If you spend enough time around beginners (like we do) on a trout stream, you’ll hear the same embarrassed confession delivered in a half-whisper: “I think I just caught… a branch.” Soon after comes the second most common: “Is it normal to snag rocks this much?” And the answer—perhaps the most honest truth in all of fly fishing—is a resounding yes.
Catching branches, rocks, logs, roots, weeds, moss, and even your own jacket is not only normal, it’s practically a rite of passage. If you aren’t snagging things, you’re probably not actually learning to fly fish—you’re just play-casting in a parking lot.
Let’s take a walk through why this happens, what it means, and why it might be the single best indicator that you’re on the right track.
The River Is a Classroom, and the Curriculum Includes Chaos
In conventional fishing, a lure sinks, a bobber floats, and gravity pretty much plays by the rules. Fly fishing, though, laughs at predictability. Your line is light, your fly is lighter, and the wind has opinions you didn’t ask for. The current adds its own commentary, often tugging your fly into places you didn’t intend—like directly under that log you definitely didn’t notice 30 seconds ago.
The first shock to beginners is realizing how alive fly line feels. You flick it one way and it snakes the other. You make a perfect cast, only for a hidden eddy to grab your fly and sweep it into the nearest underwater rock like it had a personal vendetta. This isn’t incompetence. This is just fly fishing doing fly-fishing things.
Branches Are Not Your Enemy—they’re Evidence You Chose the Right Water
Want to know a secret most beginners don’t understand? If you’re catching branches, you’re casting into fishy water. Trout rarely sit in open, glassy water waiting to be politely presented with a fly. They hide under overhanging branches, behind submerged logs, next to root balls, tight to cutbanks, deep in the structure where predators can’t see them. The places you should be fishing are, by definition, the places where you’re most likely to snag something.
Professional guides know this intimately. Ask them how many flies they lose in a season. Some will say dozens. Others, hundreds. One famously answered, “I don’t count flies. I count empty fly boxes.” And these are the people getting paid to be good at this.
So if you’ve lost a fly in a low-hanging branch, congratulate yourself: you put the fly exactly where a trout would be—if only the branch wasn’t there first.
Rocks Happen Because You’re Learning Depth and Drift
Th
e moment you start nymphing—or honestly, anytime you fish subsurface—you’re going to meet rocks. A lot of rocks. More rocks than you ever realized existed. That's because “if you’re not occasionally ticking bottom, you’re not fishing deep enough.”
Beginners often err on the side of staying too high in the water column. But trout feed near the bottom, and the only way to get down there is to flirt with the riverbed. That means you’re going to snag bowling-ball-sized rocks, fist-sized rocks and rocks that look suspiciously like they were placed there just to ruin your drift. Just remember that every time you hook one, you’re actually learning something incredibly important - you’re learning what true depth feels like.
No YouTube video can teach you that. No book can describe it. Only the tug of a rock—and the resigned sigh that follows—builds that intuition.
Every Snag Teaches You Something—Even If It Feels Like Failure
Catc
hing a branch teaches you about your backcast corridor. Catching the grass behind you teaches you about your stroke height. Catching the log teaches you where trout actually hold. Catching submerged brush teaches you how your line behaves in current. Catching your waders teaches you to slow down.
The river is always giving feedback. Sometimes that feedback comes in the form of a fat rainbow trout. But most days, especially early on, the river teaches through friction… and friction tends to look like branches. Think of each snag as part of the curriculum: If you’re snagging trees behind you, your rod tip may be dropping too low. If your fly is piling up, you may be rushing the forward stroke. If your fly is ending up just barely in the branches, your accuracy is improving—you’re just overshooting your target by a couple of feet. That’s fixable. If you’re snagging structure underwater, you’re learning how to control your drift and manage micro-currents.
The best anglers didn’t avoid these errors—they made them thousands of times until the river taught them otherwise.
There’s Also a Beautiful Universal Truth Here: You’re Trying
It t
akes guts to step into fly fishing. It’s humbling. The cast isn’t intuitive. The fly is too light. The line doesn’t behave. The environment is alive around you and the fish are smarter than they look.
So w
hen you catch a leaf, a stick, or a rock, you are participating fully. You are experimenting. You are risking failure in the pursuit of becoming a better angler. It’s actually a sign of commitment.
Think of the people who never improve in this sport—they stick to wide-open gravel bars casting 25 feet into featureless water. They cast around structure because they’re afraid to lose a fly. And for that reason, they never catch many fish.
A Final Thought
If y
ou feel alone in your frustration, you’re not. Every angler you admire has wrapped a fly around a tree so tightly it required a pocketknife, buried a hook in wet moss, hooked themselves in the sleeve (or body parts we shouldn't talk about on this G-rated blog), snagged a sunken log so hopelessly they thought they’d hooked a monster.
Someone onece told me -- “If you’re not losing flies, you’re sightseeing.”
So... you
are not behind. You are not doing it wrong. You are not unlucky. You are learning the language of the fly fishing—and all those branches and rocks were simply the river’s way of teaching you how to get here.