Salmon and the Salmonoid Family on the Fly — Part 1 of 3 · Part 2: David Hartlin · Part 3: Mark Kurlansky
Tad Murdoch has caught somewhere around 40 of the roughly 50 salmonoid species on earth — trout, salmon, char, and grayling, from a tiny Appalachian blue line to a river in Kurdistan that the Tigris and Euphrates cut through on their way to becoming two of the most storied waterways in human history. Ask him what the hardest part of the list is, though, and he won't talk about casting distance or fly selection. He'll talk about research. Everybody assumes a quest like this is about travel budget and technical skill. It isn't. It's about learning to ask a place the right questions before you ever string up a rod — and that skill transfers to every piece of water you'll ever fish, species list or not.
The Old Way of Thinking
Most anglers treat a new species, or just new water in general, as a logistics problem: find the river, show up with a reasonably matched rod and a fly box, start casting. The assumption underneath that is that effort and gear close the gap — fish hard enough, long enough, with good enough equipment, and the fish show up. It's not a crazy assumption. It works, some of the time, on forgiving water. But Tad's list is full of species that don't reward effort alone — fish that are rare, pressured, or simply hidden well enough that showing up and casting hard just burns a day on the wrong stretch of river.
Finding a fish nobody's shown you isn't a casting problem. It's a research problem — and the anglers who find the rarest fish aren't the best casters in the group. They're the best askers.
How This Plays Out on the Water
You roll up on a gorgeous, textbook-perfect run — the kind of water that looks like it belongs on a calendar. Every instinct says fish it hard. Tad's instinct, after getting burned by this exact water more than once, is the opposite: keep walking upstream. The obviously beautiful water low in a system is usually the most pressured, and for rare or sensitive species, the real population has often been pushed higher, past the water that looks "right" to a newcomer's eye.
You post in a Facebook group: "anyone know where to find [rare fish]?" You'll get answers, sure — mostly from people who've heard something rather than caught something, and mostly vague enough to be useless. The mindset shift is doing the research first, so the question you eventually ask a fly shop, a biologist, or a local isn't "where are they" — it's specific enough that the person answering can tell you've done your homework, and specific enough that their answer is actually worth something.
You ask a local about a tributary and get back "yeah, there's probably some fish up there." Compare that to "yeah, there's fish up there" — same sentence shape, completely different confidence level. The mindset shift treats a hedged answer as information in itself, the way you'd read between the lines on a job reference, rather than taking every answer at face value.
Common Traps
The prettiest run on the river photographs well and fishes poorly, especially once a species has been pushed into less glamorous, harder-to-reach water.
FixTreat obviously beautiful, easy-access water as a place to rule out, not a place to assume. Keep moving — usually upstream — until the water gets uncomfortable enough that most people stop.
A question any five-minute search could answer gets treated by locals and guides as exactly that — lazy — and earns a correspondingly generic response.
FixDo the basic homework first. The research you'd be tempted to skip is exactly what earns you a real answer instead of a brush-off.
Plenty of anglers with a little bit of success sound exactly as sure of themselves online as the ones with decades of it.
FixWeigh a source by what they've actually built — a guide business, a real body of fieldwork — over how certain they sound in a comment thread.
Showing up somewhere only to extract a checkmark reads differently to the people who live there than showing up because you genuinely want to understand their water.
FixGo in for the story, not just the species. People can tell the difference, and they open up accordingly.
Author's Story & Key Insights
I've watched this exact lesson play out with our own members more than once. Todd spent years convinced the brook trout in our part of Georgia lived in the pretty, easy-access pools everybody fishes on opening weekend — and for years, he fished those pools hard and came up with bass-sized expectations and trout-sized results. It wasn't until he started doing what Tad does — treating the obvious water as a place to rule out rather than fish — that he started finding the real population, tucked well above the barriers nobody bothers to climb past. The lesson isn't really about brook trout, or salmonoids, or any one species. It's that the research and the respect for a place come before the cast, every time, whether you're chasing your fiftieth species or your first fish on water you've never seen.
Want to Catch All Salmonoid Species — with Tad Murdoch
Tad Murdoch joins the Fly Fishing Insider Podcast to talk through the research and travel behind his species quest — originally released September 3, 2024.
Before you ever string up a rod on unfamiliar water, spend fifteen minutes doing the research you'd normally skip — a call to the local fly shop, a look at a stocking report, a specific question to someone who's actually fished it. That fifteen minutes will save you more time on the water than any fly in your box.
Part 1 — The Mindset It Takes to Chase Every Salmonoid Species on Earth (Tad Murdoch)
Part 2 — How to Fish the Portland Hitch for Atlantic Salmon (David Hartlin)
Tight lines, everyone!
Tad's next stops are Morocco, Mongolia, and a second run at Mexico's golden trout — proof that a real species quest eventually turns into a travel habit. If his list has you dreaming about your own, that's exactly what a trip through Frontiers Travel is built for.
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