AMERICA'S BEST Fly Fishing

The nation is covered with opportunities and they're not all what you'd think

- BY LARRY OLMSTED

Fly fishing is so often associated with casting in bucolic streams like this at Dunton River Camp in Colorado. But America offers many venues for the sport and the game is not all trout.

If fishing is like religion, then fly fishing is high church,” said award-winning news anchor and Greatest Generation author Tom Brokaw. The underlying sentiment is one widely shared throughout the sporting community—of the many different ways to catch a fish none is more emotional, cerebral and invested than with a fly rod. While most closely identified with angling for trout in streams, it’s a skill that is defined not by its quarry or venue, but by its precise style of casting.

Most fishing involves some version of casting—the delivery of a baited hook to where fish swim. In deep-sea fishing, this can be as simple as putting a weight on the line and dropping it, letting gravity take it down. With spinning reels, you cast a weighted hook that can carry the line a considerable distance. But in fly fishing there is almost no weight at the end, and it is the heft of the line itself—also negligible—that is used to make a whip-like cast. Hence, dropping an artificial fly at great distance to a precise spot where fish congregate is one of the most challenging feats in the sport. Then you have to reel in one of those big ones without breaking your delicate line.

"For a long time everyone thought fly fishing was just trout, but then salt water became popular and it was striped bass, then salmon, then bonefish," says Scott McEnaney, director of adventures for Orvis, the company most associated with the sport. “Now, people go every-where, from urban streams and local ponds to trips around the world, and there’s less pretension about species.”