Fly Tying
HOA Karens gatekeep eight-pound peacock bass
Don't let the park police keep you off your personal best. Fly fishing stoke from around the world in this week's newsletter
Books
Fly-fishing literature, reading recommendations, and books that capture the spirit of angling. Stories and wisdom from writers who understand the water.
Fly Tying
Portlanders! Come tie flies on Friday (or...just hang out?)
We're hosting two tying nights in November: This coming Friday, November 7th, and again on Friday, November 21st.
Fly Tying
Tune in to our massive Craig Mathews Q&A
We hopped the Pheasant Tail Simplicity press tour train and had a chance to chat with one of its iconic co-authors, Craig Mathews, about a bevy of topics related to tying flies, the future of conservation, and much more.
Six Tips to Start
Tie your own flies: Six tips to start fly tying from Craig Mathews
Blue Ribbon Flies co-founder and co-author of Pheasant Tail Simplicity offers six tips for beginning fly tiers to get the ball rolling behind the vise.
Pheasant Tail Simplicity
Win a free copy of Pheasant Tail Simplicity
Announcing our Pheasant Tail fall giveaway, a member Q&A on tenkara and creative woodworking projects, tariffs bite the fly fishing industry, and a Leaders roundup of must-reads from around the fly fishing world
Pheasant Tail Simplicity
Fall is for Pheasant Tail
We're going all-in on Patagonia's latest book, with a virtual book club meeting, fly-tying events in Portland, and a special surprise.
Read by the River
Read By the River: Nature's Best Hope
Our river nerd book club turns to trees: backyard conservation, native plants, and creating habitat that supports the food web.
Read by the River
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.
Guides
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
Newsletter
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.
Read by the River
Read By the River: James C. Scott's In Praise of Floods
Saving dolphins, propitiating river spirits, and the future of history
Newsletter
Fish on film
Roll cameras, because the Fly Fishing Film Tour came to town.
Newsletter
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.
Icons
Remembering Jimmy Carter, our greatest fly-fishing president
Many presidents have fished, but few had the soul of an angler.
Newsletter
Read By the River, 2024
Sometimes, literally. The five favorite (mostly) fly-fishing books I read this year
Icons
Remembering John Gierach
Recalling the shaper of a Platonic fly-fishing reality, in his own words
Newsletter
High-torque and low-torque activities
Digging in on the progression from Aspen Extreme to Trout Bum (RIP John Gierach), Grant Petersen CFS GOAT, SalmonSuperHwy lauded by the White House, and more
Newsletter
What we give up fly fishing
On Adam Phillips, and finding, and re-finding our identities as anglers
Newsletter
Fly fishing and problem solving
Moving beyond the engineering mindset, and trying to embrace frustration as a key function of learning
Books
The best fly fishing books ever written
Books that will improve your fly fishing. A definitive list of the best fly fishing books, from beginner guides to technical methods, from entomology to romantic lore and conservation. And, of course, great writing.
Icons
Icons: Percival Everett
On trout fishing and the truth: "For all the aggravation a trout can cause, it cannot think and does not consider you. A trout is very much like truth; it does what it wants, what it has to."
Writing
Stepping inside the Angler's Club of New York
If you get a chance to visit the Angler's Club in New York City, take it. It's the nucleus of the sport's North American origins.
Icons
Icons: William James Lunn, River Keeper of the Test
Lunn's extensive restoration and reclamation work on the Test is a must-read for anyone interested in the practice of taking care of a river.
Nymphing
CFS Chat: George Daniel on Dynamic Nymphing
We were lucky enough to get some time with George (in between the Green Drake blitz, even!) and had the chance to ask him a few questions about his approach to the book.