FOSTER FALLS, Va. (WFXR) — I can remember fly fishing with my father as a child nearly 60 years ago on the lake behind our house in Ohio. We were fishing for bluegill with tiny ant flies and filling up a bucket for a fish fry.
We had a conversation that went something like this.
“Dad, can you catch other fish on a fly?” I asked.
“Sure,” he responded.
“Bass?”
“Yes.”
“Trout?”
“Yep.”
“Crappies?”
“Certainly.”
“Northern pike?”
“Of course.”
“What about walleyes?”
To that question my father furrowed his brow and replied definitively, “No!”
I did not question it any further, and apparently a huge number in the fishing community agreed with my dad. When questions of what fish are catchable while fly fishing were raised, walleyes were never among them. They preferred to cast, troll, or jig for walleyes. I accepted that.
It took me six decades to find out I was wrong.
You can catch walleye on the fly, and the folks at New River Fly Fishing are proving it.
“It’s not easy, but we’ve figured out how to do it,” said Stephen Howard of New River Fly Fishing.
The key is getting flies deep enough to where walleye are staging and feeding prespawn, during the spawn, and early in post-spawn. That means fly fishing for walleye in the winter and early spring. The New River from Fries Dam to Allisonia is prime for it.
“You got to get down on the bottom and keep it there, stay in the strike zone,” said Mike Smith of New River Fly Fishing.
That means using full sink fly line and weighted streamers, then fishing them slowly, swinging them and stripping them back, barely ticking them along or just off the bottom.
“We’re going to set up down here off of this top ledge,” said Smith as he gestured toward underwater structure just below Foster Falls. “We’re going to throw over to that bottom ledge; there’s a trough here where there are fish holding.”
A few swings of the rod later and Smith was bringing a nice 18 inch walleye to the boat.
“Beauty,” said Howard as he netted the fish.
Smith says because the New River is a renowned walleye fishery, adding walleye to the list of species targeted by New River Fly Fishing was a natural. So, while other anglers were saying it could not be done, Smith and company were perfecting the technique.
“Come see us and we can show you how to do it,” exclaimed Howard.
Smith added: “We started targeting them on the fly about 20 years ago, and we haven’t looked back,”
