5 Underrated Fly Fishing YouTube Channels (All Under 2,000 Subs)

Smaller fly fishing channels can be overlooked on YouTube. This kind of gap is common. A well-made fly fishing video can get buried simply because it comes from a smaller channel, while similar content from an established creator gets far more exposure. That’s a big part of why highlighting underrated fly fishing channels is worth doing in the first place.

Full disclosure, at the top and not buried in a footer: number one on this list is my own channel. I'm putting it first because it's the one I can tell you the most honest thing about, not because I think it out-fishes the four below. These are numbered, not ranked. The order is not a verdict on which is best.

One rule holds the other four together: every one of them is under 2,000 subscribers. Not underrated in the sense of a channel with seventy thousand subs that probably deserves two hundred thousand. Underrated in the sense that a video somebody spent four days making gets seen by thirty-eight people. The counts as of September 2026: 99, 318, 1,200 and 1,620. I checked every handle and every number.

What does "underrated" actually mean on YouTube in 2026?

It means the work is fine and the distribution is broken. Three things are doing the breaking right now.

The first is structural. YouTube has said for a while now that Shorts and long-form are recommended separately, and what that means in practice is that a Short taking off no longer drags your long-form up behind it. A small channel can look like it's growing and be reaching nobody who'll ever sit through a twelve-minute film.

I'm a clean worked example, so use my numbers instead of a hypothetical. My channel has fifteen videos. The best long-form film, "This Tiny Creek Should NOT Hold Trout This Big," sits at 563 views. The next four sit at 138, 98, 98, and 41. My three best Shorts sit at 1,956, 1,735, and 1,638. Average those Shorts against all five films and it's nine or ten to one, on one channel, filmed by one person. The Shorts aren't better. They're eligible for a different pipe.

Number two on this list makes it starker. The Fly Also Rises posted "I Followed This Tiny Oregon Creek Looking for Trout" on September 10 and it did 6,482 views. A week later he posted "My First Time Fishing the Upper Deschutes Took an Unexpected Turn" and it did 12. Same channel, same 99 subscribers, same camera, seven days apart. Whatever changed in those seven days, it was not how good he got at fishing.

The second is the destination problem. A hosted week in New Zealand is a thumbnail. A creek three feet wide an hour from the trailhead is not. Travel content has a built-in hook that walk-and-wade content has to earn every time, and whatever the algorithm does with that gap, it is not in the small channel’s favor.

The third is thumbnail economics, which is where I'll plant my flag. Most fly fishing YouTube isn't teaching content. It's travel content wearing a teaching hat, and you learn nothing you can use Saturday morning. The channels that actually change how you fish tend to have the worst thumbnails, because the useful part (a guy in shin-deep water deciding whether to move up or change flies) does not photograph well.

1. Bushwhack Fly Fishing (10 subscribers), and yes, this one is mine

Bushwhack Fly Fishing has ten subscribers and fifteen videos. Two went up in March 2026 and the rest went up this month, so this is a channel that just started publishing on a schedule rather than an established library.

Home water is Utah creeks and alpine lakes: wild browns, brookies, and native cutthroats. Mostly walk and wade, drone when it's worth packing. But it's not all small water. The next film, out Friday, is the Kenai River, with more big-water and destination trips in the works. Two series: "Fly Fishing Every Water" for the trip films, and "Lunch Break Fly Fishing," which is exactly what it sounds like. New videos Tuesdays and Fridays, trip films on Fridays.

What it offers that bigger channels don't is real-time decision-making. Nobody hands me a spot. You watch me read a seam wrong, back out, and try something else, on the water most people actually have access to, and on water like the Kenai when I can get there. Almost nobody films the first kind honestly.

What it is not: polished. No cinematographer, no budget, and the long-form films have double-digit view counts, which is the honest version of "underrated."

You might also enjoy: White River Shad Kill: A December-to-February Fly Fishing Playbook

2. The Fly Also Rises (99 subscribers) films the actual learning curve

Twenty-four videos, ninety-nine subscribers, and the most unusual origin story on this list. He describes himself as a workaholic who had never seriously considered retirement until he picked up a fly rod. He started on a tenkara rod over one summer, caught a grand total of five trout, and that was enough.

Then he walked into a fly shop for the first time. He tells it the way newcomers actually experience it, intimidating, while making the point that shops want new customers and do go out of their way to make people welcome. He left with an Orvis Clearwater 9-foot 5-weight and a cheap reel he ordered online after being told the reel matters less. It took him days of trying before he caught a fish on it.

That's the part nobody films. Almost all instructional fly fishing video is made by people who've been good for fifteen years and have quietly forgotten what it felt like to not know. The Fly Also Rises hasn't forgotten, because he's still inside it.

The water is mostly Central Oregon small stuff with trips out to the Smokies: "I Almost Overlooked This Tiny Oregon Trout Creek" (299 views), "High Water in the Smokies, Would Euro Nymphing Save the Day?" (488). Start with the July upload where he took his 88-year-old mother trout fishing. 182 views.

3. Bill Fly Fish: 294 videos made mostly for one person

Here is the entire channel description, every word of it: "I use this channel to share my fishing experiences with my dad, who can't wade fish anymore. For others, hope you enjoy."

294 videos. 318 subscribers.

