Top Fly Fishing Destination Article

Top Ten Fly-Fishing Destinations From Alaskan salmon to the Peacock bass of the Amazon, the world's best rivers, seas, and streams. By Scott Elder

TOTALLY HOOKED: Fly-fishing Silver Creek, Idaho (Steve Smith/Photographer's Choice/Getty)

A huge blue sky hangs overhead, unbroken wilderness spreads all around, and a river rushes through, with you, fly rod in hand, standing waist-deep in the middle of it all. Welcome to a fly-fisherman's idea of paradise, where the cares are few—maintaining the back-and-forth rhythm of the cast, tricking a wary fish into biting the fake bug at the end of the line—but they completely absorb mind, body, and soul, and reinvigorate them all. If you're not a fly-fisherman, that may sound, well, fishy. I used to be a sceptic, too.Until recently, my idea of a good time fishing involved a spear gun and the Caribbean; otherwise I thought fishing was a total bore. But when I joined my brother in Idaho to fish the renowned spring-fed Silver Creek, I quickly became a convert. Fly-fishing is a true outdoorsman's pursuit, more active and challenging than casting from a dock and waiting...and waiting. Moreover, landing a fish with a fly rod isn't simply a matter of dumb luck, and it's therefore all the more sweet. But a little luck doesn't hurt either, as I learned when I snagged a pugnacious rainbow trout on my first day out.The fish wasn't the only one hooked. Now I'm doing what fly-fishermen do when they're not on the water: daydreaming about future trips to the world's best fishing destinations. To make sure I was imagining myself in the right spots, as I'm still getting my feet wet, I conversed with well-traveled pro fishing guides and asked where they are in their daydreams. However obscure their choices might seem, the same places kept coming up, and those mentioned first and most often ranked highest. Here are ten paradises on earth according to fly anglers who've been there and fished that.

10. Montana
Montana is where many anglers go for their first fly-fishing vacation, and it's where they keep coming back even after visiting the more exotic places. It's a classic destination for good reason. The rugged western half of the state, particularly from Bozeman to Missoula, offers a seemingly endless number of streams and rivers teeming with hearty rainbow, brown, and cutthroat trout. The awe-inspiring scenery features a wild kingdom of four-legged animals, lush hilly valleys, and the majestic snowcapped Rockies that carve the horizon. There are plenty of fly shops, and guides are eager to help you find the best waters. Plus, comfortable lodges abound that will put you right in the middle of Trout Country. Fly-fishing is more than a pastime in Montana—it's part of the culture. After all, Montana was the setting for Norman Maclean's novella A River Runs Through It.

9. Florida Keys
Americans don't need to travel far to find some the world's best saltwater fly-fishing. The warm, turquoise waters off the Florida Keys are loaded with record-size bonefish, a plethora of permit, and, of course, monster tarpon. When a submarine fleet of hundred-plus-pound tarpon closes in on the skiff, some anglers get so excited they can't even manage to cast. If one of these so-called Silver Kings takes the fly into its bucket of a mouth, you'll need to resist the instinct to set the hook right away. But once the line goes tight, hang on. Tarpon are famous for their explosive leaps when hooked—and for their fight. "People have fought tarpon for eight hours," say Perry Coleman, a guide and captain who splits his time between Montana and Florida Keys Outfitters in Islamorada, Florida, a local fishing hot-spot. "It's so adrenaline filled, it's like a drug."

8. Skeena River Drainage, British Columbia, Canada
Most fly-fishermen are intrigued by steelhead, a silvery seagoing rainbow trout, but there's a particular breed up north that obsesses seasoned anglers. "Skeena River drainage, that's where I spend most of my free time," says Ryan Peterson, a guide at The Fly Shop in Redding, California, who's worked most of the world's fly-fishing hotspots. Even for pros, hooking these fall steelhead is terribly difficult, but the payoff is big—and fat. Normally, a ten-pound steelhead qualifies as a whopper; Skeena giants can exceed 30. The town of Smithers is the usual jumping-off point, and the journey from there takes you deep into the rugged natural beauty of backwoods British Columbia, where the headwaters are lined with birch and aspen exploding with autumn color before the towering Canadian Rockies. "Every time you touch a fish there," Peterson says, "it's just this magical moment."

7. New Zealand
When the snow starts to fall in the States, fly-fishermen in the know head south...way south. Our winter is New Zealand's summer, the prime season for trophy brown trout. "Once they get over 26 inches, they just get fatter...almost square," says Zane Mirfin, a renowned guide at Strike Adventure who leads trips on the South Island, in the Nelson Lakes National Park area. The South Island packs in every variety of climate, terrain, and water, but it's the gin-clear rivers that the initiated mention first. The browns are so visible, anglers can basically stalk their prey. But that means the fish can see you too, and Kiwi trout are smart and easily spooked. "People get off on testing themselves against something challenging," says Mirfin. "It's sort of the PhD lesson in fly-fishing."

