Organizing Your Fly Fishing Experience and Fly Fishing Gear

The suggestions that appear here have been learned through practical experience, actual fishing trips, guided trips and late night recollections of past trips around many fires with fellow anglers after a long day out on the water. Our company hopes these suggestions will help take the frustration out of organizing properly for your next trip and help you more fully enjoy yourself. We are always very concerned with your safety, comfort, and the level of success you experience on your trip.

We feel that anglers should bring their own fishing equipment and fishing apparel if possible due to the fact that they will be more comfortable and familiar with tackle they own and use regularly. Instead of borrowing or renting tackle, waders or boots that aren’t practical or specifically sized to fit you properly. This is a safety, comfort, confidence, efficiency and success concern that cannot be underestimated or it will surely affect the customer’s enjoyment level over the period of a long day on the water.

Owning your own waders and boots that fit properly will ensure a comfortable fit and regular maintenance of waders will ensure they remain dry and warm throughout your trip. If you borrow or rent these items, you can never be sure if fit and maintenance can be guaranteed. Remember wading boots with worn felt soles on the bottoms and waders that leak or don’t fit properly are both a safety and comfort issue. Wading in streams that contain slippery wading conditions with worn or poorly maintained wading boots is a safety concern and on cold damp days, problem waders can be a real comfort problem. Waders can be rented at Navajo Dam.

These points may not seem important when your relaxing at home prior to your trip but they will increase your safety, comfort, efficiency and success on your hard earned vacation. Properly balancing your rod, reel and line combination to fit the type of fishing conditions you will encounter on your trip is crucial to success. Most guests visiting this region prefer to use an 8½’ or 9’ fly rod that is a four, five or six weight to properly deal with the various fishing situations they will experience in this region.

Another consideration to think about when borrowing or renting a reel for any trip is confirming that the reel will be set to your specific hand wind direction. If the reel isn’t setup for your dominant hand, you will have to reel or retrieve line in backwards, which is inefficient and very awkward. Having the proper hand wind on a reel so you wind line in with a forward hand motion is critical when using fine tippets and small flies.

Having a reel setup properly is crucial during the give and take situations that occur when fighting big strong fish off the reel during long hard runs. Especially those long hard fast runs that can peel off every bit of fly line off the reel and eventually end up taking the angler way into the backing. Why take the chance of having to take time out on the morning of your float trip to correct this oversight. When you can own your own reel that is properly set to the hand you feel the most competent and comfortable using

Large trout should always be fought off the reel in combination with the fly rod by applying smooth even pressure on the fish. This is accomplished by the correct drag adjustment on the fly reel to control slack or backlash and smoothly lowering the rod tip when a fish makes a long hard run. When the fish stops running and is willing to give some ground lift the rod up and wind in on the reel to gain line back. This technique will allow the angler to tire the fish quickly and efficiently to the landing net with out harming it. This type of finesse and smoothness is only achieved through the familiarity of owning your own equipment. These are all critical reasons for owning your own equipment and wading gear versus renting or borrowing these items for guided trips