Welcome to the Orvis Fly Fishing Guide Podcast with Tom Rosenbauer, bringing you tips, tricks and techniques to help you get the most from your time on the water.

Here's acclaimed fly fishing author and lifelong fly fishing

enthusiast Tom Rosenbauer.

Welcome to the Orvis Fly Fishing Guide podcast. We're approaching Father's Day and I'd like to chat a little bit about a question I get from

friends all the time is how do I get my kids into fly fishing, what do I do, what's the best

way? So let's start a little bit with age. If you're going to take a kid on a serious fly fishing trip, trout fishing with a dry fly or a nymph on a normal trout stream, I'd say that

you really need to wait until they're 10 or 12 years old because fly fishing requires a fairly good attention span and kids, most kids under the age of 10 really don't have the attention span to go on a serious fly fishing trip.

But there are lots of ways that you can get them into it and

probably the best way is to find a lake with some panfish nearby. Still water is easier than moving water because current adds its own

complexities to the situation and you know when you throw the line out there and the

current moves it and brings it downstream then you have to reposition it.

Makes things a lot more difficult and tougher to control.

So find a pond, a lake, or a slow moving river where you've got sunfish, yellow perch, white perch, blue gills, nearly all of these small fish that we call panfish take a fly very well they're eager they're not

difficult to approach they're not difficult to fool so preparation for your first

trip do some casting at home without a hook.

Take a fly rod and a leader and take your child out in the yard and just practice casting,

show them a few times, let try it give them some general direction most kids will pick it up very quickly

You can really teach a three or four year old how to cast a fly rot They don't have the attention span to even go for sunfish at that age probably, but

you kids pick fly casting up very, very quickly and it's typically not a problem.

The next thing you do is once they learn how to cast then teach them how to

strip inline, how to retrieve the fly. With kids you can even have them just twitch the tip of the

rod to entice the fish. You don't even have to worry too much about

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