6. Alaska Peninsula
Simply put, Alaska is the place to go salmon fishing. When the state's wild salmon return from the Pacific to spawn, they flood the rivers and push upstream in underwater swarms. Anglers aren't the only ones aware of the great fishing: grizzlies come out of the natural woodwork, ospreys and eagles swoop down for easy catches, and rainbow trout join the frenzy by gobbling up the fresh roe. The hard-fighting, acrobatic Silver (also called Coho) salmon probably ranks as the favorite species among fly-fishermen, and the Alaska Peninsula in late summer and early fall is the place to reel in a 30-incher. The peninsula is home to several national parks and wildlife refuges, including the Katmai National Park and Preserve and the Alaska Peninsula National Wildlife Refuge, and accommodations range from rustic campgrounds to deluxe lodges. But wherever you stay, book a floatplane trip for some backcountry fishing if you can afford to do Alaska right.

5. Amazon River Basin, Brazil
When most people hear Amazon River they don't think, "Great place to go fly-fishing." But the happy few who do think that way have either tangled with—or more likely heard tales about—a red-eyed beast called the Peacock bass. Peacock bass aren't actually bass at all but a 20-plus-pound relative of the tilapia. They chase smaller fish onto the shore, love surface flies, and strike so ferociously that they fly several feet into the air. The best of the very few lodging options is the comfortable, low-occupancy Royal Amazon Lodge on the Agua Boa River, which has a white-sand bottom and enough clarity to reveal fish 50 yards away. The surrounding area is government-protected, unspoiled rainforest and savannah, inhabited by wild things such as toucans, howler monkeys, jaguars, and caiman crocodiles. Sensibly, most people fish from a boat.

4. Tierra del Fuego, Argentina
Freshwater brown trout were introduced to Tierra del Fuego's Rio Grande in the 1930s, and a decade or two later they headed out to sea. Why? They had pretty much eaten everything in the river. These fish apparently kept their voracious appetite, because now, when they return to spawn sporting their silver scales, they outweigh their European cousins by a factor of five to ten. And their numbers are growing, too. "The runs are bigger than ever," says Steve McGrath, a retired guide who used to own a lodge in the Bahamas. "It's probably the most amazing phenomenon in the fishing world right now." Anglers who take a winter or spring trip to southern South America can expect to land about five monsters of up to 30 pounds every day—once they get the hang of casting in the winds that howl across the pancake-flat, treeless terrain.

3. Kamchatka Peninsula, Russia
This mountain-spined arm of the Russian Far East awakens memories of Alaska circa 1900. Kamchatka is much less civilized and, most importantly, much less fished. "You don't hear a bush plane flying over, you don't hear a motorboat downstream, and you certainly don't see another person," says Ryan Peterson, who often guides on the peninsula. Although Kamchatka is a Pacific salmon stronghold, most fly-fishermen come for the plentiful, fearless rainbow trout. Anglers can wade the famed Zhupanova River in search of trophy rainbows approaching a yard in length, or, if they want to explore remoteness by Kamchatka standards, they can join a float trip down one of the peninsula's scores of hardly fished rivers. "More people go to other regions," says Peterson, "but Kamchatka attracts the sort of cutting-edge, hard-core fishing set."

2. Mongolia
Fascinated by stories of titanic fish lurking the wild rivers of Mongolia, Dan Vermillion and his brothers decided to go check if they were just fish tales. "On the third cast we broke our rod," says Vermillion, a fishing guide and co-owner of the family business, Sweetwater Travel Company. The fish that snapped their rod was a taimen, the largest member of the fish family that includes salmon and trout. Taimen are behemoths: They grow to more than 60 inches and can push 200 pounds. And they love flies, just not the kind most people use. "I think we're the only ones who fish with squirrels," Vermillion says. Not real rodents, mind you, but castable fakes made from foam and rabbit hair. (The "Chernobyl Squirrel," for example.) This destination is a true back-of-beyond adventure. Anglers fishing the taimen waters in north-central Mongolia stay in yurts, and without the helicopter, the nearest town would be 24 hours away by car.

1. Seychelles
It's near impossible to get more out-of-the-way than the Seychelles for fly-fishing, or for anything really. Scattered across a small patch of the Indian Ocean to the northeast of Madagascar, this tropical archipelago includes uninhabited atolls teeming with saltwater trophy fish. Out-of-this-world permit, bonefish, and triggerfish cruise the warm, crystal-clear waters of the flats, oblivious to the existence of fishermen, not to mention the dangers posed by their flies. The Seychelles' top game fish is the giant trevally, which charges at the surface like a bull and often exceeds 45 inches and 100 pounds. Fishing the Seychelles isn't a vacation; it's an expedition. Reaching the premiere atoll, Cosmoledo, requires a 1,000-mile flight from the main island followed by a 12-hour sail. "The reason that the fishing is so good at these places is because man hasn't been there," says Gerhard Laubscher of FlyCastaway, a South Africa-based travel outfit that specializes in extreme destinations like the Seychelles. "And getting to a place where man hasn't been isn't easy."

Read more: http://www.gorp.com/parks-guide/travel-ta-fly-fishing-mongolia-bozeman-seychelles-sun-valley-sidwcmdev_116496.html?page=3#ixzz1ag7OOBFz