S4, Ep 12: Stillwater Guru Phil Rowley

EPISODE SUMMARY

Guest: Phil Rowley - Stillwater Expert, Author, Fly Tier and Co-host of The New Fly Fisher (British Columbia/Alberta)

In this episode: Stillwater guru Phil Rowley shares his journey from club newsletter writer to becoming one of fly fishing's most prominent voices in stillwater tactics and fly tying. Topics include his transition from commercial fly tying to full-time content creation, the evolution of outdoor media from traditional TV to YouTube and live streaming and his systematic approach to lake fishing that works for any species. Phil discusses his writing process for four books including The Orvis Guide to Stillwater Trout Fishing, balancing multiple content creation platforms and the importance of understanding lake stratification and aquatic entomology.

Key fishing techniques covered: • Chironomid/midge fishing with strike indicators • Naked technique (long leader, unweighted flies, 15-30 feet) • Slow retrieve methods for stillwater presentations • Indicator fishing for various species (trout, bass, panfish, walleye) • Dragonfly nymph presentations in weedy areas

Location focus: British Columbia lakes, Alberta stillwaters, Western North America, with techniques applicable to stillwater fisheries worldwide

Target species: Rainbow trout, brook trout, cutthroat, bass (largemouth and smallmouth), panfish, walleye, pike, lake trout

Equipment discussed: Thompson A-vise, Turnkoff's bloodworm pattern, chironomid patterns (sizes 8-16), dragonfly nymphs, strike indicators, floating lines with long leaders, photography and video equipment for content creation

Key questions answered: • How can river anglers transition to successful stillwater fishing? • What are the best methods for fishing chironomids and midges in lakes? • How can stillwater techniques be adapted for non-trout species like bass and walleye? • What's the career path from club newsletter to professional outdoor writer?

Best for: Intermediate to advanced anglers interested in stillwater fishing tactics, aspiring outdoor writers and content creators, fly tiers wanting to understand commercial tying and anyone looking to expand their lake fishing skills across multiple species

**Marvin Cash (00:04):**
Hey folks, it's Marvin Cash, the host of The Articulate Fly. On this episode, I'm joined by stillwater guru Phil Rowley. We talk a little stillwater fishing, and Phil shares his journey from writing for his club newsletter to becoming one of the prominent voices in our sport today. I think you're really going to enjoy this one. But before we get to the interview, just a couple of housekeeping items. If you like the podcast, please tell a friend and please subscribe and leave us a rating and review in the podcatcher of your choice. It really helps us out. And a shout out to this episode's sponsor. This episode is sponsored by our friends at Nor-vise. Their motto is, tie better flies faster, and they produce the only vise that truly spins. To see for yourself, in 2022, the folks from Nor-vise will be at all the fly fishing shows and the Texas Fly Fishing and Brew Festival. If you're in the Edison, New Jersey area on January 28th, 29th through 30th, stop by the Nor-vise booth at the Fly Fishing Show. If you miss them there, you have a chance to catch up with them the following weekend at the Fly Fishing Show in Atlanta. Now, on to our interview. Well, Phil, welcome to The Articulate Fly.

**Phil Rowley (01:27):**
Thanks, Marvin. It's great to be here.

**Marvin Cash:**
Yeah, I'm really looking forward to our conversation, and we have a tradition on The Articulate Fly. We always like to ask our guests to share their earliest fishing memory.

**Phil Rowley:**
My earliest fishing memory? Well, actually, it's not too hard to recall. I was born in England, so we emigrated to Canada when I was seven. So I think my first fishing trip, I don't know the exact age, but I assume I was around six years old. And coarse fishing was really big. It wasn't fly fishing. And there was a nearby park called Sefton Park that had a lake in it. I remember going down to that. My mom and dad were gracious enough to let me go out with the neighbor's kid who must have been about 13, 14, Peter Hopley. And I went down, and I remember setting up, and we would be trying to catch roach, bream and rud, and a carp was sort of the pinnacle of coarse fishing success, and we would bait up hooks with maggots. I remember going into the bait store. These are just little flashes of getting a tub of maggots in all different colors and writhing around. And you obviously bait your hook up and you catch your fish. And then you put them in this long keep net that was sort of staked to the bank. And then the net trailed off into the water. And you put your catch in there. And at the end of the day, you kind of look at them and let them all go. So that was sort of my first memory. The bug was planted.

**Marvin Cash (02:39):**
Yeah, was that with those really, really long kind of telescoping rides?

**Phil Rowley (02:43):**
I think so, yeah. I can't remember. You know, like I say, it's just flashes. I know they were long. And I've seen those telescoping rods they use on some of those carp shows. I remember watching one on a fishing network many years ago, kind of chuckling, look at this, this is crazy. Sat down for 15 minutes saying, well, I'll turn this over. And an hour and a half later, I was still watching it all, just fascinated by all the different bait mixes they use and the different equipment, those telescoping rods with elastic bands on the end and probing down the bank and which peg they got. It was quite fascinating.

**Marvin Cash (03:21):**
Yeah, it's really neat. And you know, I always also like to ask, you know, when you came to the dark side of fly fishing.

**Phil Rowley (03:28):**
The dark side of fly fishing? Yeah. I started in my early 20s. I had, and it was kind of a, my wife and I look back on it, it was kind of this surreal experience. We had been on a trip soon after we were married, so I must have been 23 and 24 maybe. And we had gone over to Vancouver Island. I lived in British Columbia, the westernmost province in Canada, for 35 years before moving to Alberta, where I am now. It's just one province over to the east. And we had gone to a lake and spent the better part of a week there. It was kind of embarrassing how well we performed. We were just trolling around in circles and not really understanding what we were doing. I remember sitting, our campsite was by the fire one night, and so it was kind of twilight, and this gentleman walked down. Looking back, he was the image of Roderick Hague Brown. He had a wicker creel, hip boots on, hip waders, and a fly reel, and fish were rising. He walked down, waded in a little bit, made a few casts, caught a bunch of fish, took a few home in his creel, disappeared off into the low light. And at that point, I was playing sort of casual hockey. And I had a friend of mine who his dad had mentored him through fly fishing and was always after me and teasing me to come fly fishing. And for whatever reason, I always, you know, turned him, you know, sort of, no thanks, not interested or didn't have the time or whatever the reasons were. And yet I phoned him up when I got home. I said, okay, there's something to this fly fishing thing. So he gave me a couple of rudimentary casting lessons and then I went out the following weekend with him and his dad to a river about two hours east of Vancouver called the Skagit River, and caught my first fish on that trip on a dry fly, a trout, a nice trout, and I was hooked because I had never felt anything like that. You don't watch a fish come up and eat the fly, and just the immediate connection you have between yourself and the fish that's not muffled by any of the gear you're using. And as the pun would say, I was hooked, and I've been into it ever since. It's all I've ever wanted to do.

