Your first proper fly fishing trip abroad is a funny thing. You spend months dreaming about it. You watch every video going, buy far too many flies, and practise your casting in the back garden while the neighbours quietly judge you. Then you arrive, and within about forty-eight hours you realise that nobody actually told you half the stuff that matters.
The fishing magazines will tell you about rod weights and fly patterns. Fair enough. But the things that make or break a trip are usually the boring, practical, slightly awkward bits that people only learn the hard way. So here they are, all in one place, so you can learn them the easy way instead.
1. Fishing Is the Easy Bit. Getting There Is the Hard Bit.
Nobody warns you that the biggest battle of your trip might happen at a check-in desk in Madrid.
Travelling with rods is a minor nightmare. Airlines have wildly different rules on sporting equipment, and the person at the desk may not know theirs any better than you do. Get a hard rod tube that fits inside the airline’s size limits, check the policy before you book the flight (not the night before), and print it out so you can wave it about if needed.
Better still, take four-piece rods that fit in your carry-on. Bags go missing. Lodges in the middle of nowhere don’t have a tackle shop round the corner. If your hold luggage takes a scenic detour via Frankfurt, you’ll at least have something to fish with while you wait.
And connecting flights to remote lodges? Leave yourself more time than you think you need. Then add a bit more. A missed connection in South America can easily cost you a day of fishing, and that day is never coming back.
2. Tipping Is a Bigger Deal Than You Think
We Brits are famously awkward about tipping. We don’t really do it properly at home, so we either forget entirely or panic and hand over a crumpled note at the airport.
At many international fishing lodges, particularly in the Americas, tipping your guide and the lodge staff is expected, and it can add a noticeable chunk to the cost of the trip. Find out the local norm before you go, budget for it from the start, and bring cash in the right currency, because the nearest cashpoint might be a three-hour drive away.
On a good trip, your guide has worked incredibly hard for you, often from dawn till dusk. Tipping them properly isn’t optional politeness. It’s part of the deal.
3. Your Wading Boots Might Not Be Welcome
This one catches out loads of people, and it’s genuinely important.
Many countries take biosecurity very seriously, because nasty parasites and invasive algae hitch a ride on a damp kit from one river to the next. Norway, for example, requires fishing gear that’s been used in other countries to be disinfected before you fish there, because of a parasite that has devastated salmon in some of its rivers. New Zealand is famously strict too, and felt-soled wading boots are a no-go in a lot of places these days.
The simple rule: arrive with clean, completely dry kit, rubber-soled boots where possible, and be ready to have things checked or treated. It’s a small hassle, and it protects the very rivers you’ve travelled all that way to fish.
4. Your Casting Is About to Get Exposed
I’ll be blunt, because somebody should be. The casting you get away with on your local river might not cut it abroad.
Patagonia is windy. Not British windy. Proper, sideways, take-your-hat-to-the-next-valley windy. Saltwater flats demand fast, accurate casts at moving fish. Big salmon rivers need you to cover a lot of water with a double-hander. If you can only cast comfortably in still air at 30 feet, you will have a frustrating week.
The fix is simple and nobody does it: book a couple of lessons with a qualified casting instructor a few months before you go. Tell them where you’re heading. It’s the single best money you’ll spend on the whole trip, and I’d put it ahead of any new rod.
5. Day One Is Usually Rubbish
Accept this now and you’ll enjoy your trip far more.
You’ll be jet-lagged. You won’t know the water. You’ll be fishing new flies on an unfamiliar rod, and you’ll be so excited that you’ll rush everything. Most people fish badly on their first day, and most people catch a lot better from day three onwards.
Don’t panic, don’t sulk, and definitely don’t write the trip off. Treat day one as a warm-up. If you catch something, brilliant. If you don’t, have an early night and come out swinging tomorrow.
6. Leave Half Your Flies at Home
Every first-timer does it. You tie or buy hundreds of flies for the trip, filling boxes you’ll barely open.
The truth is that your guide will have very strong opinions on what works, and those opinions are usually right. They fish that water every single day. The lodge flies or the patterns they recommend will catch more than your carefully researched selection from a forum post written in 2014.
Bring a modest selection of what you’re told to bring, plus a few of your own favourites for confidence, and leave it at that. Spend the space in your bag on spare socks instead. You’ll thank me.
