By Will Grunewald
Photos by Mat Trogner
From our May 2025 issue
Fly-fishing and Maine, together, bring a number of things to mind straightaway: the quicksilver flash of brook trout, trailblazing guide “Fly Rod” Crosby, Carrie Stevens’s iconic Gray Ghost fly, casting from a sturdy Rangeley-style rowboat, the quietude of upland rivers and streams. Ever since the middle of the 19th century, when word of Maine’s big and abundant brookies reached the East Coast’s big cities, fly-fishing has been intrinsic to the state’s sporting culture. All of this, though, is centered around the fresh water that runs and pools throughout the Maine woods. Out on the coast, meanwhile, a related but less remarked-upon pursuit has taken root too, saltwater fly-fishing.
Saltwater is Ben Whalley’s specialty. From May through October, Whalley, who lives in Cumberland, runs fly-fishing charters in Casco Bay, chasing striped bass from his 17-foot poling skiff. The boat’s flat hull allows him to navigate into shallow estuaries and along rocky shorelines, where he’s surprised anytime he sees another guide out on the water. “Saltwater fly-fishing, a lot of it began in the Northeast, but tropical climates have definitely become the destination fisheries,” he says. “Or you can go to Cape Cod and do similar stuff, but you’re choked out with other boats. Maine is really the last place on the Eastern Seaboard that isn’t so crammed. Around here, there’s the serenity and the ability to connect with nature, and it can almost feel tropical in shallow green and blue waters, except that you also see lighthouses and evergreens. Really, the fish are just a bonus.”
In the offseason, Whalley sets aside guiding and starts tying, selling his flies online. Among fellow fishermen and tiers, he’s regarded as a master craftsman, and his flies have seen action all over the world. Some of the bigger ones go for $100 a pop, and they have a reputation for being durable and effective. They’re also beautiful — Whalley and his dad, John, a realist painter and graphite artist on the midcoast, have collaborated on mounting flies next to paintings of the fish that inspired their design.
Every tier, even working from the same design, will produce something a little different. “There are a handful of phenomenal tiers whose flies you could hand me and I could tell you exactly who made it,” Whalley says. “Or I could show you exactly how I tie something, down to the littlest nuance, but there’s an art to it, like with painting, and an individual style comes through.”
During hunting season, Whalley buys deer tails and processes them in his basement, using the hairs in his flies. Binding fine feathers and wispy strands of deer-tail hair with thread in order to make a fly requires serious dexterity. Whalley likes to employ (and experiment with) various adhesives, as evidenced by the array of bottles on his tying station.
Whalley’s earliest memory is from when he was three years old. He lived in Florida at the time, and he got a Mickey Mouse fishing rod for Christmas. That day, he went out and reeled in a barracuda. A few years later, on a trip to New Hampshire, he got a taste of casting for trout. Then, a friend of his dad’s gifted him a fly-tying kit. He spent much of his subsequent childhood in Brazil, where he continued to fish and to tinker with flies, and he eventually wound up in Maine, where his grandparents had retired and where he could delve deeper into fly-fishing.
In 2011, Whalley graduated from the University of Maine with a degree in biochemistry, which led to a job at IDEXX, the Westbrook-based veterinary-technology company. Several years later, he started leading fishing trips part-time. He also started taking custom orders for flies, but he often got stuck with a monthslong backlog. A couple of friends suggested that, instead of trying to keep up with custom orders, he test out an alternate model: dropping a collection of flies every month or so, promoting them on social media and selling them through his website. The idea — creating “mini Black Fridays,” as Whalley puts it — worked. The first drop sold out in under five minutes, and he’s been doing it ever since, about 75 to 100 flies at time. It proved successful enough that he quit his job at IDEXX and went full-time into fly-fishing, guiding in the summer and tying from fall through spring. “I never really envisioned being in the corporate world,” he says, “and I felt like I was meant to be doing something else. It’s amazing how when you’re doing what you love, suddenly it’s a little more effortless.”
Around the same time, a fisherman from Connecticut reached out and wanted to meet Whalley on a trip through Maine. Afterward, the fisherman headed to New Jersey to visit Bob Popovich, and he showed Popovich one of Whalley’s flies. Popovich, a renowned tier who had been coming up with innovative designs since the 1970s, contacted Whalley out of the blue and, soon enough, had become a mentor to him. “I always knew of him as this legend,” Whalley says, “but I never imagined somebody like that would want to take some random person under their wing.”
Popovich inspired Whalley both to immerse himself in saltwater fly-fishing’s history and to help spread its gospel. Today, the tying room in Whalley’s house (formerly a dining room) is — in addition to the countless spools of thread, bottles of adhesives, and feathers and deer tails required by his craft — piled with books and magazines about fishing. Popovich died last year, at 75, and his own mentor, “Lefty” Kreh, had died six years earlier, at 93. In their absence, Whalley worries about saltwater fly-fishing losing its sense of history and its direction. “You have old-timers who have put blood, sweat, and tears into developing this sport,” he says, “and all they want now is for someone to carry that torch.”
To that end, this spring, Whalley and some other fly-fishermen rebooted a tie festival in Florida that Kreh used to organize every year. The aim was to let fishermen share their expertise, promote environmental stewardship to protect the fisheries, and, Whalley says, “get the next generation and the current legends all in one place.”
The overarching goal is to sustain a community around saltwater fly-fishing. “To a certain extent, I feel like the internet is killing mentorship, because you can just access everything on YouTube,” Whalley says. “Fly-fishing shows all around the country, I swear, so many of the tiers there now got started at home during the pandemic and don’t even fish. They’re like model-train builders. The flies look pretty, but the whole purpose is to make something functional and durable for catching fish. It took me years of fishing to figure out the small things that make a fly work.”
From left: a Bendback fly, used to imitate smaller bait like sand eels and silversides; the right colors can help attract fish; a mackerel imitation for targeting striped bass.
Whalley’s own flies combine, to varying degrees, traditional elements and innovation. “Bob’s thing was that he wanted people to take what he had provided and keep pushing it, keep figuring it out. For him, fly tying was problem solving.”
Whalley is almost always thinking about fly designs. “The last couple of years, I’ve been digging really deep into trying to understand what the fish perceives,” he says. “There’s vision, of course, but stripers and a lot of other fish can also pick up on vibration in the water.” He’s interested in how heavier, denser lures used with spinning rods, which often don’t look much like something a fish would want to eat, push through the water and produce pressure waves. Flies have to be lighter, for casting, but he’s testing out ways to approximate the effect.
“For the business,” he says, “I could definitely tie way more flies if I wanted to just focus on that, but I need the experimental side of things. I mean, I have boxes of flies on my boat that are proven to work really well. For some reason, though, I’ll still get out of bed at 2:30 in the morning to tie something I just thought of and want to test out later. If it doesn’t quite ride how I want or doesn’t get the right reaction, I’ll go home and try something else, and that’s what I love about this.”
