AUGUST MEETING: Darren Rist presents ‘Rivers of the Upper Delaware’
Darren Rist will be presenting ‘Rivers of the Upper Delaware (and how not to get skunked fishing them)’ at our August 19th 7:30PM meeting…
Darren’s bio:
Some of my fondest childhood memories are of fishing with my father and brothers. I’ve always loved trout fishing, but it wasn’t until my first year in college that I caught the fly fishing bug…BAD. I spent many painstaking hours deciding whether to go to my morning engineering classes at NJIT or the “entomology classes” on one of the many trout rivers in Northern NJ (The latter usually won out). I soon found myself gravitating to the fabled rivers of Pennsylvania, the Catskills and the Upper Delaware. I began guiding on the Beaverkill, Willowemoc and Upper Delaware in 2003. I now provide guided drift boat trips and lodging from my ‘fish camp’ on the West Branch of the Delaware in NY.
My fascination with fly tying began in the early 90′s after taking a local TU tying course. I enjoy experimenting with new materials and continue designing and refining fly patterns to try to humble those wild and weary Upper Delaware browns. Simple, fast, and effective are what I strive for when designing flies.
I am a past president of the Fred S. Burroughs North Jersey TU Chapter and a member of the Catskill Fly Tyers Guild. I’ve been teaching fly tying and casting for over 10 years. I’ve spent the past 15 years chasing trout, salmon and steelhead with a flyrod in Alaska, Canada, the Patagonia region of Chile and Argentina, throughout the American West, on the legendary rivers of the Catskills and Pennsylvania, and of course, on my home waters in NJ.
The presentation is called ‘Rivers of the Upper Delaware (and how not to get skunked fishing them)’. It’s presents a basic overview of the Upper Delaware’s rivers, hatches, and fishing techniques, including spotting feeding trout, setting up, casting, landing and the release. The program’s primary focus is to teach the dry fly tactics I use to consistently get any angler, from beginner to expert, hooked into tough upper Delaware trout.
Contact info:
e-mail: dprist@earthlink.net
Locals Michael McAuliffe and John Collins from Rise Form Studio go get some w/ Darren in this video:
