Five world-class anglers explain the lure of fly fishing | Canada Voices

A little more than 10 years ago, for reasons I still don’t understand, I veered suddenly into the sports section of my local library one day. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but one book caught my eye: A River Never Sleeps by Roderick Haig-Brown. I knew nothing about it, but I was very quickly enthralled by the book.

The way Haig-Brown described fishing on the rivers of Vancouver Island was unexpectedly captivating and inspiring. I’d been a lifelong angler but had never really fished a river before. I grew up obsessed with fishing, but my home waters were Southern Ontario’s Georgian Bay, which wasn’t exactly known for being a fly-fishing destination at the time.

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When I picked up a fly rod for the first time about six months later, everything changed. I saw the water differently. I had a better understanding of fish – what they’re looking for and the places they call home. I was totally new to trout fishing at that point, so I had to almost relearn how to fish to catch them. I was still fishing like a guy targeting rock bass for the first couple of years. It wasn’t long before I was reading, watching and listening to anything I could about fly fishing.

Unlike conventional fishing, where you use bait or lures to attract fish, fly fishers use flies – thread and animal hair imitations of the things fish eat, such as bugs, nymphs, baitfish or even mice. Typically, they’re either fished on the surface – dry flies – or designed to get down to the fish – wet flies. Traditionally, fly fishing was the realm of people targeting fish such as trout or salmon, but fly anglers these days target everything from trout to bass, pike and walleye, using flies that imitate their favourite foods.

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As I dug a little deeper, I realized that Canada is home to world-class anglers who are helping new generations of people get into fly fishing and encouraging them to connect with rivers, lakes and streams all over the world. These are people who teach, run businesses and bring attention to regions of Canada that are quickly becoming known as sportfishing destinations. The thread that runs through them all is a deep love of fly fishing and a desire to share that passion with the world.

Katherine Mulski

Teaching the next generation with fly fishing

Katherine Mulski has a lot to say about fly fishing and teaching – her two passions. She grew up fishing with her dad on Pender Island in British Columbia, and when he shifted from fishing in the ocean to fly fishing, Mulski did as well.

The more she spent time on the water, the more she noticed that fly fishing was more than just getting out on the water, “It’s definitely beyond a hobby,” she said. “And it’s beyond a passion because it’s, for me, a medicine. It’s something that feeds my soul, it feeds my ability to feel well.”

Fly fishing started to influence her career as an educator as well. She wrote her PhD thesis around the idea of using both personal and professional storytelling in teaching and largely used fly fishing as a way to connect her ideas, comparing the seasons of the school system with those of the river and fishing.

In 2024, she moved to Campbell River, B.C., to teach a high-school program that combined seven core curriculum areas, such as science and English, with fly fishing. For example, in science, the life cycles of both fish and aquatic insects are tied back to Indigenous teachings, while in English class students turn to essays by writers such as Canada’s Jim McLennan.

Mulski was able to tap into the network she’s built up over the years in the fly-fishing community to expand the Carihi Fly Fishing Program and keep students coming back. “I do get a lot of repeats. It’s just this progression of skill. Seeing a kid kinda get tanked in the first semester, like, ‘Oh, I caught no fish on the fish out,’ and then they come back the next year, they’re like, ‘I figured it out.’ And then they go and catch a fish. That’s what I wanted to see, I want that tenacity.”

Brian Still

Guiding on Georgian Bay

Brian Still was lucky enough to grow up in an outdoors paradise, in the Whitefish River First Nation on Birch Island on Georgian Bay, where the water is clear and the fish are big and heavy. He spent his early years living the good life – fishing, boating and exploring his home waters. Here, fly fishing wasn’t very common. “I’d fish out here every single day and maybe see one fly fisherman every five years,” he said.

At the age of 20, he moved to British Columbia, where the sport is much more common, and became fascinated by it. Still’s first fish on a fly was a bull trout in Golden, B.C. “It started the fly-fishing addiction for me,” he said. He did what he could to stay in B.C. – going to school and interning at the Elk River Guiding Company in Fernie – but eventually moved back home to start guiding.

At first, he was mostly doing a lot of deep trolling for trout and salmon, using heavy weights to get his lures down to the fish. But over the past few years he’s seen a big shift: “I feel like, the generation right now, everybody constantly wants to try new tactics, learn something new and explore new waters,” he said. “Fly fishing has just exploded.”

As a result, Stillwater Fishing, Still’s guiding operation, has attracted a lot of attention. He became one of the recommended guides of downtown Toronto’s Drift Outfitters, which led to him connecting with the TV show The New Fly Fisher. “It was super cool,” said Still. “I grew up watching that show and looked up to the hosts.”

He was proud to have his business featured on the show, but also to showcase the amazing fishing and waters around his home, where you can sight fish giant pike all day long – even when they’re 30 feet down!

