Learning to Fly

I caught a brown trout the third time I put my line down in the gently undulating water of the Middle Fork of the Whitewater River in southeastern Minnesota’s bluff country. Truth be told, it was the third time I’d put a fly line down in any water anywhere. The funny thing is, I didn’t immediately realize I’d gotten a bite or, frankly, even casted at all.

The day was new and I’d just waded into the river, which is home to brown trout, rainbow trout, and native brook trout. I was with angling guide Jake Lancaster, the proprietor of J. Lancaster & Son Fly Fishing. Accompanying me that day was my dad, an accomplished fisherman who had somehow made it nearly eight decades without ever officially learning how to use a fly rod. After finding a spot for my dad upstream, Lancaster set me up with a caddis wet fly tied with tiny bits of partridge feather. To my surprise, the fly was not his handiwork.

“I don’t tie a ton of these tiny flies,” Lancaster had told us an hour earlier as we were staring into his neatly appointed fly box at the south picnic area of Whitewater State Park, 100-odd miles southeast of the Twin Cities. “They’re fairly labor intensive. I just don’t really have the interest.”

Prior to my lesson with Lancaster, I’d assumed every serious fly angler spent evenings monastically hunched over a rotary vice tying meticulous flies—a romantic image that had partly inspired my fly-fishing journey. But Lancaster was more practical, the opposite of a certain type of hardcore purist that the sport sometimes attracts.

At the picnic area, our guide explained that wet fly patterns are meant to be fished in a way that mimics injured or emerging adult caddisflies struggling to leave the water—easy targets for lazy trout. Next, he walked us through the fundamentals of casting. Lancaster, who honed his angling skills while an undergrad at the University of Montana in Missoula, noted that the overarching fly cast technique is not dissimilar to a conventional fishing cast. There’s just one key difference: Weighted hooks and lures carry spinning reel casts forward, whereas in fly fishing the flies are ultralight and therefore the weight of the line propels a cast. The bottom line? Generating the right energy is critical.

What wasn’t critical to Lancaster was the cinematic shadow casting (also known as false casting) that one might imagine when picturing a fly angler at work. He explained that there can be a practical purpose to those big, sweeping casts—getting line out, for example—but he steers people away from it because it can lead to tangled line. Lancaster added that if you’re spending all your time false casting, you might be missing the point of standing in a river in the first place.

“If you’re false casting all day, your fly’s not in the water,” he said. “And if your fly’s not in the water, you’re not catching fish.”

Riding on Riffles. Later on the river, Lancaster pointed at some gentle whitewater that he called “riffly stuff” (aka “riffles”). He explained that all I needed to do was put my fly down on it and let the river take it for a ride before stripping the line in—pulling it in by hand rather than using the reel—and doing it again.

It was a simple enough instruction, perfect for a first-timer, but I was distracted by his “riffly stuff” descriptor.

“That’s the technical term?” I asked.

“Yes,” he insisted. “Riffly stuff. Nervous water. Bubbly whitewater.”

My first two casts were sincere but visually grotesque. Then I accidentally rolled my third-ever fly cast onto some riffly stuff and caught the aforementioned trout. But it took Lancaster pointing out that I had one on the line for me to notice that I’d put my fly in the water, let alone had a fish on it. Lancaster called it “true angler’s instinct,” but part of a guide’s job is to build up their student. The fact is, it was a lucky catch that owed mainly to Lancaster’s ability to get the right fly on my line and put me on some fish.

As Lancaster photographed my index finger–length trout floating in his net and gently released it, nose upstream, I thought of a line from A River Runs Through It, the 1992 film based on Norman Maclean’s novella about coming of age in turn-of-the-century Missoula, Montana. (The movie partly inspired my decision to learn to fly fish, and to do so with my pops.) Early in the film, a fictionalized Maclean recalls his father, a fly-fishing purist, giving him and his brother casting lessons.

“If he had had his way, nobody who did not know how to catch a fish would be allowed to disgrace a fish by catching it,” narrates Maclean. 

It’s a line I’d heard a hundred times, but only after catching that trout, despite my incompetence, did I finally understand it.

