Several trout species inhabit North American waters and are very important sportfish. They live in many different types of waters, from small brooks to huge lakes. Some trout are natives; others are raised in hatcheries and released into suitable waters. Trout are cold-water fish and lively fighters when hooked. They have sweet, delicate meat. Because of their wide availability, natural elusiveness, fighting qualities and good favor, these fish are highly sought by anglers.
The U.S. and Canada have five major trout species: rainbows, German browns, brook trout, cut throats and lake trout. Six other species found in localized areas are Apache trout, Arctic char, bull trout, Dolly Vardens, Gila trout and golden trout.
Lake Trout
Rainbows are so-named because of the pink streak down their sides. Native to western states, this fish has been stocked into streams, ponds and lakes throughout much of the U.S. and lower Canada. Today the rainbow trout is probably the continent’s most important cold-water sportfish. The world-record rainbow trout (42 pounds 2 ounces) was caught in Alaska in 1970.
The German brown trout is a European native that has been widely stocked in suitable American waters. These fish have dark or orange spots on their sides. Many anglers consider them to be the wariest, most difficult trout to catch, making them extremely popular among sport anglers. Browns tolerate slightly higher water temperatures than other trout, so they can live where some of the other trout can’t. The world-record brown trout (40 pounds 4 ounces) was taken in Arkansas in 1992. (When the angler who caught this fish died, he had the taxidermy mount of his world-record brown buried with him.)
Cutthroat Trout
Brook trout are native to the eastern U.S. and Canada, though they have been transplanted into other areas. They have light, worm like markings along their backs. They also have small blue and red dots along their sides. “Brookies” are probably the easiest of all trout to catch, and they are the best to eat. The world-record brook trout (14 pounds 8 ounces) was taken in Ontario in 1916.
Brook Trout
Cutthroat trout are found mainly in the western U.S. and Canada. Their name comes from the red markings behind and under the lower jaw. Their sides are dotted with small black spots. Like brook trout, they are not too difficult to catch, and they’re delicious to eat. The world-record cutthroat, weighing an even 41 pounds, was caught in Nevada in 1925.
Lake trout are what their name implies: residents of large, cold-water lakes from Canada south through the Canadian shield lakes of northern and Midwestern states. Lake trout also live in many western lakes where water temperatures don’t exceed 65° F. Lake trout are silver-gray in color, and they have deeply-forked tails. The world-record lake trout weighed 72 pounds and was caught in Canada’s Northwest Territories in 1995.
Trout feed on a broad variety of larval and adult insects, minnows, worms and crustaceans. In streams, trout spawn in shallow riffles where they build nests (or “redds”) in gravel.
Stream trout live in an incredibly different environment than you and me. When I began experiencing their world as they do, my respect and knowledge of them increased greatly, and so did my success in fly fishing for them. To ac complish this, I enter their world and quietly spy on them. To submerge in the chilling 50 to 65 degrees Fahrenheit water where trout live, and to see and breathe there, I equip myself with a neoprene wetsuit, hood, gloves and boo ties, weight belt, face mask, snorkel, and swim fins.
When I first put on all this gear, I feel as if I’m in some sort of spacesuit. But as soon as I go below the surface and into the stream’s swift current, the equipment restrictions seem to disappear. I’m now truly in a different world and suddenly my emotions and heart rate rise rapidly. I feel the pressure of the transparent liquid atmosphere against my face and body, and it quickly becomes comfortable and almost soothing. Sounds that seem greatly amplified surround me and as I stare, wide-eyed, I can see colors and objects clearly for six to ten feet. Objects farther away are in hazy focus and muted colors, eventually forming a blur in the water’s turquoise-green tint. Everything seems to be rushing toward and past me. Even shafts of light in the water column and the bottom below me seem to race by. After a minute or so my body begins to warm up, my heart rate slows, and my breathing becomes slower and deeper.
Trout swimming in a clear, sunlit stream can see shallow objects and colors clearly; distant objects fade into the color of the water.
Amazingly, trout can see objects like small insects flying in the air above them through a small distorted window, and they have the ability to leap through that surface and catch them. They also use this same ability to detect airborne and land dangers.
