Situational Awareness and Flats Fishing

Photo: Louis Cahill

Situational awareness is one of, if not the most important skills for a fly angler. Regardless of the fish you’re chasing, you absolutely have to be aware of what bugs are hatching, what the water is doing, or what food sources are available at a given moment. There’s a ton of information to process, and the best anglers are the ones who can take all that information and use it to form a plan of attack.

In flats fishing, that skill is even more pronounced, as Louis Cahill notes in his recent story over at Gink & Gasoline.

“The thing I see kill opportunities more than anything else is a lack of situational awareness,” Cahill writes. “While keeping up with light and water movement is somewhat advanced skill, it’s the simple things that are the most common problems. Simple stuff like line management often spoils shot after shot. A guide told me last week that he had a client who had a thirty foot shot at a school of permit. The client false casted wildly with no idea that his fly was hooked in the stripping mat. Nobody wants to be that guy.”

You can learn more about situational awareness on the flats, and read the rest of Cahill’s story, here.