Disgraced trout or not, I turned my attention to the most important tally when fishing with my dad—Son 1, Dad 0—and went back to my shabby casts as Lancaster walked upstream to check on the old man’s progress. I quickly caught another diminutive brown trout that was too young and hungry to know better than to disgrace itself too. Son 2, Dad 0.

Later that afternoon, Lancaster put me on a sandy fold in the river with all sorts of outcroppings, downed trees, and, in the middle of the clear, riffling water, the partial skeleton of what we surmised had been a deer. He set me up with a subsurface fly that you deploy below a strike indicator—a bobber-like attachment that signals a bite—and left me to it. Just as he and my dad were almost out of sight upriver, I put my nymph on a fish and Lancaster made his way back.

We stared down into his net at yet another disgraced juvenile brown trout.

“For the sake of the story, that’s at least 10 pounds, right?” I said.

“Uh, yeah. That’s right,” he replied as he walked back toward my dad.

“How many has my dad caught?” I yelled just loud enough for the old man to hear.

“None,” Lancaster trailed off.

Dry-Fly Success. Alone and content with my trout trifecta, I elected to work on my cinematic casting again. Visions of Brad Pitt as Paul Maclean danced in my head as I swung looping shadow casts over the river skeleton, eventually letting my line go with a fierce punch of momentum that, as Lancaster had warned of earlier, put my nymph six feet up in a tree on the far bank. By the time I freed it, my line was so thoroughly tangled that only an hour of my time and a barrage of F-bombs could undo it.

One type of fly fishing Lancaster described but wisely didn’t have me try was dry fly fishing. The goal of a dry fly is to mimic an adult fly coming off the water. It’s the most challenging way to fish and, to purists, the only true way. In A River Runs Through It, Norman put the Macleans’ reverence for dry fly fishing thusly: “My father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman,” he narrated. “We were left to assume that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry fly fisherman.”

Soon after I freed my fly from the tree, I heard a hoot and encountered Lancaster making his way back up the bank as my dad fished the river below.

“Your dad got a nice rainbow,” Lancaster told me, grinning.

“Oh, yeah?” I said.

“On a dry fly. Just floating down, came up, boom,” Lancaster marveled. “A real nice fish.”

As I watched my dad, who was just as new to fly fishing as me, down in the river swinging a dry fly around like he’d been doing it since he was 16, I couldn’t help but think of another scene from the film in question, this one from near the end of the movie. A solid day of fishing behind them, the Maclean brothers and their father gather along the riverbank and take turns emptying their creels. First goes Norman with a beautiful, if not somewhat slight, fish. Then Paul, with a trout that bests his brother’s. Their father is last.

“They’re both marvelous,” he says with a soft chuckle as he reaches into his creel and produces the best trout of them all. “I think the Lord has blessed us all today,” he says, tucking the massive trout back into his creel. “It’s just that he’s been particularly good to me.”

Minnesota  Fly Fishing 101
Angling guide Jake Lancaster offers some pro tips for how to start fly fishing.

Stop by a shop. “This is the best way to get local stream and bug info,” says Lancaster. “There are independent fly shops in the Twin Cities, in southeastern Minnesota, and on the North Shore.”

Play by the rules. “Always be aware of all DNR rules and regulations regarding season, licenses, trout stamps, water access, harvest limits, etc.”

Go with a pro at first. “Find a local, trusted guide willing to instruct novice anglers.”

Mind the water. “Be safe. Wade at an angle to the current, wear a wading belt with your waders, be aware of weather conditions, and keep a first aid kit in your vehicle.”

Practice anywhere you can. “Newbies should fish wherever it is accessible and relatively tree-free for back casts. Think ponds and lakes for panfish, riversides in state and county parks for bass and trout, or from canoes and kayaks casting to shore for bass, pike, and sunfish.”

The Minnesota DNR’s website is a great resource for fly-fishing beginners. Visit mndnr.gov/fishing/fin/flyfishing.html for a list of Twin Cities fly-fishing spots, license/stamp info, and even a couple of fly-tying instructionals.