At a distance I see the first trout. It appears to be a shadowy green form gliding just off the bottom. As quietly as I can, I move closer. The fish begins to take on more body and color details. Then at a point determined by the trout’s caution of me, I can move no closer. Its 10-inch or so length seems in constant, effortless motion as if it were soaring above and into the water’s current using some invisible energy source. Yet for me to remain in a position to observe it, I must kick hard with my fins and hold tightly to the bottom rocks. But then, of course, my body is neither shaped nor lubricated to eliminate the water’s force and friction as the trout’s is so well-designed to do.
When I’m in the environment of trout, I never cease to be amazed by and learn from them. As the minutes pass, I become less emotional and begin to see the fish and their world more objectively. I begin to see more like a trout. I can best describe the experience as being in a watery wind storm with the unrelenting force of the current and with all sorts of tumbling objects that suddenly appear out of the upstream haze and speed toward and past me. Leaves, twigs, strands of algae, stems of aquatic plants, silvery pearls of air bubbles, insects … all drifting and tumbling in one direction and in all levels of the water column.
Looking at the stream surface from below gives me the illusion that I’m watching a time-lapsed sequence of swiftly moving skyscapes. But there’s something drastically different about the sky roof of the stream. I can only see a relatively small irregular circle of very distorted blue sky, clouds, and shoreline trees. And most of the underneath surface of the stream is an equally distorted refection of the stream bottom!
If this is what a trout sees when it looks upward at the stream surface, how can it see objects moving above the surface well enough to leap through the surface and eat them? My most educated guess is that trout have extremely keen eye and body coordination and that they are “in the zone” all of the time. I’m so often amazed as I watch trout magically leap through and above a heavily riffed, fast-moving stream surface to snatch flying caddis, mayflies, damselflies, and dragonflies … and even my dry flies! Trout seem to have a sense that biologists have yet to discover. If you’ve viewed the water’s surface from below, you’d probably agree that it seems like trout have extrasensory perception.
When I’m lucky enough to find several trout holding just off the bottom, I am always transfixed by their behavior and their curiosity to the objects drifting toward them. The younger fish are the most active, zooming forward, right, left, down, or up to meet the objects at least halfway. Older trout are much less excitable and much more conservative with their observations as well as the distances they will move to intercept drifting morsels. More on that later.
1. Light rays penetrate surface of stream through a 96-degree arch angle. This is usually known as the trout’s surface window.
2. This surface window is distorted by how wavy or rough the surface.
3. The area blind to trout varies 10 degrees from surface (plus or minus 10 degrees) according to how smooth the surface.
4. If the surface is smooth, trout cannot see objects at a 10-degree angle above the surface.
5. Surface area beyond the 96-degree cone of vision is a refection or mirror of the bottom.
6. Trout can see objects clearly in the water column.
My advice to anglers: Always keep in mind that stream trout live in a constantly moving watery atmosphere, and they have highly evolved senses to detect and catch foods. Get into the water with them so that you can visualize their world as they experience it. Through that understanding you’ll become a more successful angler.
The surface reflections of a trout stream reveal some of its subsurface secrets, and one of the most intriguing and perplexing is the variation of water speeds from top to bottom. As water flows down the gradient of a steambed, it moves with variable speeds depending on the degree of the gradient and the friction it encounters as it flows downhill. The steeper the gradient, the faster the water moves by a particular point. At the same time, as the water moves by that point, the speed of the vertical column of that water can vary considerably from the surface down to the stream bottom. It’s very important to understand these vertical speed variations to better comprehend the reasons that fish live and feed where they do and how best to present and fish your flies.
Vertical current speeds, or current speeds from the top to the bottom of the water column at one point, may vary from, for example, three miles per hour at the surface to nearly zero next to the bottom. This variation is a simple function of water moving fastest where there is the least friction, which is at the surface where air offers the least resistance. As water encounters water and the resistance of the non-moving objects of the stream bottom, it slows down. The rate of slowdown is proportionate to the roughness or irregularity of the bottom. For instance, sand will offer much less resistance to water flow than will coarse rock, large rubble, or bottom-rooted aquatic plants.
Because trout often look for the most comfort and food with the least amount of effort, they tend to rest on the bottom or suspend close to the bottom where the water current is slowest. Most of their natural foods, such as aquatic insects, crustaceans, and minnows, also choose to live in this zone. The angler who can present and fish his or her flies effectively in this lower portion of the water column will catch trout more consistently.
