Reflections by Morgan Mclean on the 2025 World Fly Fishing Championships: Vyšši Brod Section of the Vltava
When asked to write a blog on one of my venues from the World Fly Fishing Championships, my first reaction was to talk about one of the sessions I placed well in. But competitive fly fishing is a journey of learning, so, I picked my 4th session, which was on an amazing stretch of the Vltava River at the Vyssi Brod Section. It was three hours of roller coaster emotions, and somewhere in there I came very close to breaking a couple of rods over my knee.
*2025 Team Canada
The session started with light rain and overcast conditions. It was hard to see much, except what looked like the obvious good water to cover. Walking the beat, I quickly saw it had every type of water we had trained for, from streamer to whitefish (chub, dace, roach and barbel) water. My first reaction was, this is a good beat, followed by damn, I’ve got a lot of rods to set up. My biggest worry was that there were too many options. Even though the beat looked good, there was the potential to waste time, which you can’t get away with at Worlds.
*One of my Czech controllers, all my controllers were fantastic.
Once I came up with a plan, I decided to set up five rods.
1) Arcay Otter11ft 2/3 dry/dropper
2) Arcay Otter 11ft 2/3 single nymph (or double but started with a single)
3) Arcay Otter 11 ft ¾ double nymph
4) Arcay Otter ¾ dry fly rod with a single dry
5) Arcay Otter 10 ft 6/7 for streamer fishing
I would have liked to set up more but there was a lot of brush and distance in the beat so more would have been too difficult to manage.
The research we had done had prepared me to expect good numbers of brown and rainbow trout, and few whitefish. Along the far bank of the middle section of my beat looked incredible for chub water. All fish species counted, so long as they were of size.
*Chub from the Vltava River
I had high hopes that the top section of the beat would produce on the streamer. Throughout every session, my first plan of attack was to get fish on streamers, for the simple reason that if the fish are on streamers, they are much faster to get to the net. After 10 minutes (which was 5 minutes too long, just willing it to happen), nothing. I changed rods in the middle of the river and started nymphing, nothing. SHIT, I had really counted on scoring a few fish by now.
I got to what I thought of as the start of the whitefish water. At this point, with no fish yet, I was getting concerned. I switched to a dry fly rod and instantly had a rise. A small chub, too small to count, then three more. All too small, all chub. I changed to a Rockerka and started to work some longer casts along the bank, which looked like perfect chub water. First drift I hit a chub that was quite large. Finally, at about an hour and a half in, having at this point only caught a bunch of small fish, this was my first fish that counted. I thought I might be on to something, but nothing else I caught was big enough to count.
At this point I am tripping out. One of the worst feelings in this game is the feeling of letting your teammates down. It’s terrible. It can make you second guess every decision you make, turning your head to mush. It’s hard to fish anything well and efficiently when you lose your mental focus. I knew I had to change what was happening quickly.
I narrowed my focus to two rods, my dry fly rod and my 11ft ¾ weight Otter. As I got back into position the rain stopped and everything lightened just a little. I noticed some deeper depressions in what I thought were weird areas. As I moved down, I found what I was looking for. There was a trough in the faster water that I could not see before.
I switched flies to match the water and on the first drift I lost a brown at the net. With many choice words screaming in my head, I put another drift through. Right away another brown. With a sigh of relief, I scored the fish and went right back. Another brown right away. While I was super happy to find what was working, it was a bit of a wade to get back to my controller and it had taken me too long to figure out. Although I managed to score more fish, I simply ran out of time.
*Small brown from the Vltava
By the end of the session, I could have very easily ended up in the bottom of the pack and was relieved to land in the middle. There is no doubt that drawing this beat gave me an opportunity to place high in this session, and I did not capitalize fully. This was a session that will haunt me for awhile, but at the end of the day it’s all about learning. A year ago, I do not think I could have regained my focus and fished the last part of the session well.
*Team Canada Captain, Ian Troup, with our Czech guide Vojta
It was an honor to represent my country in a sport that I love with teammates that have offered me unlimited support and opportunity for development. I would like to give a big thank you to Smart Angling for all they do to support Canadian growth in competitive fly fishing.
Morgan McLean – Rising Waters
