I started fishing when I was six with my dad in the sea for flounders which soon led onto fishing a little burn behind our house for trout.

We used worms and maggots, sometimes with a little float until I heard about a fly tying class in my local school. That was 32 years ago and I have been tying a few times a week since then.

I now tie flies for everything, and have fished in 15 countries around the world. I tie flies from size 28 micro nymphs for spooky trout and grayling right up to 10/0 for sharks. In the last 17 years I have been targeting large river browns, pike, and pollock on the fly and grayling throughout the winter.

I mainly target pike in Highland lochs from a float tube and big river trout with streamers. These big Scottish Highland lochs are completely different to low lying lochs, even their spawning time is a few months later due to the time it takes them to warm up a bit. My streamer journey started nearly 2 decades ago due to watching a Kelly Galloup video.

I was amazed with the flies and completely different fishing style he was using and also the fish he was taking with these flies. He is just so passionate about them and my imagination ran wild about all the pools and runs i’ve fished over the years that I could fish a streamer through. I was very lucky because I had a 4.5lb wild river trout on my first day out using these big flies and strange fishing style as I called it.

That was me hooked for life. I started fishing streamer for trout in rivers and hill lochs and the stamp of fish I was catching went up. It opened up so many doors for me to learn. The biggest one was with the fly lines. He talked about homemade sinking lines with short heavy heads so I bought a load of mill end lines and started spending hours on the grass along the road from my house making up my own lines to cast these flies at close quarters. It didn’t take long for the progression to fly fishing for pike. This is what I spend most of my time hunting these days.

They are just such an awesome fish, ugly but beautiful, aggressive but delicate. There’s just something about watching one of these fish smash a fly that I love My fishing trip and adventures can be found on Stuart Smith Fly Tying on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram

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