That sounds pretty simple for successful fishing except that the subsurface stream has its own form of four-letter word, “drag.” In this case it’s called “vertical drag.” If you think the horizontal drag control in dry fly fishing is complicated, add to those surface considerations the current speed variations that the underwater fly, tippet, and leader experience. Wild trout can be just as particular about dragging subsurface flies as they are about surface dragging dry flies! So to be successful with nymphs, emergers, and streamers on your floating lines, it’s essential to control both surface and subsurface drag.
Careful mending of the fly line’s tip and floating portion of the leader upstream of the tippet or indicator helps to counteract the pull on the line from the surface. The finer and longer the tippet you can use, the faster the fly will sink into the slowest zone while offering the least vertical drag. The water resistance of the fly itself also helps to slow the pull on the fly from above, much like a sea anchor. Extra weighting, such as split shot on the tippet, will slow the downstream drift caused by the more rapid water movement higher in the vertical current column.
Just before I began writing this chapter, I witnessed an eye-opening demonstration of how vertical drag can affect the success of a fly’s performance. Two of my students, one a beginner and the other an intermediate-level fly angler, were fishing a very swift 2 ½-to 3-foot-deep run with a size 6, olive, Nearnuff Sculpin. The intermediate student, who was first through the run, used a 5-foot, No. III sinking-tip line. The beginner fished the run next with a full-sinking, No. IV line. The beginner, using the sinking line, took 10 rainbows while the student with the sink-tip caught only one! I was surprised and amazed at the drastic difference in the success of one form of sinking line over the other using exactly the same fly in such shallow water. Then, after thinking about it, the reason became clear: The full sinker got the fly deeper into the slow layer next to the bottom longer than did the sinking tip, and without much interference from surface drag.
Can you identify the aquatic trout foods shown in the enlargement?
1. mayfly nymphs
2. leeches and aquatic worms
3. crayfish
4. cased caddis larva
5. scuds and sowbugs
6. minnows
7. snails
8. stonefly nymphs
9. sculpins and darters
10. midge larva and pupa
The top diagram page shows vertical current speeds and their effects on trout, trout foods, and subsurface flies.
Current speeds are proportional to the stream’s gradient and the friction that water is subjected to as it moves downstream and encounters air, water, and stationary objects. Generally, the fastest current will be at the surface, slowing vertically as the water nears the stream bottom.
Trout in a particular area of a stream, especially in riffles, pockets, and runs, will hold just off the bottom where current flow is modestly slow. Most aquatic trout foods live in this area for the same reason.
When presenting a nymph to a feeding trout, anglers should remember that vertical drag especially affects how a subsurface fly sinks and the speed and direction it drifts to the fish:
1. A long, thin tippet presented in a slack coil or pile allows the weighted fly to sink faster than a straight tippet presentation.
2. The fly will have drift speed proportional to the extent of the vertical drag that the tippet encounters between the surface strike indicator and the fly. The arrows show the extent of drag and where most occurs (at surface and mid-depth).
3. a weighted fly and split shot combination will allow the fly to sink into and drift through the feeding zone better and help reduce vertical drag.
Those wonderful, larger, wild stream trout like to have their food delivered to them, as often as possible, right down where they are most comfortable resting on or suspended just off the stream bottom in the riffles or runs. In that position, within inches of their heads, is a constant, fast-moving conveyor belt of oxygen and food. Placing and drifting a fly on this conveyor belt with as little vertical drag as possible, so as to match the belt’s speed, will ensure you consistent success in catching quality trout.
In golf, nine out of ten swing flaws can be traced to your hands and how you hold the club. The same is true of the fly cast. It starts in your grip. You want to be firm, without over-clutching the handle. The line goes where the rod tip directs it to go, and your grip dictates the direction of the rod tip. Because of this, line your hand up so that it can control how the rod flexes. Hold your thumb on the top of the grip, then snap those casts. If you visualize looking “through” your casting thumbnail, odds are that the line will unfurl right through that window. —K.D.
A good, consistent cast begins with a firm grip.
