Press Release

A European Approach To Fishing Out West

Article Date: January 2007

Talk about fascinating wrinkles in international fishing travel, ponder this: An Italian fly fisherman moves to America and is so successful with his business helping Europeans fish North America that he decides to stand the business on its head, offering the same kind of service for Americans who want to fish in Europe, principally Italy. And wait. There’s more. This same Italian Claudio Tagini now believes he’s spotted a business opportunity providing European-type travel services to Americans interested in fishing the American West.

Let’s start at the beginning. Claudio Tagini is an Italian fly fishing junkie who moved to the US way back in 1978 and began to fish intensively across North America, particularly the American West, with an eye toward offering complete-itinerary-type fishing travel services for Europeans. To that end, he formed a company called American Western Adventures.

Tagini has copied us on one of his Western fishing itinerary packages, and it is indeed something to behold. The one we perused, for a party of three Italian anglers, comes in a hard-cover notebook with a color photograph on the cover and page after page of detailed instructions on how to go from point to point, what flies to use, who to call. Nearly all the pages have a map of some sort on them, or one or more color photographs. No American agent we know of is producing anything like this.

The trip began with the Italian anglers arriving in Idaho Falls, renting a Ford Explorer and heading toward West Yellowstone where they stayed in a cabin with a kitchen on the Madison River. From there, they went into the park, visiting the geyser area and on into Mammoth Hot Springs/Gardiner where they fished the northeast section of the park before going on to Jackson and back to Idaho Falls. One of the highlights of the trip was a horseback/day-fishing trip up Slough Creek.....Click Here to Continue Reading