Of all the anglers filling BC's fly-fishing airwaves, Don Freschi is the one who fishes closest to home. Based in Trail, at the confluence of the Kootenay and Columbia, he has hosted Sport Fishing on the Fly for more than twenty-six years — long enough to have covered most of the province's water, but with a catalogue whose centre of gravity sits squarely on the Kootenay and Columbia-basin freestones this journal calls home.
Reading big water
Freschi's on-screen specialty is the exploratory river game: the logistics of large, fast flows, boat positioning on heavy current, indicator setups for moving water, and matching the hatch as he goes. He is, above all, a Columbia River specialist — but the same craft travels north to the province's biggest glacial rivers.
▶ Fly Fishing the Skeena River for Salmon — Sport Fishing on the Fly
From big rivers to interior lakes
The show's range is the point. One week it is salmon in a glacial torrent; the next it is a technical interior hatch — reading and matching an intense mayfly emergence and adjusting the presentation from surface to sub-surface as the fish key on different stages.
▶ Dragon Lake Mayflies — Sport Fishing on the Fly
Known for
Sources & further reading: sfotf.ca and the Kootenay Mountain Culture Columbia-River profile. Videos © their respective creators, embedded from YouTube.