Many fly-casting instruction books tell you to imagine casting as if your rod moves along an imaginary clock face, with the forward cast stopping at ten o’clock on the imaginary dial and the backcast stopping at the two o’clock position. That’s correct, in theory. In reality, when casting, most people are oblivious to the positions of that imaginary clock. What feels like two o’clock on the backcast may actually be four o’clock. When I guide, I change time zones and suggest to clients to go to one o’clock on the backcast. For what-ever reason, most people achieve the ten o’clock–two o’clock mechanics if they’re thinking 10 and 1. Try it— you’ll see what I mean. —K.D.
The number-one mistake most novice fly casters make is going back too far on the backcast. The only tipoffs are the noises of line slapping the water or the rod tip scraping the ground behind them. This happens, more often than not, because the caster is allowing his wrist to cock too far back. As it relates to fly casting, the wrist-versus-arm equation is a difficult balance to describe. Remember this: The arm is the engine; the wrist is the steering wheel. Yes, sometimes it’s “all in the wrist,” but that pertains to matters of aiming the cast, not powering it. When you let your wrist power your cast, you will inevitably crash. If you have a problem with your wrist over-cocking, there are a few simple fixes that will help you capture the right feel. One is to get a large, thick rubber band, wrap it around your casting wrist, and then insert the rod butt inside that rubber band when you practice casting. If you find that the rubber band is flexing too much, odds are you are breaking your wrist too far. If you are wearing a long-sleeved shirt, tuck the rod butt inside your cuff. It will have the same effect, and it will tell you when you’re cocking your wrist too far on the backcast. Even seasoned anglers will tuck the butt end of their rods inside their shirt cuffs now and again to help them regain their stroke. —K.D.
Many people are frustrated when their line bunches and dies on the forward cast. This is usually caused by going too far with the backcast, which creates an open loop. The best tip I’ve ever heard for correcting this came from Dan Stein, a guide on the Bighorn River in Montana. He simply suggests that you keep your casting thumb in your peripheral vision at all times. Lose sight of your thumb, and you’re going back too far. Simple as that. —K.D.
Watching how your line behaves during the cast will tell you if you’re making mistakes. It’s tricky to self-diagnose the exact nature of a problem, however, and even harder to make the fix. Before you get bogged down in complicated physics lessons, try watching your casts from a fresh perspective. Dan Wright taught me this exercise: To help develop the proper feel for a cast, first tilt your rod sideways and cast from waist or chest level on a fat plane above the ground. Use a measuring tape stretched straight along the ground as your bench-mark. Start with small flicks of line, maybe 15 feet long. As you look at the line shooting back and forth, you’ll be able to see and feel both good U-shaped loops and tailing loops. Make both forward and backward casts from a dead stop. Eventually, link those casts together. Build line length gradually. As the good loops become uniform and systematic, you’ll be able to lift that cast 90 degrees over your head, still watching, and feeling, how the line shapes. If you tail, start over. The key is keeping the tempo even. Good loops grow in distance with practice. —K.D.
Perhaps the most common casting error, apart from breaking the wrist on the backcast, comes at the very beginning. Many anglers begin applying full power on the pickup, starting with the rod parallel to the water, while there is still slack line on the water surface. This immediately creates an extremely large loop while failing to properly load the rod. The angler spends the remainder of the cast sequence fighting to tighten the loop, eliminate wind resistance, and build line speed. Most often, he never recovers. An effective cast begins by stripping in excess line, then smoothly lifting the rod tip to ten o’clock. This places the rod in position to load while setting the stage for a short, quick power stroke. Remember: The shorter the power stroke, the tighter the loop and the more powerful the cast. —C.M.
I find that I roll cast on a river at least three times for every overhead cast I make. When you get the roll cast down and you learn to use the water to load your rod, you’ll find yourself spending less time and energy thinking about casting. In turn, you’ll be more focused on reading the water and finding fish. The roll cast is important for two other reasons. First, it’s a stealthier approach and is less likely to spook fish than false casting overhead. Second, it’s your go-to option when there are bushes or other obstacles behind you, where they’ll likely foul up a backcast. What’s the key to a good roll cast? Same as with any other cast—gradually accelerate the rod, building speed and resistance, then stop, change direction, and unfurl the cast forward. A common mistake people make is to start that roll cast with too much loose line on the water and the rod tip pointed straight at the sky. Instead, retrieve with the rod tip from a low position, with noticeable tension on the line as it slices through the current. When the moment is right (and you’ll develop a feel to know when), lift the rod tip skyward and snap the rod forward, unfurling an on-target cast. —K.D.