**Marvin Cash (05:49):**
Yeah, very neat. Who are some of the folks that have mentored you on your fly fishing journey?

**Phil Rowley (05:54):**
It's hard to see. A lot of people have mentored me without even realizing. So when I got into the sport, I was reading everything. I remember going to a library. Some people, like you and I, probably remember what libraries are. But I know my kids today don't do them much. It's all on the Internet. But getting every book. So people like, you know, Gary Borger, Dave Hughes, Doug Swisher. And then I had, obviously, my friend Richard's father, Ted, who ironically has the same name as my father. And Brian Chan, who's become a really good friend. We do a lot of work together as a fellow stillwater addict. And as I got into fly fishing, I took a night school course. And one of the members, the person who was teaching it, was from the Osprey Fly Fishers. And that was a local Vancouver club. So I went in and dropped in by myself. And they had invited me in and took me under their wing. So I had a lot of mentors within that club as well. It's kind of funny, as my fly fishing career has evolved, I've got to meet Gary Borger. We have casual conversations in elevators at shows. It's really kind of humbling to see that transpire as it has.

**Marvin Cash (07:13):**
Yeah, it's really neat you say that, because I would say, from a book perspective, probably one of the most influential books I've ever read about fly fishing is Gary's presentation.

**Phil Rowley (07:23):**
Yeah, fantastic book. I wish that was still in print. It's, you know, I've referenced that book many times and it's just a good book to go back and reread. You know, it's science background. It's something that was what drew me to one of the things that drew me to the sport was things like entomology and just really getting in touch with how nature worked. Whereas when I, you know, fish traditional conventional methods, put on this color, put on that because somebody said it worked good. There wasn't a lot of science, you know, a lot of trying to link what you saw in nature to how you chose to, you know, attack the problem and present things.

**Marvin Cash (08:01):**
Yeah, absolutely. And so when did you get the bug to start fly tying?

**Phil Rowley (08:06):**
That's another kind of funny, because when I took, you know, the fly fishing course and got into fly fishing, I didn't know if I was going to be interested in fly tying. I know a lot of, I've heard a lot of people say they started tying flies first and then fly fished. I was the reciprocal of that. And I had, you know, probably a year later decided to finally take a night school course with another person. I had met Vic at the club, a friend of mine, and we decided to take fly tying class together. And that just fascinated me to do that. So it was probably a year or so at least after actually formally picking up the fly fishing bug.

**Marvin Cash (08:47):**
And do you remember your first vise and the first fly you tied on it?

**Phil Rowley (08:51):**
Oh, all too well. Because British Columbia has such a strong tradition of stillwater fishing, there was a pattern, it's a bloodworm pattern, which is a chironomid larva, a midge larva, called a Turnkoff's bloodworm. It consisted of a sparse tail of black bear hair, a wine burgundy-colored chenille, really fine, and just a few strands of pheasant rump sort of tied around the head of the fly just to not imitate legs or anything, but when the fly got wet, it would move and suggest a wiggling worm. And that was all tied on my Thompson A-vise, which served me for many years, even when I started tying commercially.

**Marvin Cash (09:32):**
Yeah, absolutely. And it's funny you say that because I, you know, from kind of watching you from afar in the industry, it's clear that fly tying is kind of the foundation of your career in the industry. And when did you know that you wanted to make it a full-time career, and why did you think that fly tying was the path to move in that direction?

**Phil Rowley (09:53):**
Yeah, I kind of think I wanted to make it a full-time career after that first place on the schedule. It made doing a traditional job seem kind of not what I wanted to do. But fly tying I got into because I started tying, and I remember at the Ospreys Club, we would have these Christmas dinners, and everybody would donate a gift to the auction, and I started putting fly plaques together. I was gluing flies on, I can't remember, shadow boxes. There's a term I'm looking for. And you would actually epoxy the fly to a pin and mount it in there, and I started getting, once I got into it, like anything, I just kept doing it and kept doing it. So I got people said that they liked my flies. And then I had a local fly shop, Badcock Fly and Tackle. I'm still friends with Brian, the former owner today. And he took a flyer on me and had me start to tie up some flies for his bin. This was before, obviously, all the fly tying companies, Montana Fly Company, Umpqua, Rainey's, Fulling Mill, all the companies that are out there nowadays. You know, the local fly shops had local tiers tie their fly patterns for them. So I started doing that. And my niche, I decided, because I had some other friends that were doing this, I was going to tie dry flies. So I wasn't picking this out very well because dry flies at that time, it was hard to find good quality hackle. And good quality hackle was kind of expensive. But it did make me a good fly tier because dry flies are so proportionally demanding. The hackle has to be sized the right way. The wings have to be the right way. The tail the right length. Or else the fly, you know, a traditional Adams or Catskill-type fly wouldn't float properly. It'd tip on its head or what have you. So, yeah, that sort of led into, from there, fly tying courses.

**Marvin Cash (11:45):**
Yeah, so how long did you tie commercially?

**Phil Rowley (11:50):**
I argue I'd never really stopped. But officially, probably I did about 10 years. And then just got so busy doing other things, and it was so hard to keep up. After a while, if you didn't tie at least a dozen or so or more a day, you couldn't keep up with demand. Then it started to become onerous and a bit of a job. That's probably the only time it kind of lost some of its luster. With the online store I have now, I have been known on occasion if we are a little low of a pattern here and there to pull out the vise and quickly knock off three or four to fill an order. That doesn't mean I'm taking orders commercially now.

**Marvin Cash (12:31):**
Yeah, fair enough. And at the peak, I mean, how many dozens a year were you cranking out?

**Phil Rowley (12:37):**
Oh, God. Hard to, I never, it's been so long since I counted them. I should know better than this. But, you know, if I was doing at least 24, grabbing some math here, if I was doing 24, you know, two dozen a night, you know, times, you know, 30 days in a month, times 12, thousand dozen at least. Yeah, so it was a lot, you know, because I tended to do flies that were tricky, and all I used to do was I would use it to purchase gear. Get rods, get lines, get reels, waders, those kind of things. I'd just tie on an account or kind of a contra deal. That's how it all started.

**Marvin Cash (13:30):**
Yeah, very neat. And you know, you know, obviously folks have seen you, you know, you write regularly for lots of fly fishing magazines. You've got four books. How'd you break into the outdoor writing game?

**Phil Rowley (13:38):**
Again, it's back to the Osprey Fly Fishers. They used to have a newsletter that was, you know, formally printed and mailed to you. And, you know, members are always encouraged to get involved and to write about their experiences. So I started doing little articles here and there and then I actually enjoyed that and started, you know, always, you know, with the fly tying as you mentioned decided, you know, why don't I start a column? So I had a column I think called Phil's Flybox, I think I named it. So I would feature different club patterns and different patterns around just illustrating different things and sort of got some confidence up and got exposure writing and a few people said you know you're not half bad at this. So then I started reaching out, you know, decided, well, I'm going to try and approach different magazines. So I would send out, you know, at that time, you would type a letter and mail it off, a query letter. And a lot of times, many, many, all the time, they came back, you know, your article doesn't meet our editorial needs. So I felt I was like, trying to, you know, shooting in the dark. I had no idea where the target was, or where it was, or how big it was, and just trying to guess. So I finally took the initiative and looked on the masthead of the magazine and saw they had a phone number and called the editors. And they were very helpful and willing to give me advice. And I remember one gentleman, Art Sheck, who was the editor at the time for American Angler magazine, because I had put, I think one of my proposal queries was how to fly fish lakes. And he just said, that's way too broad. He said, take a piece of paper and write down everything you can think of that goes into how to fly fish a lake. And each one of those little things is an article subject unto itself. So that gave me a lot of ideas and talking with the editors to what they wanted. So my next submission was basically we'd already almost had it agreed to in the phone call. And then once you start writing a few articles, you gain a little momentum. The ironic thing about it all was I had a heck of a time trying to get published in Canada, in my home country, right? There's way more magazines in the United States, but I did have one time where I was at a show and met the editor of a magazine that I now have been writing a column in for over 10 years. The editor at that time asked me, oh, you're right, how come you've never written for us? And I kind of smiled, a little sly smile, well, you'd turned me down. So I sold it to another art magazine in the States. He kind of drooped his shoulders and went, oh, I guess we have to fix that. So the rest was history on that relationship. It's kind of funny.