7. Listen to Your Guide, Even When You Think You Know Better
This follows on nicely from the last one.
There’s a particular type of experienced angler who arrives at a lodge and quietly decides they know better than the guide. They change flies when told not to, ignore the advice on where to stand, and strike like they’re fishing for trout back home. Then they wonder why they’ve had a poor week.
Your guide wants you to catch fish. It makes their day easier, it makes the lodge look good, and frankly it makes for a better tip. If they say slow down, slow down. If they say change your strike, change your strike. Swallow your pride for a week. You’ll catch more, and you’ll learn more in those few days than you would in a season on your own.
8. Pack for Every Season, Even Somewhere Hot
Tropical destination? Bring a warm layer. Summer in Patagonia? Bring a proper waterproof and a hat that can’t blow off. Norway in July? You might get blazing sun and sleet in the same afternoon.
Layering is everything. A good base layer, a fleece, a decent waterproof shell and a buff will cover you for most things. And whatever you do, don’t underestimate the sun. On the water, especially somewhere like the flats or the Southern Hemisphere in summer, the glare bounces up off the surface and will cook you from below. Long sleeves, sun gloves, a buff and a good pair of polarised glasses aren’t fashion choices. They’re survival kit.
9. Check Your Travel Insurance Actually Covers This
A basic travel policy often won’t cover expensive fishing equipment properly, and it may not cover you if you’re injured somewhere very remote that needs a helicopter or a long evacuation to get you to a hospital.
Read the small print before you go. Make sure your rods, reels and kit are covered at their real value, and check that your policy includes medical cover in remote areas. It’s dull, I know. But wading in fast rivers miles from anywhere is exactly the kind of thing insurers like to quibble over, and you don’t want to find that out the hard way.
10. Licences and Permits Aren’t Always Included
Don’t assume the lodge has sorted everything. Sometimes they have, sometimes they haven’t, and sometimes you need to buy a separate national or regional licence on top of the beat fees.
Ask the question clearly before you travel, and get the answer in writing. Being turned away from the river on the first morning because you haven’t got the right bit of paper is a uniquely painful way to start a holiday.
11. Who You Book With Matters More Than You Realise
This is the one I feel most strongly about.
International fishing trips are expensive, and you’ll often be paying large deposits months or even years in advance. If the lodge, the airline or the person who sold you the trip goes bust in that time, you want to be protected. Under UK and European rules, a genuine package holiday should be covered by a travel guarantee scheme, such as ABTOT in the UK or the travel guarantee fund in Norway. Plenty of informal “hosted trips” sold on the back of a famous name simply aren’t, and the customer carries all the risk.
So ask. Ask whether you’re financially protected, ask who you’d be dealing with if something went wrong, and ask whether the person selling you the trip has actually fished there. Specialist fishing tour operators like KD Flyfishing Tours are members of the Norwegian travel guarantee fund and only sell destinations they’ve fished themselves, which takes a lot of the gamble out of it. Their booking service also costs you nothing compared with going direct to the lodge.
12. The Best Bits Often Have Nothing to Do With Fish
Here’s the thing nobody tells you, and the thing you’ll remember longest.
You’ll forget the exact weight of most of the fish you catch. You won’t forget the asado your guide cooked on the riverbank in Argentina, the old boy in a Norwegian village who told you about the salmon his grandfather caught, or the evening you sat on the lodge porch with a glass of wine watching the light go over the mountains. You’ll remember the people you fished with and the daft things that went wrong.
The best trips leave room for all of that. Don’t schedule every waking minute on the water. Try the local food. Talk to people. Take the odd photo that isn’t of a fish. If you’re working with someone who knows the area, ask them for the restaurants and the little side trips worth making. The people behind KD Flyfishing put it nicely: fishing is about far more than catching fish. After forty-odd years of doing this, they’re right.
The Bottom Line
Your first fly fishing trip abroad will almost certainly be one of the best weeks of your life. It’ll also involve at least one moment where you’re stood in an airport, a river or a downpour thinking “what on earth am I doing here?”
Prepare for the boring bits properly, and you’ll have far more time and energy for the good bits. Practise your casting, sort your insurance, clean your boots, listen to your guide, and book with people who know what they’re doing.
Then go and have the time of your life. And when you get home, start planning the next one, because you will. Everyone does.