How To
How to make your kids hate fishing
Re-writing the old tired playbook of fishing as achievement and productive time in favor of something more curious and explorational.
Latest
Learn fly fishing: CFS' complete beginner's guide to getting started
Whether you're completely new to fly fishing or looking to improve your skills, this directory of all the main articles from Current Flow State has everything you need to learn about fly fishing, and be successful on the water.
Conversations
CFSQ&A: What I Wish I'd Known Before My First Guided Float in Montana
Impressions, insights, and lessons-learned when an Intro to Fly Fishing alum takes her first guided float trip in Montana.
Weekly Update
Profiling fly fishing educator George Daniel for PennStater magazine
From inspiration and ideas to executing a feature story, it takes a team, trust, and a little bit of good timing. Sounds like a successful fishing trip, too
Books
Fix your yard, help a fish?
Join us for a discussion of backyard ecology in our Summer edition of the Read By the River book club.
Weekly Update
Pain, pressure, and one hard pull: Hook removal done right
If you stick yourself rather than a fish, know how to get it out.
Weekly Update
Salmon without fish: Lab-grown seafood earns FDA approval, and a spot on the menu at Portland's Kann
With recently-granted FDA approval and a summer slot on the menu at Portland hotspot Kann, lab-grown salmon is in the spotlight. I talked with Justin Kolbeck, co-founder of cultivated seafood startup Wildtype.
Weekly Update
Leaders: Wisdom never expires
It's the June edition of Leaders, our links roundup, featuring the big public lands battle, the wisdom of guides and land-watchers, gear reviews, technique primers, and more.
Meditations
Skate or Fly: How two outsider sports foster the same creative flow state
From boardslides to redsides, meet a few notable skaters who fly-fish, and identify the big areas the sports have in common, built around getting into the flow state.
CFS News
TroutFest 2025, debriefed: We came, we saw, we fished...we won the trivia contest!
Here's what went down at the first-ever Maupin Meetup during the Deschutes River Alliance's TroutFest.
How To
Tap into the Wisdom of the Guides
Gleaning advice for taking your first guided fly-fishing trip from legendary fly-fishing guides and a tome that's stood the test of time.
Meditations
Nirvana on the Deschutes: The salmonfly hatch with no hookups
Deciding to fish the salmonfly hatch on the Deschutes with hookless flies
How To
30 micro-lessons for the fly-curious to learn to fish
We're off and running on a marathon of Bluesky posting to kick off this year's trout season. Try one every day, and in a month you'll be an angler!
Weekly Update
Rigged for spring
it's the May edition of Leaders, our links roundup, featuring a bevy of great PNW events, primers on fish handling, and an intro to Trout Spey.
How To
One of the best ways to improve your fly fishing: Download our free fishing log template
All the theory, workflows, and downloadable tools you need to build one of the most important habits of a fly angler.
Weekly Update
Floods, anarchy, and river gods
The season kicks off with a rush of fun, with the TroutFest agenda dropping, a little soliloquy, a report from our book club, and my first significant fish of the new season.
CFS News
TroutFest 2025: The schedule drops
We're just over a month away from TroutFest 2025 in Maupin, OR, and the Deschutes River Alliance has released the first schedule of events.
Books
Read By the River: James C. Scott's In Praise of Floods
Saving dolphins, propitiating river spirits, and the future of history
Meditations
Fish around and find out
Ten ways to make fly fishing a bigger part of your life
Meditations
Take your time: Ten ways to make fly fishing a bigger part of your life
We have a motto around here: "Make fly fishing a bigger part of your life." Here are ten ways to work in more time on the water, and time spent feeling fishy.
How To
Hands off, or hands-free?
Yet sometimes you have to get a little dirt on your hands.
Dispatches
This season's most essential piece of fly-fishing gear
The dirt-cheap wonder-tool any angler can use to become legendary.
Meditations
No drag, just drift
Striving to get even with the flow
CFS News
The Intro to Fly Fishing class in the spotlight
A short video introduction to the Portland Community College Intro to Fly Fishing course, courtesy student-angler Nathaniel Chapman
Weekly Update
Vivid indicators of life
Wading for caddis, fishing nymphs with suspenders
Weekly Update
Fish on film
Roll cameras, because the Fly Fishing Film Tour came to town.
Industry
The Oscars: CFS' 2025 Fly Fishing Film Tour Awards
There are four questions a pretty good fly-fishing film has to answer in order to be considered truly great.
Weekly Update
Rolling your own
If you wish to make a fly rod from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
Books
River reads, post-hibernation edition
Grand Canyon dreaming, communing with the fishes, Jackson County's finest, Tokyo shopping, and a great smallmouth bass learning opportunity
Books
Hibernation reads, 2025
When we can't fish and make stories, we read stories. Sometimes those are fly-fishing stories, and sometimes they're not. Here are three that rolled across the bedside table, from the Grand Canyon to the Mariana Trench to the Carhartteratti of Jackson Hole's Persephone Bakery.