10/20/2026
Joan Wulff turns 100 today.
She was ten when she first took her father’s fly rod out on the water and lost its tip on that first outing. A neighbor fished it out with a rake, and her father, seeing how much she cared, began bringing her to the casting club with her brothers. In 1943, at 16, she won her first national casting title.
Through the 1950s she competed against men in distance events, because there was no women’s division. She became the first woman to win the National Fisherman’s Distance Fly Championship, with a cast of 136 feet. In 1960 she cast 161 feet with a one-handed bamboo rod.
Her most lasting work came as a teacher. In 1979, she and her husband, Lee Wulff, opened what is now the Wulff School of Fly Fishing in New York’s Catskills, where she taught anglers from around the world for decades. Her 1987 book, Joan Wulff’s Fly-Casting Techniques, was the first to analyze the mechanics of the cast.
Joan was inducted into the IGFA Fishing Hall of Fame in 2007. Generations of anglers know her as the First Lady of Fly Fishing.
Happy 100th birthday, Joan, from all of us at the IGFA.