**Marvin Cash (16:24):**
Yeah, very neat. And I always like to ask authors and writers how they like to write. Like, you know, some people like to get up every morning and write for an hour and a half before they do their day job or they write, you know, kind of in spurts. How do you like to do it?

**Phil Rowley (16:39):**
I'm probably a blend of those two things. I would try to do it every day, particularly when you've got a book project because you've got a deadline and you've got to get it done. But, you know, some days the writing flowed freely and almost, you know, it was like a cork. Once it came out, I couldn't stop. And other days I couldn't write a paragraph. It was just as, you know, struggled with the formatting and how am I getting, you know, the idea is spinning around in my head. But it won't transmit to my hands or my fingers now with typing that I could get it out and articulate it properly. So it's sort of a love-hate relationship.

**Marvin Cash (17:17):**
Yeah, it's funny. That flows nicely into my next question, which is funny also. When I talk to authors, some of them really like the process of writing and editing, and some really don't like it at all. And I was kind of curious where you kind of fall in that continuum.

**Phil Rowley (17:31):**
I'd like to like it, but I probably lean towards the dread portion. I have talked to many authors. I often have, I remember having a conversation with Dave Hughes because he's had a heck of a lot of books published. And he's one of those, he would get up and write for an hour and a half every day, and that's what he did. And I just, you know, he was a full-time writer at that time, so in some ways he had the ability to do that. But I still had a 9-to-5 normal job, if that's the right term. So that didn't work. So I would oftentimes have to come home and write after work or get up really early in the morning to do it. And, you know, I could never find the right time. I remember there's a book out there. There's two books he used to read, Elements of Style is one, and On Writing Well by Richard Zinslow, I think his name is. And the opening paragraph, the opening part of the book, the introduction, is basically he was sitting at a panel of writers, and each of them is being asked a very similar question to this one, and a lot of them are acting poetic, how it fulfills them, it's this existential stuff and all this stuff. And it gets to him and he just, I hate it. It's hard. It doesn't go well. It fights me every point of the term. And I went, that's me some days. And that book had instant value then and his concepts were good. So those are two books, if anybody's aspiring to write, Elements of Style and On Writing Well, were two books that just talked about writing and sort of the magazine genre and just writing books and things like that. And just coming to, you know, cause I'm always trying to talk to other authors and find out how they do things and how do they map it out? How do they plan it? Cause it's interesting to see how other people do it and see if you can adapt some of that to your own process.

**Marvin Cash (19:25):**
Yeah, absolutely. And I'll drop links to both those in the show notes. Yeah. I'm familiar with Elements of Style. I'm not familiar with the second one, but it's what you're talking about kind of is close to home. Cause I spent a good chunk about a year ago, helping my oldest son with his college essays. And so for Christmas, he got a copy of Old Man and the Sea and Strunk and White because he needed a little bit of help.

**Phil Rowley (19:49):**
It's funny. I think my oldest son was going to college and having to write papers. He'd ask me to read it and edit it. He used to get so mad at me because, you know, I remember when I was in school and like most teenage boys, in the academic stuff, you're just either chasing girls or want to go play sports somewhere. So you're always, you know, when is this math or algebra ever going to benefit me in life? And when am I ever going to use English? And I look back now, I'm sure my English teachers would be chuckled quietly at what became. Because all of a sudden you start to, you know, understand how to use the language and how to grammar and all that kind of stuff to set it up. So I used to cut his articles pretty bad. He used to get pretty frustrated with me.

**Marvin Cash (20:35):**
Yeah. I will say, though, you know, helping people with their writing using Google Docs is a great, I thought, was an awesome way to do it.

**Phil Rowley (20:42):**
Oh, yeah. We didn't have those resources. I'm so envious. You know, you would send something off and get sometimes the dreaded red pen, right, the editor's sword that they used. I think it was red for blood. It would just carve things up. And, you know, you learn it was really good because I remember one of my mentors, you know, talked about that, was the late Les Johnson. He wrote for Frank Amato and wrote a few books on the West Coast for Cutthroat and Salmon. And he was the editor of, I think it was Fly Tying and Fly Fishing Journal. And he told me, you know, you write very concise, short. You know, if you can say what originally took three sentences, if you can get it down to one, then you're writing well. Right? I think when I first started out, you're stuck on this word count thing. It was almost like school where you have to write an essay. It had to be 500 words. You had a lot of "and" in there just to take up word space. But you learn to, you know, when I edit now, I just hack. And half the time I'm editing and I go the whole paragraph, what is this even doing here? And it's just gone. Right? Because it's easy to get off on bunny trails and off topic and sort of lose things. So you just got to learn to be ruthless and carve it to pieces. That's the fun part, right?

**Marvin Cash (22:01):**
Yeah, and speaking of, you know, your fourth book, The Orvis Guide to Stillwater Trout Fishing, I guess, came out probably mid-spring last year. And I was really kind of curious about, you know, where the idea for the book came from.

**Phil Rowley (22:13):**
Well, the idea has been in the book in my head for years. My first book, Fly Patterns for Stillwaters, followed by my second Stillwater Solutions Recipes, which I co-wrote with Brian Chan, and Stillwater Selections were all primarily fly tying-based books. They had some presentation techniques woven in there throughout, but it was mostly a step-by-step fly tying book. So I always wanted to write my philosophy on how I fish lakes. And so it's been bouncing around in my head for years. And just finally, I guess I got, not pushed, but got into a situation where I was fortunate that it finally came to fruition and I got to write it.