He isn't building an audience. He's sending footage to one person and leaving the door propped open in case anybody else wants in. I don't have anything clever to add to that.

The fishing is Southern Appalachian small water: Great Smoky Mountains National Park backpacking trips, North Carolina small streams, Bartram's bass down in South Carolina. The titles are dated rather than optimized, which is the clearest illustration of why nobody finds the channel. "GSMNP Backpacking Fishing Trip, Day 1 - 8-27-26" sits at 96 views. Just a place and a date, which is how a person labels a memory rather than how a creator labels a product.

The part I didn't expect is the conservation footage. There are uploads of brook trout restoration work and stream sampling across several creeks, material that normally exists only as a PDF on an agency site. The National Park Service describes how the Smokies' native brook trout got squeezed into the highest headwaters. Watching somebody film a sampling run on water he personally fishes beats any handout, and one of those restoration videos has 421 views, easily his biggest.

4. Solo Fly Fishing went back to check on a creek after Hurricane Helene

Chris runs Solo Fly Fishing out of North Carolina: 1,200 subscribers, 104 videos, and a stated obsession with native brook trout at elevation. Pisgah, Nantahala, the North Carolina side of the Smokies. He uses small campgrounds as a rolling base and scopes new water out of his jeep, a workflow more people should steal.

The reason he's here is the Helene series. He went back to a brook trout creek to document whether it survived, and titled the series for the interval himself, 14 months after the storm. It came out in pieces across summer 2026. Part one did 1,983 views, part two 684, the full movie 3,372. Strong numbers for him. Invisible numbers for the subject. Helene rearranged trout water across western North Carolina. No large channel bothered to walk back into one specific creek and report on the recovery. A guy with 1,200 subscribers did.

The other thing he does is genuinely hard: a 32-mile, four-night backcountry run through the Smokies and the Nantahala wilderness, filmed alone. Hauling camera gear and a pack and a rod that far in, then editing it, is enormous work for the 326 views part two picked up.

You might also enjoy: Egg Patterns for the Brown Trout Spawn: Fish Behind the Redds, Not On Them

5. Scotland, bug surveys and euro rigs: Diary of a Trout Fisherman

Diary of a Trout Fisherman is the only channel here outside the United States. 1,620 subscribers, 113 videos, filmed on Scottish rivers and Highland burns for wild brown trout, grayling and salmon.

His framing is what got me to subscribe. He documents places, insects, wildlife and moments, then mixes in the practical work: euro nymphing and dry fly tactics, gear reviews, rod building, the occasional bug survey. The stated goal is to understand the river a little better each visit.

A fair sample: "When Dry Fly Fails: My Euro Rig Modification on a Tiny Scottish River" (2,648 views), "How I Read Water When Euro Nymphing" (1,062), and a size 16 nymph into a salmon on the River Don, landed on a trout rod (3,968).

One thing American readers should file correctly: he names rivers openly. The Don, the Clyde, the Tummel. That's normal in Scotland, where access runs through permits and beats rather than secrecy, and naming a river there doesn't hand anybody a pool. Don't read it as spot-burning. Different system.

Small Scottish rivers fish a lot like American small water anyway. Tight, brushy, low by August, fish that vanish off a bad first cast.

Small does not mean good

A list like this can slide into pretending obscurity is a credential, so let me head that off. These are little channels and it shows. Wind gets into the audio. Clips run past where an editor would have cut. One of them titles videos with dates.

A low subscriber count is not a virtue, and plenty of 200-subscriber channels sit at 200 subscribers for entirely good reasons. What earns these four a spot is that the fishing is real and the honesty is total. Obscurity is the problem I'm describing, not the qualification. If you want polish, the big channels are right there and they're good at what they do.

Should you learn from Shorts or from long-form videos?

Long-form, almost every time, if learning is the goal. A Short shows you the result. The take, the net shot, the fish held up to the lens. Long-form is where the decision lives, and the decision is the only part you can't get from a photo.

The useful footage is the boring footage: why the angler moved upstream instead of fishing the tail out, why he swapped a size 16 for a size 18 after two refusals. Shorts structurally cannot carry that.

Use Shorts the way you'd use a fishing magazine cover. They're how you find a channel, not how you learn from one.

The other half of learning from video is closing the loop on your own water. Watching someone fish a blue line for brookies is worth more if you log what happened when you tried it, so three months later you can tell whether the flat light theory held up or you got lucky twice. I keep mine in Bushwhack for that reason.

How I find underrated fly fishing YouTube channels worth subscribing to

Three filters, and they've held up better than subscriber count ever has:

• Do they show the failures? A channel that has never posted a bad day is editing out the only part that teaches anything.
• Could I fish what they fish? A hosted trip to a lodge is entertainment. A creek and a pair of boots is instruction.
• Do they name spots? If they do, I'm out, with the Scottish caveat above. Creators who burn water in the US are borrowing against a resource that isn't theirs, and the fishery pays within a season.

None of those correlate with production value, which is why the roundups keep missing them.

If you act on one thing here, make it this: go subscribe to The Fly Also Rises and Bill Fly Fish. They need it most, and they're doing the two things the rest of fly fishing YouTube has quietly stopped doing, showing the learning honestly and filming for love instead of reach. Ninety-nine subscribers and three hundred eighteen. You can move both numbers in about eight seconds.