5 Things You Should Know Before You Start Fly Fishing – According to Todd Spire, Angler, Guide + Steward
"Addiction is Likely. Thankfully, There is No Cure." 🎣
This year at Escape Club, we’ve been inviting people with real experience and perspective to share a quick “Top 5” from their world — design, hospitality, food, nature, and the quieter corners of culture that shape how we travel. It’s a chance to hear directly from people who genuinely live and breathe these spaces and experiences, and a small bonus for our paid subscribers.
Recent editions have covered a wide range of places and perspectives: Ash Hotels co-founder Ari Heckman shared five underrated American cities worth traveling for, Kelly Crimmins of Upstate’s mobile sauna company Big Towel highlighted her favorite saunas across the country, and Drew Frankel of Impact and Assembly offered five standout music spaces across the Hudson Valley and Catskills. Closer to home, Escape Brooklyn’s Hannah Crisafulli shared five of Upstate’s best independent movie theaters, while Slug Wine founder Sara Velazquez highlighted five New York wines worth seeking out.
For this week’s installment, we’re turning to Todd Spire — longtime Catskills fly fishing guide, founder of Esopus Creel, and Editor-in-Chief of Edible Hudson Valley — for his take on five things every beginner should know before stepping into the river.
Each spring in the Catskills, April 1 marks the opening of fly fishing season — when anglers return to the region’s rivers after winter, in search of trout.
Todd Spire has spent two decades fishing the rivers of the Catskills and is now in his tenth year guiding anglers on the region’s trout streams, most often along Esopus Creek. In 2017, he founded Esopus Creel, a guiding service and retreat program built around fly fishing, watershed stewardship, and the culture that surrounds the sport. These days, Spire still guides — though mostly for longtime clients and returning anglers.
Spire currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of Edible Hudson Valley, where he oversees a regional magazine covering the food systems, farms, and creative communities that shape the Hudson Valley. Before that, his work helped foster Beacon’s early arts community, including opening one of the city’s first artist studio buildings in 2002.
Across these chapters — from the arts to fly fishing to regional food culture — a common thread runs through Spire’s work: building communities around place, craft, and the natural systems that sustain them.
Below, he shares five things every beginner should know before stepping into the water.
Enjoy,
– Erin + the EB team
5 Things You Should Know Before You Start Fly Fishing
Addiction is Likely. Thankfully, There is No Cure.
By Todd Spire.
To put it simply, fly fishing is hard. There is a lot to learn, and if you’re attracted to a life-long pursuit that you may never actually master, it’s a game for you. Fly fishing requires an endless accumulation of book knowledge and outdoor intuition, mixed with physical skills and mental focus. Everything needs to align, and you’re only as successful as you are present in the moment.
Still, when everything comes together, catching even the smallest of trout is an achievement. It is a skillful and poetic act, accomplished while submerged in the middle of a flowing stream. It is a conjuring, and it is simply miraculous.
As a guide with two decades of experience fishing Catskill waters, I’ve developed a script to set expectations for first-time anglers. So if this is the year you taste the drug, allow me to help you into the water.
The Game: Forget Luck – Fly Fishing is About Knowledge and Skill
One of the reasons that fly fishing for trout is so difficult boils down to the fundamental difference between spin fishing and its older counterpart. We say that spin fishing is mostly luck with a bit of skill because when you throw a worm or a big lure at a hungry fish, you create an irresistible food opportunity. In fact, as animals with a decentralized nervous system, most fish cannot consciously stop their muscles from lashing out at food.
Trout, however, are unique, and traditional fly fishing is a game of imitating the tiny aquatic insects that grow on the bottom of the river and float to the surface when they are ready to hatch. Every time a trout rises to eat an insect, they risk being eaten by predatory birds. And, if the calories they burn to swim to the insect are more than they’ll receive from the tiny morsel, it’s not worth the trip. So, trout are eating with their brains, making a conscious risk assessment with every strike.
Your job as an angler, then, is to be the bug, not to lure the fish. Aim and stillness are the goal. Picking the fly that’s actually hatching requires knowledge, not skill, and knowing where and how to place your fly gently on the water is a combination of both.