Trout spey has been growing increasingly popular of late, and for good reason, its super fun! We do a lot of it at our Rapids Camp and Alaska West operations, and fish with more and more anglers each year who are interested in sticking trout on two handers. However, over the last five or so…
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trout spey
Swinging for Trout – Naknek Style
The Naknek River is regarded by many anglers as one of the most prolific fisheries for trophy rainbow trout in the world. Feisty, native, resident rainbows exceeding thirty inches aren’t uncommon on the Nak, which is why we’re really lucky to call it our home water at our Rapids Camp Lodge operation. In fact, just…
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Spey Casting Tips for Switch Rods from Airflo
In case you haven’t heard, earlier this year the folks at Airflo introduced their latest spey line, the Skagit Scout – Their shortest skagit head to date designed to make easy work of switch rods, shorter spey rods, and single hand spey casts. With their release of the Skagit Scout, they’ve also been pumping out some…
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Trout Spey Retrieve Methods – Video
Swinging flies for trout on light weight two-handers has gained quite a bit of popularity over the last few years, and for good reason.. It’s super fun! In a lot of ways, spey fishing for trout is very similar to swinging flies for salmon and steelhead. The casting is nearly identical, and most of the…
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The Single-Hand Spey Revolution
Most of the time, when people hear the words ‘spey casting,’ they immediately think of two-handed rods. Heck, we refer to two-handed fly rods as ‘spey rods’ for a reason! However, it’s important to note that by definition spey casting is a style of fly casting, one that can be performed by both two-handed “spey”…
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OPST at Alaska West – Video
Earlier this summer, we mentioned that the boys from OPST were joining us for a week at Alaska West to test out their new Commando Heads, skagit heads designed with the shorter spey and switch rods of today in mind. One of their goals was to test them out on our leopard rainbows using single handers. That’s…
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Trout Spey Techniques: The Hang Down Drop-Back
Rapids Camp Lodge head guide, Tom Provost, is no newbie to swinging flies for trout and today he fills us in on how he targets trout during the most neglected part of the swing, the hang down. Thanks Tom! Swinging for Trout – The Hang Down Drop-Back When swinging for trout or other aggressive species, the dirtiest…
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Airflo Releases Streamer Switch Lines
If you’re like us, and enjoy spey fishing for trout, you may have found it difficult to find the right spey line to match today’s trout-worthy switch and small spey rods. The development of shorter skagit-style heads such as the Airflo Skagit Switch or Rio Max Short have made loading modern switch and short spey rods…
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Trout Spey Techniques – The Bobble Dredge
A couple weeks back, we ran a post titled, Active Swinging, where we highlighted some of the techniques we use when spey fishing for trout that go beyond the classic downstream and across swing. However, most of these techniques are limited to slower gradual runs, those most characteristic of a swung fly. As spey anglers, most of…
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Kyle Shea’s Trout Swinging Rig
Today we’re back with another edition of our ‘Expert Rig‘ series of posts, where we highlight all the details (right down to the knot) on how the experts rig up. As a guide at Alaska West, Kyle Shea gets to fish for big leopard rainbows during his down time. His method of choice? Swinging flies with…
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