Fly Fishing for Beginners: Gear, Casts and Your First Flies

Fly fishing has a reputation for being fussy and expensive. It can be — but it doesn't have to be, and you do not need a tweed jacket or a thousand-pound rod to catch your first fish on the fly. Here is the honest beginner's start: what to buy, the one cast worth learning first, and where to put the fly.

The only gear you actually need to start

• A 9ft, 5-weight rod and reel combo — the do-everything starter size for trout and most freshwater fly fishing. Buy a balanced combo, not separate parts.
• Weight-forward floating line to match the rod (a 5-weight rod takes 5-weight line). Most starter combos come pre-spooled.
• A few tapered leaders (9ft, 4–5x) and a spool of tippet to extend them.
• A small box of flies — see below. That is genuinely it to begin.

Five flies that catch almost anything

Ignore the wall of 500 patterns at the shop. Start with a Woolly Bugger, a Pheasant Tail nymph, a Hare's Ear nymph, an Elk Hair Caddis (dry) and a Parachute Adams (dry). Between them they cover sub-surface and surface feeding through most of the season, on both sides of the Atlantic.

The cast: stop fighting it

Forget distance. The fly-cast is a crisp back-and-forth between roughly the 10 o'clock and 2 o'clock positions, pausing to let the line straighten behind you before you come forward. The single most common beginner mistake is rushing that pause. Let the rod load. Ten metres of accurate line beats thirty metres of chaos.

Where to point it

On a river, fish hold where they can rest out of the current but still grab food drifting past: the seam between fast and slow water, the tail of a pool, behind a boulder, under overhanging trees. Cast slightly upstream and let the fly drift back to you naturally. There is more on this in How to Read a River.

Log your first fly-caught fish in CastLog and it will name the species and remember the conditions — so next season you will know which fly worked, where, and in what weather.