BrattleFly is a fly fishing shop and guide service rooted in Brattleboro, Vermont — a town that sits at the confluence of two fisheries most anglers drive past on their way somewhere else.

Operating out of 45 Linden Street in downtown Brattleboro, and assisted by the expertise of Brew Moscarello and the team at Trico Unlimited — with over 75 years of combined fly fishing and guiding experience — BrattleFly offers instruction, gear, and guided trips across southern Vermont and the Connecticut River corridor. Brew, who founded Trico Unlimited and has fished and guided the Battenkill for over 40 years, is an Orvis Endorsed Guide and was nominated for Orvis Fly Fishing Guide of the Year in 2024.

The shop is built around a conviction that fly fishing belongs to more than one species. The Connecticut and West Rivers through Brattleboro hold strong populations of smallmouth bass, northern pike, and others — fish that reward the same disciplined reading of water and presentation that makes a good trout angler. BrattleFly is committed to making that case, and to making those fisheries accessible to anyone willing to learn them.

The Battenkill, one of the most iconic trout streams in the country, as well as other southern Vermont fisheries, are also within reach. Through the Trico partnership, world-class trout-water guiding is part of the offering from opening day.

BrattleFly also sells Vermont fishing licenses and is building programming specifically designed to introduce young people and first-time anglers to the sport — not as a marketing exercise, but as a reason the business exists. From casting clinics to fly tying nights to guest speakers, we’ll be engaging the community from the day our doors open.

What We Share and What We Don’t

There’s a version of a fly shop that treats local knowledge as a commodity: put everything online, maximize search traffic, grow the audience. BrattleFly is not that shop.

There’s also a version that treats local knowledge as a secret to be hoarded: say nothing, share nothing, protect the water by pretending it doesn't exist. That’s not this shop either.

The rivers through Brattleboro — the Connecticut, the West — are not fragile. A smallmouth bass fishery on a river this size can absorb attention in a way that a small trout stream simply cannot. The fish are resilient. The water is big. More people fly fishing here is genuinely good for the sport, for this community, and for the long-term health of what we're building.

What changes when a specific spot gets broadcast to the internet isn’t the fish population. It’s the character of the experience. A quiet morning on a river bend you found yourself, or that someone trusted you with, becomes something different when fifteen people found it the same way you did — through a YouTube thumbnail.

So here’s the policy, stated plainly: BrattleFly publishes information that makes anglers better. Water-reading. Seasonal patterns. Tackle and technique. The reasoning behind why fish are where they are, so you can find them yourself. That knowledge belongs in the open, and sharing it freely is part of what a fly shop is supposed to do.

Specific locations — the bends, the backwaters, the access points that took someone years to learn — those stay in the conversation. Come in. Ask. That’s what the shop is for.