Welcome! TotalFlyFishing.com is dedicated to helping fly fisherman find fly fishing information on the internet. We catalog good fly fishing sites in an effort to bring anglers the best fly fishing information on the internet.
What this site is About
Fly fishing is a sport that can be practiced everywhere. For years, in its early history, fly fishing was reserved for an older, more elite populace. Those days are long gone. Those old perceptions of the fly fishing enthusiast spending every winter evening in his snowbound cabin in the woods tying fly patterns or spending hours learning Latin names for insects are terribly out of date. Today’s fly fisherman spends more time fishing than preparing fly patterns. The modern fly fisherman travels anywhere and everywhere to enjoy the sport. They fish fresh water and salt water, from Alaska’s remote rivers to Montana’s Spring Creeks and Maryland’s Bass laden Potomac River, from the mountain lakes of Peru and New Zealand, Highland streams of Scotland and the waters of Florida to California. Fly fishing is done everywhere.
We are little bit old school
We live in age of social media. There exists a multitude of amazing people and profiles to follow on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube etc full of awesome GoPro videos where you can get your fix of selfies and “fish porn” and anglers bragging about their secret spots. Thats great, more power to them. The sport lives on with every new angler picking up a rod inspired by local fisherman sharing the beauty of a day on the water. We are not trying to compete with that. We encourage it and if you reach out to us we will gladly link to you, even if its just because you need to improve your Google rankings. As a matter of fact, we want local guides and shops to do well and prosper when people search for fly fishing near them, or where they plan to visit.
But the tone of this site harkens back to the basics, on a global basis. There is so much local knowledge that has been lost over the years. There are so many old shops and guides that put their livelihoods on the line over the years, only to have been lost as the internet, and the economy, has gone up and down since the dawn of fly fishing and the “golden age” has come and gone. We have tried to capture that basic information here. We want to preserve the enthusiasm and love for teaching that poured out in the days after “the movie” where information flowed freely about a river or a bayou or a hatch or a migration or certain fly.
To that end, this site is an on going, ever growing labor of love that tries to organize the beautiful world of fly fishing in an encyclopedic fashion. You might read something that seems dated, but thats how it was when a local genius decided to share all you needed to know with the world, and its too valuable to be lost because their shop had to close when a big chain moved in, or they couldn’t navigate the complexities of website hosting fees or spammers hacked their forum.
Someone has to preserve the knowledge of the past, without the pressures of growing subscribers and generating ad revenue, and thats what we try to do.
Most of us aren’t so lucky that we can just drop everything and hit the water in the middle of the week when there is no fishing pressure on our hallowed waters. Half of the fly fishers in the world spend their time reading and dreaming about their next trip. Thats part of the love affair. We just want to enable that process, that time off the water when we read and research about what what we are going to do next.
As they say, “tight lines”….