FFI Gulf Coast Council

New Orleans Fly Fishing Expo
Saturday, April 6, 2019
8:00am to 4:00pm
The Deutsches Haus, 1700 Moss St, New Orleans, LA
FREE admission!

The New Orleans Fly Fishers Club, a charter FFI club, is hosting the biggest fly fishing event of the year on the Gulf Coast.  The inaugural New Orleans Fly Fishing Expo will be held at the new Deutsches Haus, on the banks of Bayou St. John near New Orleans City Park.  It’ll have fly casting seminars, demonstrations, and instruction, fly fishing seminars, fly tying demonstrations and instruction, an Iron Fly Tyer competition, an Outdoors Writers Roundtable, outdoor equipment displays, vendors, exhibitors, and raffles.

Headling this event will be Jon Cave. Cave is a nationally-renown fly fishing writer, author, instructor and guide, who operates the Performance Fly Fishing School. Jon will be holding his semi-private casting class the day before the Expo. Everyone is invited to sign up for this rare opportunity, slots are limited.

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The Kisatchie Fly Fishers, an FFI-GCC affiliate club based in Alexandria, LA, will hold their annual “Fly Fishing 101” workshop on Saturday, March 30th at the Booker-Fowler fish hatchery in Forest Hill. Time is 9:00am to 12:30pm.

The workshop is free, but pre-registration is required. An online registration form is available on the club’s website at www.kisatchiefly.org. Click on the “Fly Fishing 101” page, then on the “Registration Form”.

This is the fourth year for the workshop, held each Spring. Attendance at each one has exceeded the previous year. As of this writing, 21 have registered. The workshop maximum is 30.

The last two years, students have been treated to a private tour of the hatchery prior to the workshop. But now Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, which operates the facility, has announced a public touring all day, starting at 8:00am and running until 2:00pm.

Hatchery visitors who wish to learn about fly fishing are encouraged to sign up for the workshop while there is still room. The fly group will be on one of the early tours (8:00am or 8:30am) prior to the workshop start.

Booker-Fowler is the department’s primary fish production facility. This facility produces freshwater sportfish fingerlings to assist LDWF Inland Fisheries managers with achieving statewide management objectives. Since its first year of fish production in the spring of 1997, the hatchery program has released over 125 million fish into public water bodies throughout Louisiana.

Saturday, March 2nd is the 27th annual “Red Stick Day” fly fishing festival, which this year returns to the LDWF Waddill Outdoors Education Center on 4141 North Flannery Road in Baton Rouge. Time is 8:30am to 3:30pm. Admission is free.

Hosted by the Red Stick Fly Fishers of Baton Rouge, an FFI-GCC affiliate club, Red Stick Day is the largest and longest-running event of its kind in Louisiana. Historically, this event has featured some of the biggest names in fly fishing such as Gary Borger, Jason Borger, Ed Jaworoski, Chrystal Murray, Nick Curcione and others. In recent years, it’s featured several rising experts in our sport, such as Zach Matthews, Bill Laminack, Ed Lash and Ben Roussel.

Red Stick Day also routinely features some of the top fly tiers in the region – even the country – demonstrating their skills at the vise.

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