The windiest place I’ve ever fished was the redfish flats of Aransas Bay, Texas. It was there, as I was struggling with a flapping fly line, that guide Chuck Naiser called a halt to the action, gently placed his hand on my shoulder, and said, “Son, you’re gonna have to make friends with that wind, or else come back here in July when it calms down … but all the locals are busy then, chasing down the chickens that blew out of the barn-yard.” The point was well taken, and using the wind to your casting advantage is especially important for the trout angler who has learned the hard way that breezes whipping through the canyon can mess with the best intentions.
For a right-handed fly caster, the perfect wind is a gentle one coming over the left shoulder, because it keeps your line and flies pushed away from your head at a safe distance. When the wind howls from the right side, tip the top of your rod at a raised angle over your left shoulder, still powering the stroke from your right side. When the wind is directly behind you, shorten and power that backcast high, allowing the fly line to kite up with the wind’s force.
If you go too far back, or break your wrist, and let that rod tip dip blow the kite plane, the wind will pile-drive the fly line into the water behind you. But do it correctly, and you’ll reap the same rewards as the golfer who finds added driving distance with a tailwind. And the most intimidating wind of all—the one that blows right in your face—might actually be your ally. After all, your backcast is where you load the power in the rod, and a stiff breeze will help straighten the line behind you. To transfer that energy through the teeth of the wind, make a slight adjustment to finish your forward stroke lower.
In other words, if you normally stop the rod at 10 and 2 on the imaginary clock face, shift to 9 and 1, stopping higher on the backcast, and driving lower on the front. Remember, punching the rod won’t get you anywhere but tangled. This isn’t a power game; it’s about timing. When you can form a tight casting loop, and make small adjustments to counter the effects of wind on the river, you’ll never be blown away. —K.D.
Let’s get one thing straight: Wind knots aren’t caused by the elements; they’re caused by what you do. It’s okay, they happen to everyone. But I will say this: Early diagnosis is the key to fixing the problem and getting back to business. And I have never, in all my life, seen a tangled mess get fixed by whirling and twirling the rod tip. It might be human nature to try and undo the problem by twirling the rod in reverse motion, but the sooner you learn to stop and address the problem, the better off you are. When I see the intricate mazes of highly complex, patterned knots that result from a micro-second lapse of concentration, it reinforces my belief that this whole delicately balanced universe may have indeed resulted from a massive explosion. —K.D.
When you are dry fly fishing, a good presentation always starts with a good drift. And a good drift is usually a dead drift, meaning the fly is traveling in exact connection with the current.
I once walked up on a guide friend and his client on a gorgeous Colorado afternoon, a day when insects were swarming and the fish were happy.
“What are they eating?” I asked.
“A good drift,” he said, smiling. And to prove the point, he showed me the size 14 Royal Trude his guy was fishing with. I’d seen a lot of bugs that day, but nothing that looked quite like that. The secret to a good dead drift is casting upstream and letting your fly float with the current. Drag, when the fly line is caught by the current, causing tension that moves the fly unnaturally, and “micro-drag,” when the leader does the same thing, will inevitably turn fish off.
Try to keep as little fly line on the water as possible. When the fly is moving from upstream down at a straight tangent, drag is less of a concern. But when you are casting at an angle to the current, keeping the line off the water is smart; failing that, always keep the fly line upstream from the flies. —K.D.
You’re fishing nymphs in a run, and just as you get ready to lift up and make another cast—bang—you get a hit! It happens all the time. What you just did is hook a fish on the swing. As the line straightens out down current, the flies inevitably lift toward the surface, which looks exactly like insects emerging. Trout love eating those bugs.
Many people have lost touch with the art of wet fly fishing and swinging bugs subsurface. In my family, we had a rule that the little kids had to fish the river with wet flies, so they’d work the water going downstream. When you got big enough, you were allowed to turn back into the current and start working dry flies upstream.
I always thought that Grandpa made that rule to keep the kids dry. I’m starting to see an ulterior motive: We caught a lot of fish that way, and learned the value of the swing. —K.D.
