Troy Haselip (Corvallis) is a river guide, fly fisher, fly tier, and owner of Watershed Fly Shop. He has been fly fishing since 2004. Haselip’s criteria for being a great angler is being able to pull fish out of any body of water, which requires technical skill, local knowledge, and understanding fish.
Bio
Troy Haselip is a river guide, fly fisher, and fly tier. He's been fishing since childhood and fly fishing since 2004; once he started, he says, "it took over everything.” The Willamette Valley is rich in a great variety of fishing opportunities with ocean, estuaries, rivers, and lakes all nearby. Haselip guides on several local rivers including both the North and South Santiam, McKenzie, and Rogue. He prefers the McKenzie because of its beauty and excellent fishing. According to Haselip, a good fishing guide must know how to target different fish as well as which fish are in which waters; steelhead, for example, swim in deeper water than other trout. It’s also essential to know where fish are at different times of year, since fishers use different flies to imitate seasonal bugs. Fly tying itself must be done by hand; there is no machine that can do the job. Haselip, who rarely stops tying flies at his bench in his shop, was shown how to tie a wooly bugger, a popular type of fly. He took off from there, learning as he went. He acknowledges that there is an art to tying flies as well as to knowing the right types to reliably catch each kind of fish. Fishers seek out Haselip as a guide because he is known for his skill in "swinging flies," when an angler casts his line to throw a fly across the river; the current does the work of moving the fly through the water. His criteria for being a great angler is being able to pull fish out of any body of water; this requires a combination of technical skill, local ecosystem knowledge, and a deep understanding of the fish. These skills, says Haselip, define a "pretty rare breed” of angler.