**Marvin Cash (22:59):**
Yeah, very neat. And who did you write the book for?

**Phil Rowley (23:03):**
Well, I wrote the book for anybody wishing to, who had an interest in fly fishing lakes. Although it's written for the Orvis Guide to Stillwater Trout Fishing, that wasn't good. It's anybody who fishes lakes, because I use the same philosophy for fishing lakes, no matter what species I'm after. Where I grew up as a fly fisher in British Columbia, stillwater fly fishing is very, very popular there, that's readily accessible. There's lots and lots of lakes. The fishing is very good, and pretty well the same with Western Canada, Western North America. So it just sort of gravitated towards it. The other river fishing, there was a few. There's some very good river fishing in British Columbia. It's just not as well-known as the stillwater fishing. And the other fishing was anadromous for steelhead or salmon. So to go steelhead fishing, you have to drive 20-some-odd hours and all that stuff where I could drive two and a half, three hours or less and be into good lake fishing. So the book itself is tailored to, you know, I wrote it as a, you know, remembering the struggles I went through trying to learn how to fly fish lakes and trying to, you know, pass along hopefully my knowledge and my experiences help them shorten their learning curve so they get enjoyed as much as I do but don't have to go through quite the trials and tribulations that I had to over the years. So it's sort of anybody aspiring, anybody who wants to fly fish lakes.

**Marvin Cash (24:41):**
Yeah, very, very neat. And I'm always curious too. I've been lucky enough to have several authors on who unfortunately had to promote their books during the pandemic. What was that like?

**Phil Rowley (24:51):**
Challenging, challenging. Yeah, my book, well, the book was originally slated for release just prior to Christmas of, I guess it would have been 2020, but when the pandemic first hit the publisher got furloughed for three months so they were, they just almost disappeared because they were not in the office, so that delayed it. It did give me time to tweak it and play with it some more which isn't always a good thing sometimes because you just end up going in this big circle where you start with a sentence or a paragraph or whatever you're talking about and go full circle to come back to it after numerous edits. You end up going right back to where it was. So it got released in May of 2021, which, you know, I think the Christmas period is always a good time to release a book because it's a gift. It's new. But, you know, those are the cards you're dealt. So it's, you know, a lot of the promotion I do myself through social media and podcasts such as this one and every avenue I can to get it out there. So part of the, you asked about the book too, was how it came to be as well, was a conversation with Tom Rosenbauer from Orvis. I'd had a good fortune to film some television shows with Tom in the past. And we were at the author's booth at the fly fishing show in Somerset when it was still there. It's now in Edison. And we were just catching up and talking, and he sort of said to me, you know, we haven't got a stillwater book in the Orvis Guide series. We need one, I think. But I think you'd be the guy to do it. So it's like a lot of times you have these conversations at shows that never really materialize into anything, and all of a sudden it's a phone call, it's an email exchange, and a contract, and the rest is history, and you're on that euphoria. Wow, I'm finally going to get this done. And then we're sort of back to the dread of, oh, no, now I've got to write this thing.

**Marvin Cash (26:56):**
Yeah. Yeah. And speaking of, I think it took you over three years to write the book. And I'm really kind of curious if anything kind of stands out in your mind about the writing process.

**Phil Rowley (27:06):**
Well, the writing process I had to have, and I can certainly see the publisher's thoughts on this, is they wanted a chapter from me, I think within 90 days, probably to see that I could actually string two sentences together. So I, for me the elephant in the room in the book because you know I'm not a biologist by profession but I'm attracted to that kind of stuff and one of the chapters is entitled How Lakes Work. So that's all about how lakes are, although they're called stillwaters, they're probably anything but. They're always in a state of flux and transition as they go through the season due to the impacts of water temperature and stratification and all this stuff. So it's technical, but it's important for fly fishers who fish lakes to understand because it really impacts where fish are going to be at any given time. So it helps you take that flat void of water that can be kind of intimidating because there's no visible features and help you break it down a little bit and target areas of the lake that are, depending on the season, most likely to be. So that was technical. And if I got it wrong, credibility, you know, it's just dominoes to the rest of the book. If you don't have that right, the rest of the chapters are all suspects. So I got that one done first. And then my good friend Brian Chan, who's a fisheries biologist by profession and knows this stuff inside and out, he proofread and vetted that chapter for me. So that was done. And then it went off. And then I got the green light from the editor. He liked it. Very little in the way of changes or edits, which was really refreshing. And then I was off and running, right? And I was just, you know, I had it all outlined out. So I do a lot of mind mapping where I'll take the concept and just do this kind of, I call it brainstorming on paper. And now I know the software programs you can do it, but I still do it the old-fashioned way with paper. Even when I write an article, I have the subject and an introduction and all the things that go in. And it just looks like this, all these circles connected by lines. And then I'll string those into somewhat of an outlining, just gather my thoughts. I'm just dumping everything out of my brain. I'm getting it on paper. I'm putting little asterisks by something. I make a point that needs a little bit of investigation to make sure it's accurate, whether it's spelled it right or using the science properly or whatever the reason. That one needs a little investigating. And then just sit down and get it written. So that's sort of how it all went.

**Marvin Cash (29:37):**
Yeah, and I'm a big fan of mind mapping too. Yeah, I have an app I like on my iPad. But yeah, it's an awesome way to organize stuff. And, you know, it's interesting, right? Because, you know, kind of being down in the mid-Atlantic, kind of upper south, you know, we don't have a lot of opportunities to fish stillwaters for trout down here. But I was curious, and you mentioned this a little bit earlier, you know, if there's an angler that wanted to target a non-trout species, you know, how can your book help them do that?

**Phil Rowley (30:05):**
Well, I would, in simple terms, take the word trout out and put your favorite species in, because, you know, I've had the good fortune to, you know, fly fish across North America, both Canada and the United States, and now do hosted trips down to Argentina. So, and I've often, especially pre-pandemic where you got to, you know, physically travel to clubs and speak to them, I'd often, you know, the way travel works, you'd extend a day or you get invited, would you like to go fishing when you're down here, which was a really hard question to answer. Of course I would. And a lot of times it was non-trout. We've got bass. I'd love to fish for bass because I don't get the opportunity in the province I live now. I did in British Columbia, but I didn't. I approach any stillwater situation using the same philosophy that's outlined in my book. I fish the same method because fish overall are fish. Sure, they've got their quirks, but you can fish strike techniques for smallmouth bass. I fished chironomid techniques for panfish. So the same way, in my introduction of the book, I actually talked about that, that I use exactly the same philosophy. I don't really get to, and it's a question that's often asked of me is, okay, I want to go fish for this species. What would I do differently? And it's like not really much. You might play around with the fly types, you know, the forage base you're trying to imitate or things like that, or the flies, you know, for a bass, maybe a little bigger. Maybe it's more minnow-based, crayfish patterns, leeches, dragonfly nymphs, some of those things. Because I've been fortunate. I've got some good friends and acquaintances down in California who've used a lot of my dragonfly nymph patterns. They're amongst their favorites for fishing for bass in the Delta. It makes sense. A largemouth would eat a dragonfly nymph because of maturity. Some of them are two, two and a half inches long, and bass live in weedy areas. Dragonflies like to hunt and live in weedy areas. It's just going to be a good intersection of prey and predator.

**Marvin Cash (32:08):**
Yeah, absolutely. And so, you know, let's just say you're, you know, an average kind of fly angler who doesn't traditionally fish stillwaters, you know, and you wanted to give it a try. It's almost like what would you do if you were going to go try Euro-nymphing? You know, what would you say if the average angler could kind of take, you know, out of his gearbox and, you know, how should he rig up and give it a shot?

