3 amazing ways that fly fishing makes you a better all-around angler

#1 Read the Water

If you want to catch fish at least semi-regularly, one of the first skills you need to learn when fly fishing rivers is how to read the water. Fly fishing is slower than spin fishing, and you just can’t cover as much water as spin anglers. So to make the most of every cast, you need to focus your efforts on the richest targets. That means learning to recognize the places where fish hold, such as seams between slower and faster currents, bubble lines, surface bulges that indicate midstream rocks, and so on.

Decades before I ever had a boat with a sonar unit, I was already thinking about how water behaves around underwater structure, not to mention visible cover. This has proven exceedingly helpful in lakes, which almost always have some sort of current, even if it’s just wind generated. For example, a fly angler’s eye for water helps you spot subtle current seams around points or between islands—hot spots for walleye, bass and more.