Central casting: Local guide takes people fishing in Spokane’s Riverfront Park

It was about 5:30 p.m. on a Friday in Riverfront Park. A food truck served diners on the orange bridge over the Spokane River. People cruised by on bikes and scooters. The cowboy boots and denim crowd had started filling up the Spokane Pavilion for a country concert.

At the Great Northern Clock Tower, Marc Fryt stood in front of about a dozen people holding fishing rods.

“Raise your hand if you’ve never fished in the park before,” Fryt said.

All but a couple of hands went up. Fryt ran through the rules – no bait, no treble hooks, no barbed hooks, no getting in the water – and listed off the native species they might hook – redband trout, largescale sucker, northern pikeminnow.

He warned them to watch their backcasts and to have a plan for how they’d land a fish if they hooked it.

Then it was time to fish.

The anglers who had been here before headed for the steps near the Spokane Convention Center. Others started with the orange walking bridge. A few went right to the fence under the Washington Street bridge.

The Friday evening park traffic continued. There were strange looks. Occasionally, someone asked the natural question: Catching anything?

Fryt, a fly fishing guide and the owner of Fly Fish Spokane, has been trying to make anglers a more regular sight in Riverfront Park, where there are fish to be caught on a relatively placid section of the Spokane amid the summertime crowds.

It’s a much different environment from the places the 36-year-old fished when he first picked up a fly rod, back when he was in the U.S. Army and stationed at Fort Lewis near Tacoma. He fished the Cascades and the Olympics for small trout, finding that exploring the creeks and rivers in the mountains was a good way to decompress.

When he moved with his wife to Ohio, where she attended medical school, trout fishing opportunities dried up and he got more interested in the fly-fishing opportunities available in urban environments. Not far from their Columbus apartment, for example, he found a spectacular carp fishery.

He became a fishing guide after the couple moved to Spokane in 2021, and now was getting paid to show people how to catch fish on a river in Washington’s second-largest city.

Over time, an idea came to him: What if he wrote a book about urban fly-fishing?

Called “The Guide to Urban Fly-Fishing,” it’s due out in April. Researching it prompted Fryt to fish in places like Denver, Minneapolis and New York City. He found vibrant angling communities there and some pretty good fishing in places anglers might not expect.

After a trip to Los Angeles’ MacArthur Park, where he fished for carp, Fryt realized that although he’d been guiding the Spokane River downstream of the falls, he’d never searched for fish in Riverfront Park. When he got back, he went to the park and started looking around.

“I came here and walked around the park and saw huge redband trout,” Fryt said.

He started coming back with a fly rod soon after. He caught some of those nice redbands. One day, his wife caught a 19-inch cutthroat off the orange walking bridge. He figured out how to catch largescale suckers.

Now he runs guided trips and private casting lessons in the park. Several times this summer, he’s led free fishing events there with the same simple premise – show up with whatever gear you have and Fryt will fish with you. On social media, he invites people to come “hang out and fish.”

The crowd last Friday had a mostly even mix of fly and spin rods, and anglers of all ages. Elijah Doty, an 11-year-old angler with a spin rod, started under the Washington Street Bridge, where he saw a tantalizingly large fish occasionally show itself. He’d come to the event with his mother, Amy Harwood, who heard about it through Facebook.

“I was like, ‘My kid loves fishing,’ ” she said. “It’s a good outlet for him.”

Off to the east, Phil Sandifur and Brian Durhein worked the water near the Spokane Convention Center.

Sandifur started learning to fly fish this summer. He went to a casting clinic, picked up a 7-weight rod on Facebook Marketplace and caught a sunfish in a pond Fryt recommended. He’s been to more than one of Fryt’s events, and planned to hit another one the next morning in People’s Park.

In other words, he’s hooked.

“It’s like low stakes, high fun,” he said.

Sandifur and his friend Durhein, who has been fly fishing for years, dropped flies into the water from the walking bridge and then walked down the steps behind the convention center. Largescale suckers are known to prowl the flats there, and they saw a few. None would bother with their flies, though, so they kept moving west.

They reached the orange walking bridge, a spot that the growing number of park fishing acicianados know as a relatively consistent spot to find redbands. Durhein tied on a third fly. It was pink, and he eventually convinced a trout to eat it, though he didn’t land the fish.

That was one of two confirmed bites that night. Fishing was tough. Even Fryt wasn’t hooking anything. He said the weather seemed to turn the suckers off for sure, and something had made the redband trout unwilling to play.

As the sun started to set, Fryt found his way back to the steps in front of the convention center, where Noah Cecil was still casting.

Cecil recently moved to Spokane from Texas and is new to fly fishing. He’s been going to Silver Bow Fly Shop and learning all he can. He’s still looking for his first fish.

It wasn’t happening Friday night.

Still, he said the evening was “the most fun I’ve ever had fishing.”