**Phil Rowley (32:29):**
Well, probably the easiest way nowadays is the floating line and the strike indicator. It's become very popular because the strike indicator, you know, a lot of traditional fly fishers, both river and lake, frown on fly fishing. But yet, you know, when I guide, I often, you know, I've got people that haven't got a lot of experience. And one thing I want to ensure when somebody comes with me on the water is they have an enjoyable day and hopefully catch some fish. So to give them a difficult method to do it with that involves, you know, their casting may not be, you know, in lakes with the exception of strike indicators we're trying to cover as much water as we can so the further you can cast the more likelihood you're going to run into a fish, but there's a lot more variables when you're just casting and retrieving as far as how you know how long your leader is, how long you let it sink, what retrieve rate you use for your flies. It's just lots of things going on and people that I see come that are new to lakes or struggle with how slow we move to fly sometimes. You know, one of the best methods to fish in the west and productive lakes is midges or chironomids, and we're fortunate in lakes that our average midge size is, you know, in the lakes I fish a 14 would be a 16 would be a small one, and we've got some lakes where we're fishing chironomid midges that are 8.2XL, so they're big. We call them bombers. So they struggle with having to retrieve the slow retrieves for that, so the indicator gives them that visual clue for something to watch, and their depth of their presentation, which is another key presentation element, getting your fly to the right depth and keeping it there, that's set by the distance between the indicator and the fly, and their retrieve, because they can just let it sit out there and let the waves animate the indicator, which translates down to the fly, or they can slowly strip it back or hand-twist it in. There are a lot of different ways. And, of course, when that little ball goes under the water, pulls under, everybody knows what it is, right, and they get some fish. And then they can sort of evolve from there. And it's just a deadly method to fish because it keeps your fly out of trouble. It's not going to hang up on the bottom because if you're six feet of water and two feet of weed, so you've got two feet of workable water, you can hang a fly two feet down and not worry about it getting all tangled up and stuff. And then you can evolve, have some success, and then try the other methods.

**Marvin Cash (34:53):**
Yeah, interesting. And I guess would you try to have your indicator kind of be just buoyant enough to hold your fly up so that it doesn't give a lot of resistance?

**Phil Rowley (35:03):**
Yeah, you generally obviously need to make it visible. So it's different. There's lots of things that impact. I try to use the smallest indicators I can get away with because they're easier to cast. One of my basic principles of indicator fishing is you don't want to make long casts because, depending on what fly you're using and how you're presenting it, your takes are not always aggressive. The indicator can just slide left or right, and you'll develop an eye for when things don't look right and set the hook because the takes aren't. I think we all like a take where an indicator gets pulled under the water and it goes under so hard it leaves a bubble trail. But that's not always a reality. So if you cast too far away, you can't see those kind of subtle takes. And even if you can, you can't react to them. So it's a good idea. Use your indicator. Because if your indicator is too big, you can gap it further because it's more visible. But other things that come into it, obviously the weight of the fly or your flies, you know, heavier flies, require more indicator to hold them up. And if the surface is choppy, you know, the smaller indicators get a little harder to see in the swells and the surface chops. So you move a little bigger. So there's no, you know, I think everybody's looking in indicators for the silver bullet, that one perfect indicator, and it doesn't exist. I think that's a good thing.

**Marvin Cash (36:21):**
Yeah, fair enough. Well, that sounds like a really good jumping off place for folks, whether it's brim or bass or smallmouth. Yeah, we have walleye down here.

**Phil Rowley (36:31):**
Yeah, I fish for walleye all the time up here. In the summer months, our lakes get quite warm, too warm to fishing for trout. But the walleye are a much more temperature-tolerant species, and I chase them all the time. I find them a fascinating fish to chase on the fly because you're not supposed to. So if somebody tells me you can't catch a fish on the fly, I'm instantly intrigued to do it because I believe you can. One of my models is if it swims and eats, I think we can catch it on the fly. And there's just so many, I know people, they have their own preferences, but I really believe, like, keep your options open. Like, learn to, because you learn so many things from other species or other methods that you can transport, you know, to whatever your preferred fly. Like, I'd love to European, it fascinates me. It's kind of the moving water equivalent. We have a technique in stillwaters we call the naked technique, which is how I first used to learn to fish midges because strike indicators weren't around, where you would fish a floating line and leaders that were 15, 18, 20, 25, close to 30 feet long, make a cast as far as you comfortably could, let that line and leader lay out, wait a minute for that little unweighted fly because bead heads weren't around to sink, and then just slowly inch it back, like maybe half an inch at a time, and just watch that fly line to straighten. Half the time you would see the take before you felt it. So that's a method that I really enjoy and try to build people up to because it's very technical. It's all leader length and pattern weight. There's a lot of variables to play with it. But it teaches you patience and touch, which patience to let the fly sink and to move it slow enough and touch just to recognize those really subtle takes, which pay big dividends in other disciplines of fly fishing too.

**Marvin Cash (38:23):**
Yeah, and being patient pays dividends in life as well.

**Phil Rowley (38:29):**
Yeah, I always joke when I take somebody fishing if they're an ardent dedicated streamer fishermen they're the most challenging because they're they're used to pulling flies fast and if they're river fishermen they're walking and wading and bending and casting they're always on the go and to sit them in the boat and say okay make the cast okay how long do I let it sink well we're going to start with a minute they're like what and then okay when do I bring it back okay bring it because I time it on my watch and then okay now how fast no slower than that slower than that like, when we're fishing that naked technique, one of the principles of the retrieve is you're moving the fly line so slowly it will not make a wake when you strip it on the water. So you're moving it. You're just basically dragging it across the surface. Right? So it's quite funny. I do have some fun with them. They have fun with me when I'm on rivers fishing streamers.

**Marvin Cash (39:15):**
Yeah, I would say that you can really torture them that way. And, you know, it's funny too, Phil, because the first time I kind of met you was, you know, watching the New Fly Fisher. And I was really kind of curious, you know, we've talked about your writing and your commercial tying, you know, how did you get hooked up with the guys at the New Fly Fisher?

**Phil Rowley (39:35):**
Well, it was because of the book. You know, the Fly Patterns for Stillwaters came out, I want to say about 20, 21 years ago at least now. And it had just come out, and the producer of the show, Colin McEwen, called me out of the blue. I guess he'd read my book, and he had a shoot planned for Fortress Lake, which is a trophy brook trout lake located in the Canadian Rockies, just over the border from Alberta into British Columbia. So I was all excited to do this. So I got time off work at the time and drove basically across the province to get there. We helicoptered in to get a fly-in destination, so the trip alone was worth the price of admission. And, you know, spent a week there fishing with them. And it was, you know, I felt the pressure because obviously you want to do well and, you know, have a good shoot and catch some fish and look like you know what you're talking about. And, you know, I envision generally a steep-sided high mountain lake is not as productive as a lowland lake, just the way the nutrients work and amongst other things. So I wasn't terribly optimistic that it was going to be a challenging shoot because for fly fishing in lakes, we're much better in water 20 feet deep or less. That's sort of our sweet spot because that's where all the sunlight penetrates, creates weeds, which creates habitat for food, which brings in the predator, which is the fish. And from all the presentation techniques, we have our full suite of techniques we can use where as you get out into deep water, there's not a lot of food living out there per se as compared to the shallows, and the line types and the presentation options you have narrow greatly. But it's a fantastic fishery, the big brook trout there. I don't know if they're as big as they are today. It's been a number of years since I've been in there, but had a great shoot, and I got invited back. So that turned into a few more guest appearances and then brought on as a co-host, and I still do that role as much as I can whenever the opportunity presents itself today. So I've had the good fortune to, you know, travel all over North America, film in different locations, fish rivers and streams, fish for, you know, take my stillwater fishing and take it from trout and chasing pike and lake trouts and, you know, figuring out how to get lake trout out of 70, 80 feet of water or more and catch them on the fly, all those kind of things. Pike are a lot of fun on the fly.