Emily Rodger

Professional cyclist turned fly-fishing trip host

In 2014, while recovering from a serious cycling accident, Emily Rodger often found herself along the banks of a river in Sedona, Ariz., where she was living at the time. A sign there read: “Fly fishing only.” She wasn’t familiar with the sport at the time, so when she got back home to New Brunswick, she googled, “What is fly fishing?,” she recounted with a laugh. She then looked up local guides and, within a couple of days, was fly fishing.

“Being on the water was the first time that I remember, in months, not thinking about the accident or all of the pressure that I was putting on myself or that I was feeling from others around competition and sport,” said the former competitive cyclist.

It wasn’t long before Rodger had her own fly-fishing set-up and was carrying it around the world as she competed in cycling events. “For the first couple of years, I would just go out fishing by myself,” she said. “When I was travelling to race all over the world, I would look up local fishing guides wherever I was and book a day with a fishing guide.”

Fly fishing overtook cycling in 2019 when she was faced with a choice: go to a race or head to Belize and fly fish. Fishing won out, and since then Rodger has been focused on it and her career as an executive coach.

She now travels all over the world and organizes fly-fishing group trips. Of all the places she’s been, Lesotho, in Africa, stands out. There, on one of its countless mountain streams, she caught a yellowfish, which looks like a carp but feeds on the surface like a trout. “It completely captivated me,” she said of the landlocked country, which is completely surrounded by South Africa. “It taught me so much, so much, on so many different levels.”

Brian Chan

The biologist who helped shape B.C.’s stillwater fishing

It’s hard to talk about fly fishing on Canada’s lakes without hearing Brian Chan’s name. The former fisheries biologist spent decades improving the fishing in lakes around Kamloops but also helping shape how people fish in the province (and beyond).

Chan’s father was an avid salmon moocher, using a technique that involves cut bait in deep water. Chan was around 7 or 8 and had been reading about fly fishing in Outdoor Life magazine. He was intrigued. “By reading magazine articles,” he said, “I figured out how to tie some flies that would imitate the herring that the coho were eating. I would be casting a fly off the bow of our boat, catching grilse, which are two-year-old coho salmon and they’re like 14 to 17 inches long.”

He was obsessed with fish from a young age. In Grade 4, he recalled, he was given a writing assignment about what he wanted to be when he grew up: “I wanted to be an ichthyologist – that’s someone who studies fish.”

He eventually became the small-lakes biologist in the Kamloops region. “It was an absolutely wonderful, wonderful career filled with lots of fishing. And then even more fishing after I retired.”

Along the way, he said, he stumbled upon a secondary career helping people learn about fly fishing on lakes. He gave talks to fly-fishing clubs around North America, wrote books, filmed instructional DVDs and now guides in the Kamloops area. His passion remains just as strong today as it was when he was younger. “I love seeing these fish, I love catching them and I like letting ‘em go,” he said.

Sarah Nellis

Competitive fly angler and lodge owner

Sarah Nellis is going full tilt these days. She just opened a lodge, Gaspé Coastal, and recently hosted 175 women at an event by 50/50 On the Water, an organization that helps women get into fly fishing. And the year is just getting started.

Nellis was born and raised on the banks of the Grand Cascapedia River, a legendary salmon stream in eastern Quebec, but she didn’t get into fly fishing until she was in high school, when she got a job with the Cascapedia River Society. “I started out kind of going out a couple of times per season, really enjoying it, but not really knowing what I was doing,” she said.

It was the people that helped her obsession grow. “There’s such an amazing community around fly fishing and such an amazing atmosphere,” she said. “It feels like it’s really a passion that brings people together, and that gives you kind of a sense of purpose.”

There’s also the challenge that comes with it. The learning never really stops, and new opportunities present themselves all the time. In 2022, Nellis was invited to participate in the Women’s National Fly Fishing Championships in Kamloops. The event took place on both rivers and lakes, something she had very little exposure to.

In 2024, she and her partner began working on Gaspé Coastal, a lodge that highlights both the world-renowned Atlantic salmon fishing and relatively untapped striped bass fishery in Atlantic Canada. “It was really natural for us because it fits both of our personalities so well to be hosting. … So we thought, rather than have our place look like a commune, let’s open a lodge.”

Five tips for getting into fly fishing

Have the courage to try something new. Be open to being a learner – even the most experienced anglers are always learning. – Emily Rodger

Just do it. Find somebody who can answer some questions and help you out and start asking the questions. There are so many resources out there, like YouTube, and we’re so lucky to live in a time where knowledge is at our fingertips. – Sarah Nellis

Make friends with your local fly shop. Use their experience in how to get set up with a matched rod and line and all the accessory gears and the flies to get pointed in the right direction. – Brian Chan

Hire a guide. Fly fishing is one of those things that you can’t have such bad habits with casting, and a guide can help you avoid those. Also, don’t get discouraged and then, uh, pick good weather days. – Brian Still

Don’t take it too seriously. While catching fish is a big part of fly fishing, being outside and appreciating just how much of a world exists below the water is a privilege and a gift, so get out there and enjoy! – Katherine Mulski