Texas Fly-Fishing
Many anglers don't give Texas much credit for fly-fishing opportunities, but they are available in fresh water as well as salt water.
From our pages: Fly-Fishing Articles
Shaking Hands With a Fish
The unexpected wonders of fly-fishing.
Rare Fish, Rare River
Trout don’t naturally occur in the Guadalupe, but they seem right at home.
It was the spring of 1966 and Lone Star Beer had just provided 10,000 rainbow trout to be stocked in the swift currents below Canyon Dam on the Guadalupe River.
Several hundred Texans with little knowledge of trout fishing converged on the river with wide-eyed anticipation of catching a new breed of fish. They came with a Noah’s ark assortment of ill-suited tackle that ranged from closed-face spin-cast rigs to heavy bass tackle.
Seeing Red
Some of the best fly fishing in Texas is in Oklahoma.
Dick Freeman is a study in concentration. Strip, strip, strip, pause. Strip, strip, strip, pause. Just as he begins another series of lightning-fast strips, the surface of the Red River boils and his fly rod rainbows. Minutes later he cradles a two-pound striped bass.
Texas fly fishers often head to Colorado, New Mexico or Arkansas to wet their lines, but Oklahoma offers quality fly fishing much closer to home — so close to home, in fact, that you don’t even have to leave Texas.
Due to an oddity of history, the entire width of the Red River between Texas and Oklahoma lies wholly within the latter state. Anglers standing on the Texas side need an Oklahoma fishing license, except when fishing from the bank between the base of Denison Dam and the mouth of Shawnee Creek a short distance downstream. Along that few hundred yards of river, as long as you do not enter the water, a Texas license is valid.
Texas Parks and Wildlife Department Inland Fisheries biologist Bruce Hysmith, his son, Larry, and I meet for an afternoon of fly fishing on the Red River at Carpenter’s Bluff, a few miles east of Denison. read more
Trout for all Seasons
The cold, reservoir-fed waters of the Guadalupe River sustain rainbows and the people who fish for them.
Being in the river is the thing, not near it, or beside it, or floating upon it, but standing knee-deep in the pulsing thing itself, feeling its tug on body and soul alike.
It's one of those Texas winter days that compensate for the summer's misery: the air still and pleasant, the sky achingly blue with a hard-etched clarity, dazzling kicks of sunlight on the water, a perfect number of crows. Bare cypress limbs throw lacy shadows across the fast water and steadfast rocks. A slow leak in the right foot of my waders provides just enough chill of reality to assure me I haven't been creamed by an 18-wheeler on I-35 and sent prematurely to fly fishing heaven. In heaven, I presume, waders never leak.
It's about as unlikely as polar bears in Aransas or sushi in Muleshoe, but I'm fishing a classic trout stream that is not in Montana or Wyoming, but in the heart of Texas in the Guadalupe River. Just below the Canyon Lake reservoir, where cactus thrives and flip-flops are considered shoes, fisheries managers have created an actual trout river, which forces us fly anglers, normally staunch advocates of wild rivers, to admit that not all dams are bad. read more
Fly-fishing on video
Trout in Texas
Texas Parks & Wildlife — April 19, 2010 [From Our Files] The cold waters of the Guadalupe River below Canyon Lake (also known as the Canyon Tailrace) provide a perfect habitat for rainbow trout and is one of the southernmost year-around trout fisheries in the U.S. NOTE: the Trout stamp is now the Freshwater Fishing Stamp.