**Marvin Cash (42:09):**
Yeah, absolutely. And so how many seasons have you been on the show?

**Phil Rowley (42:15):**
Off and on, well over probably 15. You know, sometimes, you know, I might be on the show two times a season because a lot of times my schedule now gets in the way. Speaking in schools and workshops, I do destination workshops, hosted trips and stuff, but I'm just not available. So whenever there's an opportunity, I definitely take it up.

**Marvin Cash (42:37):**
Yeah, and it's interesting, too, because it's really interesting to watch how Colin has kind of evolved the way the show is put together and it's distributed. And I kind of see that a little bit with you. How did that help you? You're super active on YouTube. You've been doing kind of on-demand video as kind of a replacement for DVDs. I know with COVID, you've kind of gotten into live stream video. How did that kind of flow out of the New Fly Fisher for you?

**Phil Rowley (43:02):**
Well, to me, one of the byproducts of fishing, because they live in such beautiful places, is you want to record your experiences with a camera. And I was always interested in photography. It just sort of came. And also, when I did my first book, I shot all the step-by-step fly tying pictures and took pictures of all the bugs. So I had to teach myself macro photography back in the slide world. And the Internet wasn't around. It was very hard to find resources to get answers to your questions. So it was an awful lot of trial and error and an awful lot of slides that went from the slide sleeve to the garbage can. It was three seconds flat. I always remember I took a fly tying, a photography at the San Mateo show. I was speaking there and, you know, got a break in between my presentations and caught Lefty Kreh. He put on a photography seminar. And one of the lines he said in that was, you know, pictures are not like fine wine. They don't get better with age. So if there's a crappy picture to start with, it'll still be crappy in three months. Get rid of it. Throw it out. So, yeah, so that sort of stuck to that. So I was fascinated by the photography. So, you know, on the television shoots, when you're, you know, when it's quiet time or whatever in the evenings, I'd be asking questions to the cameraman and having these dialogues and better understanding photography. And then, of course, now with digital photography and videography coming, you know, so relevant, you know, like an iPhone 13, it's probably more powerful than my first, way more powerful than my first camera. So, you know, all the tools we have at our disposal nowadays to do good content is really refreshing and nice. So I've always had a fascination with that. That's probably my second addiction is the photography. You know, it's bad enough I make gear junkie in fishing. I love having stuff and, you know, fine tying gear and scissors and all that stuff and rods and lines and all the accessories that go with that. And then to get into photography as well, which can be quite expensive. I've actually learned to sort of tone down my wish list a little bit and do a lot of research before pulling the trigger.

**Marvin Cash (45:09):**
Yeah, but that being said, I mean, you can rack up camera gear on a fly rod equivalent basis pretty quickly.

**Phil Rowley (45:16):**
Oh, on a global scale, yeah. You can spend more on the camera gear than some third world countries.

**Marvin Cash (45:24):**
Yeah, for sure. And, you know, so it's interesting, right? We're seeing all this stuff evolve and you're kind of in what I kind of consider kind of the both extremes of video, you know, kind of traditional video, kind of more like the TV show, the New Fly Fisher. But also, you know, you're really kind of pushing into, you know, social media video. And, you know, I was just kind of curious about kind of your thoughts on those two worlds.

**Phil Rowley (45:48):**
Yeah, because we use it, you know, some of it depends on what I'm using it for. So when I'm doing educational content, you know, I tend to look at it, I need to spend as long as it takes to tell that story. So that tends to be more traditional. I've produced a couple of videos, Conquering Chironomid series, I did with Brian Chan because that's a discipline of stillwater fishing. As soon as you come to lakes, you realize you've got to come to grips with that particular food source and how to present it. And there's so many different presentation options. It can be quite intimidating and frustrating. So that was, again, a lot of my stuff is just trying to take the frustration so they don't have to go through what I have to go through. I don't try and shorten that curve for them any way I can. So there's times when more of a traditional video approach would be there. But like the social side of things, you know, the time-lapse photography of fly tying, use those somewhat as a teaser to bring people to other things as well because social media a lot of times you are limited by time length like I think Instagram you can only have 60 seconds so you you've got a you know the medium kind of dictates how you're going to tell your story or pieces of it or you're going to have to tell that story in segments things like that so it's fun and it's challenging.

**Marvin Cash (47:08):**
Yeah, absolutely. And I mean you know we talked a little bit about you know I remember film and you know I was thinking about you having to teach yourself macro photography and it's not like you take a picture and then you look at the monitor on the back of the camera and you delete it and you try it again. Right. Yeah. So the digital thing is a big development, but, you know, what have you kind of seen in your time in terms of, you know, the arc of, you know, how content creation has evolved and kind of what do you think the future is going to look like?

**Phil Rowley (47:32):**
It's going to be, I think, more online based. I think, you know, and I think that's, I could say one good thing about the pandemic is it's, for me personally, I had had a concept in my mind to provide educational access through the Internet years before the technology even existed, before Zoom. Zoom was just a dream of somebody. And you just couldn't figure out to do it. You would have to go and develop that software yourself with that process, which would have been horrifically expensive. But now it's mainstream. And it's just made, you know, it makes the ability to reach the world. I do through my YouTube channel. I try to do at least one live event a month, whether it's a chironomid-focused event or I have a guest on. And they're all, my niche is stillwater fly fishing. So having, you know, guests on or myself on by myself focused on that genre, it's incredible to see, you know, people from New Zealand and Chile and England, and popping on and saying hi, and it's really kind of neat that we can pull each other all together, all for a common love of something.

**Marvin Cash (48:41):**
Yeah, it's amazing. One of the things I did during the early part of COVID is I think Tom Rosenbauer probably needed his own FCC license. He was live streaming so much, and kind of to your point, you watch that and you see the reach, and it's pretty phenomenal.

**Phil Rowley (48:59):**
Yep, and the beauty of it, too, with these live events, they're live at that moment in time, but they record. I use a broadcast software system that allows me to stream simultaneously to my Facebook page and my YouTube channel so people can digest that content in whatever medium they like and then it's recorded there. So it actually sort of grows and builds its own legs just because of the people watching it all the time and people can go back and refer to it rather than, you know, it's almost like how traditional TV was. If your favorite show was on at 8 o'clock on a Tuesday night, and you missed it. That's it. You missed it. There was no way to watch that show again. And then the VCR came along, and now streaming, and just the way everything's evolved, that we are all now able to consume content more on our own terms because of the pressures of life or scheduling or time zones or what have you. So that's how it's evolving. And I think it's, you know, I think from a customer service perspective, we're better able to service our customers and give it to them when they want it, how they want it. Which is, you know, you're not trying to put a square peg in a round hole all the time like sometimes and traditionally you were.

