The Life of Ryan

UNTIL JANUARY 4, I’d never even heard the term “float-n-fly.” It sounded like a kid’s ride at the fairground, or the street name for some illicit new drug. But I Googled it that day—the same day Oroville, California-based flyfishing guide Ryan Williams, and his partner, Logan McDaniel, won the Shasta Lake Wild West Bass Trail tournament. The first thing that popped up was a 2008 video produced by Kentucky Afield, a fishing and hunting show. And the first words out of the host’s mouth were these: “Everybody in the world is talking about the float-n-fly.” Apparently, it was time I reached out to Williams.

“I learned from a guy who did it with a spin rod, a friend I took out steelheading about ten years ago,” he told me. “He saw that we were using bobbers, and he says, ‘Dude… I gotta tell you about something. You would slay bass using this thing called float-n-fly.’ I was thinking he’d tell me that they use it to go way down deep, but then he