Today we continue our great run of guest posts, with an article on tying ‘confidence flies’ from Dan Huff, the guy behind Angling Obsession. Angling Obsession is a blog focused on fishing the Great Lakes, where trout, salmon, and steelhead provide opportunity for fishing adventure 365 days a year. Thanks Dan – we’re headed to…
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Tips
Mending Line
Today we’re starting a mini-series of posts on mending your fly line. We’re starting at the very beginning, a very good place to start, with a simple explanation of what mending is all about. More mending advice to come! Thanks to Chris Price, our manager at Chile West, for even more great fly fishing tips….
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Fishing Dropper Rigs
What’s a “Dropper Rig”? Maybe you know and fish them all the time, but just in case you don’t… “Dropper” is the term for a nymph pattern that’s fished in combination with a dry fly. The nymph pattern drops in the water and floats below the dry fly, so it’s called a “dropper”. Simple, right?…
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Cold Water Dry Line Steelhead Fishing
Tom Larimer, as you may know, is one of the top-shelf guides in the Northwest, spending a whole boatload of quality time on the Deschutes River and the surrounding area. Tom also leads group trips to Alaska West and BC West each year, which we’d be happy to tell you more about if you drop…
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Reading Trout Water
One of the most-requested topics on our blog is information about reading water – especially water where trout live. We can’t think of a better expert on fishing for trout than a guy who makes his living knowing where trout live – that would be Chris Price, our manager at Chile West. We asked Chris…
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Top Bonefishing Tips
This is the time of year that lots of fly anglers are getting ready for their winter bonefishing trips. Yes, you should be getting your calendar straight and your plane tickets booked, but now’s also the time to brush up on your skills. Pebble Beach is not the place to be working on your golf…
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Spey Casting – Snap T / Circle Spey Basics
It’s spey casting video time. Whitney Gould makes an appearance today to walk us through the basic steps involved in making one of the most useful spey casts out there – the Snap T a.k.a. Circle Spey a.k.a. C-Spey a.k.a. Circle Cast. It’s a great cast that just happens to have a lot of names….
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Top 5 Mistakes Fighting Big Fish
At Alaska West and BC West we see a lot of big fish fought by our guests – we’re talking steelhead and king salmon here. Sometimes our anglers do a great job fighting the big ones. Other times…not so much. Fight hard, fight smart, and get it over fast! Top 5 Mistakes Made Fighting Big…
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Get It Down!
We’ve been beating the drum lately about the fact that flies that imitate salmon parts work really well when targeting rainbow trout in Western Alaska. We’ve also mentioned that dead drifts aren’t that important, but getting your fly down is. In the process of going through the 1,273,489 pictures from our summer season at Alaska…
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Steelhead Hangdown Eats
It’s one of the toughest situations in steelheading, but it happens quite a lot. Most often it’s early or late in the day, and light is relatively low. Feeling safe, a steelhead tucks himself in right against the bank. You make a long cast (because even though the fish are in tight, that’s what we…
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