Mother Jones illustration; Courtesy Randy Betz Jr.
The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy.
There’s a lot that can scare off the newbie fly fisher. First, the gear: the rod and reel, of course, but also the fly line, the leader, the tippet, the waders, the boots, and—above all—the flies, the infinite permutations of size and color and material and hook. Then there’s the cast: a seemingly endless pursuit of the right rhythm, the correct accelerate-to-a-stop, pause, accelerate-to-a-stop that stretches the line out in front of you and lands the fly gently on the water. There’s also learning to read your local streams: Even drifting the right fly at the correct depth won’t matter if nobody’s home. And finally, entomology: You can catch trout without knowing the life cycles and behaviors of mayflies and caddisflies and stoneflies, but you’ll land far more if you know which hatch to match and how.
Randy Betz Jr. understands this. He knows you’re confused and frustrated and more than a little intimidated, but he just wants you to net some fish and have a good time on the water. So, in his @flyfishdelawhere videos on TikTok (421,000 followers) and Instagram (91,000), the 45-year-old owner of a spinal implant company from Wilmington, Delaware, is the fishing buddy you never knew you needed, happy to offer some tips and cheer you on, and, more than anything, make fly fishing more friendly and less daunting.
“If you want to learn to fly fish, this page is a great page to at least get started,” Betz told me earlier this month. “It’s a great page for someone who says: ‘I wanna get into fly fishing. I don’t know the basics. I don’t know what I should use. I don’t know how to even approach a stream or what rigs to use or what flies to use.’”
Satisfyingly, he caught a trout, and then another, and then another, rainbows and brookies and brownies and tigers all brought to his net for snapshots before being gently released back into the water.
The first time I saw one of Betz’s Reels, I was deep in a frenzy brought on by my tween son’s almost overnight obsession with largemouth bass. I had never fished growing up, save for the one time as a kid when some guy’s back cast hooked my thumb, but suddenly I was sneaking off to a nearby pond with my spinning gear every chance I got. My Insta Explore page was full of dudes catching bass, pike, and muskies on all manner of lures and soft plastics. Fly fishing—long my father-in-law’s main hobby—was way off my radar.
And yet, Betz instantly, erm, reeled me in. There he was streamside, narrating a GoPro-filmed video about why trout like the tailouts of pools and telling you before he cast his exact setup, in case you wanted to try the whole thing at your own river. He flipped over rocks to scope out the bug life, and he talked through the different challenges of streamers, nymphs, and dry flies in a way that made sense…and made it seem kind of fun? And then, satisfyingly, he caught a trout, and then another, and then another, rainbows and brookies and brownies and tigers all brought to his net for snapshots before being gently released back into the water.
So before I knew it, I was fly fishing almost every week during the winter in frigid water, snow piled up on the banks. I got caught in trees and on the bottom and lost countless flies and accidentally snapped my rod (multiple times, actually) but kept going out there as the seasons changed and the action heated up.
It wasn’t exactly A River Runs Through It. But as I toured central Connecticut’s streams and rivers—filled with a mix of stocked trout and some holdovers and wild fish, too—I became a bit of a walking cliché: communing with nature, learning on the water, the whole bit.
“You know, anyone that can take something away from one of my videos and use it to catch fish? There you go, that’s the reason I do it.”
I read books and studiously followed the fly shop’s twice-weekly river report and bought more gear and started watching an enormous amount of online fly-fishing content: everything from the grandfatherly ruminations of Orvis OG Tom Rosenbauer to the broseph stylings of @funky_fly_guy to the masterful competence of Troutbitten’s Domenick Swentosky and the clever casting lessons of @troutpsychology. But I kept coming back to Betz. Anytime I got skunked, anytime I was puzzled by new water conditions, I’d scroll through his posts and find something useful, and oddly comforting.
Betz, who first picked up a fly rod with his grandfather and later honed his craft as an undergrad at Penn State, says he fishes five to six times a week, often between work appointments and rarely more than two hours at a time. That can yield weeks worth of content—and provoke a flood of comments from followers who just caught their first trout on the fly and wanted to thank him. “You know, anyone that can take something away from one of my videos and use it to catch fish? There you go, that’s the reason I do it,” he told me.
I’ve now been out on the water dozens of times this year, and I’ve caught and released dozens of fish. I’m not good (that’s years, maybe decades, away?), but I’m also no longer bad. Thanks to Randy Betz Jr. and my other fly-fishing influencer-instructors, I’ve got an actual chance out there—just in time to fool some stocked Atlantic salmon this winter.