**Marvin Cash (50:11):**
Yeah, it's funny you say that because I was just explaining to my youngest son that when I was growing up, there were three TV channels. And then there were 26 episodes and half the year had reruns. And he looked at me like it was the worst world that I could have ever possibly grown up in.

**Phil Rowley (50:26):**
I've had that same conversation with my son. You know, we had three channels, but then it got to 13, and then the U channel, and then I joke with them, you know, you have to get off the couch to change the channel. It was black and white. You know, the television weighed about 8,000 pounds. It was this giant block. Oh, yeah. My wife and I chuckle sometimes looking back, you know, oh, remember that, remember that. You know, those kind of, the way things were. You know, now you can, you can stream it whenever you want. Netflix, you can binge a whole series, you know, over the Christmas holidays or what have you. You know, it's a great way to consume. So it's, it's, I enjoy it. I like those challenges and how it's always changing. There's no rules, right? Which is kind of fun.

**Marvin Cash (51:13):**
Yeah, it's neat. It's neat too. And I like kind of how it's becoming more democratized, right? In terms of, you know, the, you know, there's still a huge value on kind of curation and good content. And that really matters.

**Phil Rowley (51:26):**
Oh yeah, there's no substitute. Yeah, there's no substitute for you know good content well shot good audio right I think people will tolerate a little bit of you know not the greatest video content at times you know sometimes it's the way the shot turned out but if they can't hear what you're saying or whatever really for I remember that when I was studying up on YouTube and how to you know be a YouTube creator and some of the do's and don'ts audio was super important right hear what they say without wind noise or crackle.

**Marvin Cash (51:56):**
Yeah, and it's amazing. You know, now as opposed to going to, you know, cameras that, you know, no one had, now it's a phone in your pocket. And, you know, if you buy a Macintosh, you know, all the software you need to do, any of that stuff is there.

**Phil Rowley (52:08):**
Well, when I, you know, back to Colin and filming, you know, my love of photography, I remember one of the shoots I was on in Manitoba, because I tended to get all the stillwater shows, which I still do. And I love that, no complaints there. But I remember the cameraman I was working with, they just got a new Panasonic, I don't expect anybody to know it, a big full-size camera, HTV or something it was called. And I'm fascinated, I'm looking at it, what's that button do? I said, well, how much is that worth? Well, the body's worth $75,000, and the lens is $30,000, and I was like, I'm not touching this. And you would show up for a TV show with all these gear and everything's big. Poor cameraman's baggage charges were just excessive. And now you can show up with a backpack and you've got a full-frame camera and a couple of lenses and everything fits together. And you almost worry sometimes when you show up for a shoot that you look like you haven't got enough equipment to do the job when really you've got more than enough equipment to do the job. It's incredible. I've got a drone now that's a joke. It's like an iPhone with propellers on it. It's so small. I'm going to worry I'm going to put it down somewhere and not be able to find it.

**Marvin Cash (53:26):**
You know, and it's funny, too, because you're incredibly busy. I mean, you teach, you guide, you write, you create video content, you know, and you live stream. And, you know, you must have a really disciplined production process, and you must be really, really good at time management. And I was wondering if you had any tips you wanted to share with folks or maybe any insights into your process that other content creators could maybe benefit from.

**Phil Rowley (53:50):**
Yeah. Yeah, I'm, it's from my, I spent 23 years in the auto collision and insurance business. So there's always a lot of time management involved with that. So I'm a real addict to Outlook. I'm on Mac now, so Outlook for Mac, and everything goes on task lists or on appointments. So I don't have to remember all the time. Prior to that, I was always writing. You probably remember you could get those to-do pads you could buy. People had published stationary stores or to-do lists, and I would write everything down on the to-do list, make notes, all that stuff, really disciplined on following that stuff. And I get a lot of satisfaction out of crossing something off a list, sense of accomplishment. Some days are better than others, obviously. But just sticking to a schedule, it's just a lot of it's just mental will. You got to get it done, right? Because once you get behind, it's very hard to get out in front of it again. So I'm a big believer, drives my wife crazy sometimes, but never put off today, tomorrow, what you could do today because you never know what tomorrow's going to bring. So we all get guilty of it sometimes. I'll do that tomorrow. And yet if you'd spent 15, 20 minutes, you would have got it done because tomorrow something went sideways that didn't allow you to do it and now you're behind again. And learning to bite off what you can chew, and that just takes a little bit of experience. And I've got a mentor of mine that helps me on the social and sort of the technology side of it. He's explaining what I do with it. He says, boy, you're a mile wide and a foot deep. I'm just stuck in my head. Because I don't like to let opportunities pass by either, right? I will take them on and sometimes to my detriment, but I'll figure out how to get them done because they've got to be done.

**Marvin Cash (55:43):**
Yeah, it's funny you say that. I have a post-it note here on my iMac that says, say no. Yeah. And, you know, it's interesting. I always remember that Steve Jobs quoted something to the effect of, you know, he's more proud of the things he said no to so that he could say yes to the things that he did do. Yeah. And that's a hard thing to do, very hard thing to do.

**Phil Rowley (56:05):**
And I tend to, you know, a point in my life that I don't have to do everything, right? And I do, like you say, you get to pick and choose what you want to do. You know, some things I do because I, you know, maybe monetarily they're not as lucrative as something else, but I really enjoy doing them. And part of it is, you know, the beauty of what I'm able to do now is I'm doing something I want to do. And when I do the work, I get the benefit of it, which is as opposed to when you worked in a corporate world, the corporation or the company got the benefit of that stuff, right? It was hard to, you know, it was just a, I don't know if I'd be a good employee anymore.

**Marvin Cash (56:39):**
Yeah, I know for a fact I wouldn't be. I'd be fired in about 10 minutes, I think.

**Phil Rowley (56:45):**
When you go to work for yourself, just your decision-making process. My wife is very much involved with the business. She likes to do the editing on my videos. I like to shoot them. You know, I can edit, but she does a lot of the editing on it. I've got a friend who helps me with the fly tying videos as well to keep up with that, that does it. So, you know, I always joke, I'm the eye candy, which is a really not a good analogy for me, but they, you know, you've got your, your help and support from there, but yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's just important. All those things all come together to help to support, but I don't think I could go back in that corporate world because you just, the decision-making process, when there's an issue, my wife and I talk about it, we act on it and we move on. Whereas in the corporate world, we need a committee. Right? You got to do this. Six months later, I remember one organization I worked for, I was actually on the committee as to why we have committees, which was the ultimate.

