A Guide to Fly Fishing with Kids

We’ve been hard core fly fishers for a long time. There were autumn tent camping trips to Yellowstone with subzero temperatures when we had to trudge through snow to get to the river. There were many tarpon fishing trips on small skiffs in the hot sun. One of those was a multi night camping trip from a canoe into Hell’s Bay in the Everglades where a 10′ alligator was a camp companion. Not much has ever gotten in the way of our fly fishing. Not even kids!

Here we are on our first big fishing trip with our daughter. Floating and wading the Madison with a 10 week old! She slept through it all.

He we are a few years later on the Snake River in Jackson Hole. It was Boone’s first trip west and Willow graduated to carrying the net.

We’d be lying if we said we still have the same habits and modes of fishing with our kids as we did when it was just the two of us. The days of camping with alligators are behind us, although the kids are old enough and have enough experience in the outdoors now that we might revisit it in the future.

We’ve successfully managed fly fishing with children from the time they were infants all the way up to the teen years where we are now. Both our daughter and son are pretty enthusiastic fly fishers so we must have done something right and not traumatized them too badly. Unfortunately we’ve heard stories about how well meaning parents turned their kids off of fly fishing, and even worse it had a negative experience on outdoor outings for the future.

Family vacation floating the Yellowstone River with the kids

The most important thing any parent can do to foster a love of the outdoors and fly fishing in their children is to KEEP IT FUN AT ALL TIMES. This means that as a parent you’ll have to take the intensity level down a few notches and probably spend plenty of time on the river not fishing at all. You don’t want start out with long, intense days on the water in unpleasant conditions. It’s far better to have the kids out on a pretty day and have some plans for them besides fishing.

That means you probably shouldn’t start the kids with fishing for steelhead or musky and focus more time on bluegills or brook trout. Stocked trout are another option depending on where you live. These are just suggestions, but whatever you do you’ll want pleasant weather and relatively easy fish to catch.

Swimming, rock skipping lessons, and looking for frogs, salamanders or stonefly nymphs are all great things to do with the kids and they’ll love it. Our son Boone is developing into a pretty vicious fly fisher right now, but feels jilted if he doesn’t get to go swimming. (Full disclosure: Your kids might not want to swim in trout waters. Boone takes pride in his ability to swim in the most bonechilling waters and does so gladly, even attempting a dip in Little River on a mild February day. He did find his limit that day.)

Our son Boone enjoying the Midnight Hole on Big Creek in the Smokies

It doesn’t matter if you’re at a pond near home or traveling to blue ribbon trout water, you should keep the early experiences pretty short. Fishing from dawn to dark really shouldn’t be part of the program. If the child is too young for fishing you might be able to go a little longer if you can split fishing time with a partner. One of us used to fish while the other would sit on the bank with coloring books or sketch pads. Go ahead and bring an electronic tablet if you want, but the entire reason for being outdoors is to unplug so it never made sense for us to bring electronics. We still have crayon drawings our kids made of outdoor scenes drawn on the river or on camping trips.

Here’s a great drawing a girl made in the drift boat while her Dad fished with me a few years ago on a guided float.

Once your child is old enough to participate a little bit with the fishing it’s critical to keep it short. Fishing isn’t always the most interesting activity for someone with a short attention span. We always suggest parents keep a guided trip with their younger children to a half day. This allows the kids to get out on the water and have a good time in the outdoors, but wrap it up before they get too bored. Four or five hours on the water is probably enough unless you have a kid who is absolutely eaten up with fishing. Those kids do exist, but they’re a pretty small minority and most of those kids are made that way over time.

One suggestion we have that is always met with a little confusion is to stop early even when the fishing is quite good. Why would anyone stop fishing when the fish are biting!?!? If your son or daughter is having a good time, now is the time to wrap it up while the trip is a success. Don’t wait for them to get bored with it. In fact, it’s just like taking a bowl of ice cream away from them before they eat so much they get sick. If you quit early they probably want to keep going and you’ve left them with a burning desire to go again. If you push it the last thing they remember might be mosquito bites, a sunburn, or sixty minutes of boredom with no fish biting. That last 30 minutes will be what they remember most, so it’s always best to end on a high note.

This will be hard to top, so it might be time to call it a day and leave her wanting to come back again.

Another thing we’ve always done is to bring along a special treat. Our kids didn’t get any sweet drinks when they were younger and only had candy on occasions like holidays or birthdays. Whenever we went to the river we’d always bring along a bottle of Snapple and some sort of candy like M&M’s.

For us family fishing day was at least once a week so that meant “candy day” to our kids. Not only will you give the kids something to look forward to, you’ll start a tradition. I recently had one guide customer tell me that every time he eats a Snickers bar he thinks about hunting with his dad because they always shared a Snickers bar at the end of the day. That’s the whole point, right? Any time he sees a Snickers in the grocery store he thinks about time with his father. Make those memories!

Snack time and laughs in the boat

It’s always best to try to hold out on the treat for a little while so there’s some anticipation for the kids, plus you’ll have the figurative bullet in the chamber if something goes wrong. Years ago when our daughter Willow was about three years old we were floating the Madison in Montana. Floats were always easier for us since she could be right by our side while we fished and she wouldn’t have to walk our wade to keep up with us. This one day on the Madison a terrific storm came up. The sky turned black, strong wind, lightning… You get the idea. We pulled off the river in a sheltered spot and gave her the small bag of M&M’s as the weather passed through. I don’t think she would have noticed if the world came to an end as she happily munched candy on the river bank while the thunder rumbled.

There’s an age when your kids will be a little too young to fish effectively, but be sure you let them in on the action. The easiest way is to hook a fish then let them reel it in. This is really pretty easy when bluegill fishing. Be sure the make them feel like they caught it, not just reeled it in. Another great idea is to let them hold the net and land the fish. That’s always a big hit and our kids STILL want to net fish for us to this day.

Be careful, though. One day on the Clinch I thought I’d let our daughter Willow cast to a pod of trout rising to Sulphurs when she was about 5 or 6. Her casting wasn’t perfect, but I thought she’d enjoy casting to fish she could see rising. To my shock and surprise her “cast” sent the whole fly rod and reel into the river! I immediately jumped into the river to grab the Winston and Abel combo before it sank out of reach in the 45 degree water.

Willow nets one for her brother on the Hiwassee

Our kids have slowly become great fishing buddies. They’re still pretty young but are old enough to hike into backcountry areas to fish with us and look forward to our annual western fishing trip. Regardless of the age you start taking your kids fishing, the name of the game is fun. We all go fishing to have fun, more than to catch fish when you think about it. Pass this ethic along to your kids to keep fly fishing alive in the next generation and make memories for yourself. You won’t regret a second of it.

Willow hooked up with a trout on the Henry’s Fork last September while younger brother Boone acts as guide and cheers her on

A memory of a great day on the water with the kids on the West Branch of the Penobscot River in Maine 2015