North Washington guide service

Trey Combs

Queets River Buck 

Trey has lived a long and illustrious carreer in fly fishing. He is most well known for authoring ‘Steelhead Fly Fishing’ and ‘Blue Water Fly Fishing’. He has been an advisor for countless equipment manufacturers including but not limited to, Thomas and Thomas, CF Burkheimer and Sarcionne. Aside from his incredible prowess in actually catching fish and then writing about the insight in doing so, Trey is a masterful teacher.

He was part of the ‘cutting edge’ of Steelhead and Blue Water flyfishing. He was making shooting heads before ‘shooting heads’ were cool. He has fished ALL OVER the WORLD with too many places to name.

Aside from all of that, Trey is a ‘nice guy’. We are fortunate to have him on our crew in an advisory/host capacity and most of all,  a good friend.

Tom Pero’s introduction to Trey’s new book offered by Wild River Press,,,

Trey Combs has been synonymous with steelhead fly fishing for more than 50 years. In his first book, The Steelhead Trout (Salmon Trout Steelheader, 1971) he described the migratory habits of ocean steelhead for the first time. His second book, Steelhead Fly Fishing and Flies (Salmon Trout Steelheader, 1976) remained in print for 30 years and was called the steelheader’s bible by a generation of fly fishers. He followed that with Steelhead Fly Fishing (Lyons and Burford, 1991) now the current bible for fly fishers throughout the salmon and steelhead world.

For seven years, Combs hosted trips to Costa Rica’s Bahia Pez Vela Lodge for Pacific sailfish. He ultimately caught five different species of billfish on fly-more than 100 marlin and sailfish in all, fishing offshore in Australia, Papua New Guinea, both coasts of both South America and Africa, and through the Americas from Panama to Mexico. For over a decade he worked as the lone charter-master for a long-range fly-fishing program out of San Diego, chartering Royal Star and Shogun for marlin trips to “the ridge” off Mexico. Then, with film crews, he led exploratory trips to the Revillagigedo Archipelago-the Mexican Galapagos–and to the French-owned Clipperton Atoll, islands never visited by fly fishers. Bluewater Fly Fishing (Lyons and Burford, 1994) was the first book about fly fishing for offshore game fish.

Trey has always returned to his steelhead roots. Today he lives a couple long casts from the Klickitat River in the little village of Klickitat, Washington. Here he engages in his favorite pastimes, tying flies for steelhead and tubes for Atlantic salmon, and giving them a swim in rivers near and far.