Whitney Gould

Whitney Gould won four world titles and the women's overall crown at the 2026 World Flycasting Championships in Vinadio, Italy. Her 2026 gold medals were in Seatrout Distance, 15' Spey, 16'/18' Spey, and Combo 5/6, and she also won bronze in Trout Distance. Fly Fisherman's account describes the women's overall ranking as unofficial.

Whitney's path to the river wasn't a straight line. She holds a degree in Painting from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University and a Master's in Landscape Architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design. While working as a landscape architect in San Francisco, she joined the Golden Gate Casting Club — recruited onto the women's Spey team almost by accident. She turned out to be a natural, and the rest is history.

Whitney's guiding résumé runs the length of the West. She started in Alaska on the Kanektok River for salmon and trout, then guided the Grande Ronde River in the Pacific Northwest and the Eel River in Northern California for winter steelhead, followed by trout Spey on Montana's Missouri River near Craig. She guides two-handed steelhead fishing on Idaho's Clearwater River.

Whitney won eight Spey-O-Rama International Casting Championship titles from 2009 through 2025. At the 2025 championship, she set women's Spey-O-Rama records with a 154-foot single cast and a 585-foot four-cast total. She was also the first woman in Spey-O-Rama history to break both the 140-foot single-cast and 500-foot four-cast marks. On the international stage, she won gold in 15-foot Spey at the 2022 World Flycasting Championships.

An FFI Certified Casting Instructor in both single- and two-handed disciplines, Whitney has taught for organizations including C.F. Burkheimer Spey Schools and runs her own instructional business, Gould Standard Fly Casting, offering personalized video-analysis lessons to anglers worldwide. She is also a longtime visiting guide for Warriors and Quiet Waters, a therapeutic fishing program for post-9/11 combat veterans and their families. Whether she's swinging flies for steelhead in frigid Northwest waters or hunting permit and tarpon tails from the bow of a flats boat, Whitney brings precision, patience, and pure joy to every cast — and that's exactly what students get when they cast with her.