A working field guide to fly-fishing Canada

Canada Fly Guide is an angler's working knowledge of fly-fishing Canada, charted one region at a time. It begins with the deepest coverage anywhere of British Columbia's Kootenay & Columbia Basin — 1,700+ rivers, creeks, and lakes, each with its own page — and new regions join the journal as we chart them.

The lens is practical: where to fish, what's there, what to throw, how to fish it, and how to get in. Waters, fish, flies, and forage are cross-linked so a single fact — a hatch, a closure, a put-in — connects the pages that share it. It reads like a magazine and works like a field guide.

How this journal is made

Every waterway page is grounded in the province's own open data, checked against published guide and regulatory sources, and cited where a claim came from somewhere specific. The core datasets:

• BC Fisheries Information Summary System (FISS) — the fish-observation records behind every water's species list and record counts.
• BC Freshwater Atlas (FWA) — the stream network that defines the drainage tree, watershed groups, and every waterway's lineage.
• BC Freshwater Fishing Regulations Synopsis — Region 4 (Kootenay) rules, classified-waters requirements, and closures referenced on water and regulation pages.
• Freshwater Fisheries Society of BC — stocking records powering the per-water stocking history charts.
• Hydrometric gauges from the Water Survey of Canada, land parcels and access from ParcelMap BC, and base cartography from OpenStreetMap.

Where the record is thin, the page says so — a water with no verified fish observations is presented as unverified, not padded out. Facts carry their measurements (widths, gradients, discharge, stream order) with plain-language context, and every page shows the date it was last updated.