By Peter Brookes | I’d long heard the tales of long, two-handed fly rods, graceful loops, booming casts, and silver salmon and steelhead smashing a well-swung fly. I’d even dabbled a little in the trout Spey space over the years—mostly unsuccessfully. But late this summer, I decided to seriously scratch my Spey fly fishing itch and head North to a two-handed fly fishing festival called “Spey Nation” on the banks of central New York’s storied Salmon River.
For the uninitiated or unfamiliar, two-handed casting has deep roots in fly fishing. On Scotland’s River Spey in the 1800s, anglers needed a way to deliver salmon flies to feisty, ocean-run fish across wide current seams without room for a backcast.
The solution? A long, wooden rod–some exceeding 15-plus feet in length–paired with a series of roll casts that used the physics of water surface tension to load the fishing line, allowing for a long cast.
From those origins, Spey fishing spread across the salmon rivers of Europe, jumped to the American Pacific Northwest, and eventually found a foothold here in the upper Midwest and Northeast, especially in the tributaries of the Great Lakes that host the super salmonids: salmon and steelhead.
So when the chance came to attend Spey Nation and its first-ever two-handed casting school put on by Swing the Fly magazine in early August, I showed up with an eager mind, a ready notebook, and borrowed a Spey rod….
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