Brett Bishop - Competitor, 2008 World Fly Fishing Championships

Anyone who has ever fished with Bret Bishop will tell you he has a gift for catching fish and for teaching people how to catch fish. Currently a high school English teacher in Boise, Idaho with a Masters in Curriculum and Instruction, he credits his fly fishing experiences with igniting his passion for teaching. “I started young” he said, “Each summer my family would pack up the V.W. Van and become fishing gypsies.” The times he spent traveling from river to river around the West shaped him as an angler and it seemed natural to blend his love of angling with teaching. After graduating from Colorado College, he started fly fish guiding in Taos, New Mexico on the Rio Grande and its tributaries with The Solitary Angler. He has also guided in Wyoming on the Green River below Fontenelle Reservoir and the Ham’s Fork. He currently guides during the summer months were he grew up in Sun Valley, Idaho on the Big Wood, Silver Creek and the Big Lost for Silver Creek Outfitters. If you can not find him on the rivers of Idaho, he might be fishing some remote rivers in Alaska or stalking tarpon in Florida.

Bret sees competitive angling as another facet of a great sport. For him it is a venue to lay all ones preparation, experience, knowledge, and skill on the line. “I get the same thrill out of competition angling,” Bret says, “as I do casting to tarpon, stalking wild trout, or teaching a client to set the hook. I love to fish; everything I do, I do with passion.” Furthermore, he believes as a guide and member of Fly Fishing Team USA that he is an ambassador of the sport: “What I teach and what I do exemplifies a respect for the environment, the trout, and the other anglers.”

Bret was the individual gold medal winner, and team silver medalist, in the first National Championships held in Boulder Colorado in 2006. He was a member of the ’06 World Fly Fishing team in Portugal where the team finished in the top ten. At the Cody, Wyoming ’07 Western Regional trials he was the top finisher out of a field of forty anglers. At the ’08 National Fly Fishing Championships, again in Boulder, he finished a respectable 14th individually and was part of the gold medal team. He is currently preparing for the ‘08 World Championships in New Zealand.