**Marvin Cash (57:40):**
Yeah. That's the complete Dilbert moment right there.

**Phil Rowley (57:47):**
Oh yeah. Yeah. It's just like, no wonder that we never get anything done. And of course your staff, I was management, so my staff were always, you know, felt abandoned because their boss was never there, he was always off at a meeting somewhere, and I never got anything done. Then you're getting pressure because your performance reviews aren't done or not meeting target or whatever the issues were, right? Stop putting me on this stuff.

**Marvin Cash (58:08):**
Yeah, I don't know. I always tell people I'm self-employed and I really like the boss. He's very reasonable and a very nice guy.

**Phil Rowley (58:16):**
Yeah, he always seems to know what I'm thinking.

**Marvin Cash (58:18):**
Exactly. You know, and as we kind of start to wind down tonight, Phil, I wondered if you could folks know the best place for them to order not only your Orvis Guide to Stillwater Trout Fishing, but you know your other books and your videos. I'm sure they're kind of the traditional places like Amazon, but I suspect there's a way for people to get signed copies and stuff like that, too.

**Phil Rowley (58:40):**
Exactly. Many years ago, Brian Chan and I and myself were both stillwater addicts. We work together. We're kind of like a rock band. We do our own things and then come back together for a union concert a couple, three times a year. So we both had independent, still do independent channels, websites rather, but we both had stores, independent stores. And we just got together and said, why are we, you know, making our customers go to two places to shop? Why don't we consolidate and do one shop? So Brian and I have set up, Phil and Brian, Stillwater Fly Fishing Store. And we cater, it's an online store. We cater to everything stillwater trout fishing basically and stillwater fishing so we have all of our books there videos our custom flies that are tied on our behalf accessories looking to grow and expand that so that's the stillwaterflyfishingstore.com pretty simple email address but that's all the books and videos all the books there you can pick up my new book there and they all come autographed.

**Marvin Cash (59:42):**
Very cool. And I'll drop a link to the shop in the show notes. And also, I always add all of my author's books. I have an author's page on the website. So, yeah, two easy places for folks to find your stuff. And then, you know, we were talking before we started recording, things are a little bit in flux right now with COVID, but I still suspect you have some upcoming events and appearances you want to let folks know about.

**Phil Rowley (01:00:07):**
Yeah, I'm taking them sort of one at a time to see what phase or what variant is going on at any one time. Because it is a challenge traveling between countries with restrictions and testing. You have to get to travel nowadays and being able to get them. But next up I've got the fly fishing show in Denver. And then two weeks after that is the fly fishing show in Pleasanton, California, which is the Bay Area. It's just about 35, 40 minutes south of Oakland. And then the Wasatch Tying Expo in Salt Lake City. And then once April's done, then the season starts, and I start to do destination schools. So I have schools and three schools in British Columbia at different lakes and lodges, and I've got one in eastern Canada at Canuck Nature, which is located just north of Montreal, and so I'll be doing those and probably some filming in there and in October I'm going back down to Argentina again. I do hosted trips to Jurassic Lake which is sort of the World Series, World Cup Super Bowl of stillwater trout fishing because the trout down there are massive. They average 12 to 15 pounds and that's where I've got my personal best on the fly down there so it's a great experience to go there. Oh I guess there's also in April there's the Marlborough Fly Fishing Show because it was moved. It was the first weekend, so they moved that to April, which I think will be a good thing. So I'm looking to see people and be at those again. And of course there's the Fly Tying Symposium later in the fall as well. And it just goes in that cycle over and over again.

**Marvin Cash (01:01:55):**
And so for your destination trips, are all those on your website or are they done kind of through the lodges?

**Phil Rowley (01:02:03):**
Yeah, I have them on my website just in process of updating them because they fill so quickly. Sometimes they don't even get a chance to get up because I have so, you know, I built a lot of repeat customers that just send me emails, put me on the list and they get the first call because they supported me before and they fill up. So, and then I have my new, I have a newsletter as well. So if you go to my website, you can, right on the homepage, you can sign up and join my newsletter and that's a great way to keep in touch. It's an educational-based newsletter, so it does let people know about schools and trips I'm doing, but also there's lots of little educational nuggets there that I put in to help them enjoy their on-the-water experience.

**Marvin Cash (01:02:43):**
Very cool, and I'll drop links to all that stuff in the show notes. Any kind of projects or anything else you want to share with folks?

**Phil Rowley (01:02:50):**
You know, just working on the online learning. I'm trying to put a chironomid course together, tying and fishing chironomids, so I'm just working on that. That'll probably more be known about that probably by the end of this week. So, again, for your viewers, it's probably middle of February. That'll be out. It'll be a six-night course, two and a half hours each night, tying and fishing techniques, all live and on camera. And then I'm doing more, developing more, particularly this spring and summer when I'm not guiding or on the water. I'll be filming a lot of content for additional educational, looking to do some online clinic classes that you can just in an evergreen state that you can just sign up and take them whenever you want. It's your own self-paced way as opposed to just the live methods, the live streaming and the live ways too, which I really enjoy doing. It's fun to interact with people that way.

**Marvin Cash (01:03:48):**
Yeah, absolutely. So the moral of the story is subscribe to the newsletter. And then I would say, too, what's the best way for folks to kind of follow your fishing adventures? You mentioned the newsletter, but I'm sure you're on every flavor of social media we know, right?

**Phil Rowley (01:04:05):**
Yeah, I try to be. I'm on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, dabbling a little bit in TikTok because of the video side of it. But probably I'm most active on YouTube and Instagram. So PhilRowleyFlyFishing is my Facebook page, the same PhilRowleyFlyFishing with Instagram and I believe it's the same for TikTok as well and my YouTube channel. I always say to people the best thing to do is just Google my name put PhilRowleyFlyFishing and everything I will pop up there and make it one-stop shopping for everyone and of course there's my website too flycraftangling.com that will be morphing over soon to philrowleyflyfishing.

**Marvin Cash (01:04:44):**
Well there you go and I will drop all of those in the show notes so if people are too lazy to Google, they can just go to the show notes and click on the link of their choice.

**Phil Rowley (01:04:55):**
That's the best place to go, because you've got lots of other great content for them to listen to as well.

**Marvin Cash (01:04:59):**
Yeah, absolutely. Well, listen, Phil, I super appreciate you taking the time to chat with me this evening. It's been a lot of fun.

**Phil Rowley (01:05:07):**
It has, Marvin. It's been great. It's always fun to talk fly fishing. As I always say, it's usually tough to get me to shut up, not to talk.

**Marvin Cash (01:05:13):**
Oh, no, it's all good, and hopefully our paths will cross in Denver.

**Phil Rowley (01:05:16):**
I hope so. Looking forward to it.

**Marvin Cash (01:05:18):**
Absolutely. Take care.

**Phil Rowley:**
You too.

**Marvin Cash:**
Well folks, I hope you enjoyed that as much as we enjoyed bringing it to you. Again a shout out to this episode sponsor our friends at Nor-vise. You owe it to yourself to head over to www.nor-vise.com and check out all their cool products and their show schedule this season and again folks if you like the podcast please tell a friend and please subscribe and leave us a rating and review in the podcatcher of your choice. Tight lines, everybody.