Always curious about the mysteries of trout fly fishing, Jack Dennis took an underwater camera into a local stream to discover what really happens when anglers made presentations to fish beneath the surface.
Among his more revealing discoveries: Anglers failed to detect 40 percent of the strikes they received using conventional nymphing techniques, particularly with indicators.
The reason? Invariably, the problem was too much slack in the line. Dennis found that fish feeding actively on a plentitude of insects floating past their noses seldom moved much; rather, they simply held their position and opened and closed their mouths. In such situations, anglers generally failed to realize when a trout had taken the artificial fly.
In feeding situations with fewer insects, when trout drifted up or darted sideways to take the artificial, the line often moved sufficiently for the angler to detect the strike.
The key to hooking fish when nymphing is to get the slack out.
One solution to a light bite is to get as close as possible to the fish, eliminating as much loose line as possible. But the ultimate cure for missed strikes is keen concentration, setting the hook at the slightest pause in the drift. Make the hook set quick and short, keeping the fly down in the target area if you don’t connect. —C.M.
The decision to use a strike indicator for nymphing is usually a matter of preference rather than necessity. You can catch fish either with or without an indicator, whether it’s a balsa bobber, piece of yarn, or a large buoyant fly.
Success generally depends upon conditions. Short-line nymphing without an indicator often works best in a swift, deep run where you can get close to the trout. Often, you’ll feel the strike directly and quickly, an advantage over the delay caused by slack line common with indicators.
On the other hand, an indicator helps deliver a good presentation at a greater distance and offers a good visual for those who need or desire it. Should you choose an indicator, select a system that allows for quick depth adjustment, a critical element in presenting the fly in different locations as you move along the stream. Reluctance to change depths may be the most important reason for nymphing failure.
One variable is beyond dispute: In a strong wind, get rid of the indicator. It’s like trying to cast a kite, plus it catches the wind when on the water, accelerating the speed of the drift. —C.M.
As a guide, I often see people make great casts and drifts, then yank the fly out of a trout’s mouth when it hits. The problem is that they try to set the hook in an upstream direction.
Trout face into the current 99.9 percent of the time. They eat things that float toward them. If a trout eats a bug (dry fly or nymph) that is floating toward it, why on earth would you think it’s a good thing to rip that fly back upstream? The whole point of fly fishing is to set that J-shaped hook into the trout’s mouth, and that can only happen if you set the hook down-current (not downstream … down-current).
It seems as if our instinct tells us to lift, flick, and pull upstream with every take. Before you make your next cast, take a minute, watch the way the current is moving, and then plan to set the hook down-current in the same direction of the current flow. This will increase your success-to-net ratio tenfold.—K.D.
The month: January. The river: Colorado’s Roaring Fork. The challenge: getting flies down to sluggish trout holding close to the bottom in extremely cold water. Three anglers tried a more conventional approach, drifting bead-head nymphs with a couple of split shot while furiously mending line to neutralize a steady current. Each caught an occasional fish, working hard for their strikes. A fourth companion seemed to have a trout with every second cast, chortling at the obvious discomfort of his far-less-successful friends. Closer inspection revealed his novel and highly effective approach. His flies were heavily weighted with tungsten wire and a tungsten bead, with about the same specific gravity as a ship’s anchor. He also pinched two larger split shot to his leader. The truly novel ingredient was the balsa indicator, much like an antique panfish bobber, that was large enough to stay afloat above all that weight. With this rig, our friend kept his offering dead-drifted in the zone much longer than anyone else, and he had the fish to show for it.
Such a weighty assembly isn’t for everyone, but when trout are hugging bottom, it gets results. —C.M.
As long as your flies are floating naturally, and the drift is good, there’s no rule against making multiple mends to cover lots of water. In fact, in big rivers, like the Colorado at Lees Ferry in Arizona, and up on Oregon’s Deschutes, stack mending for long drifts is a smart way to fish.
Make your cast, let your flies settle, then make your mend. As the flies float downstream, make another mend, feeding more line as you go. Then another. And another. Mete out line gently by wiggling the rod tip to feed line through the guides; at the same time, don’t get caught with so much slack that you cannot set the hook when your indicator stalls 50 or 60 feet away from you. It can be tricky. The key is making many small, gentle mends as you feed your line through the run. —K.D.
The best lesson I ever learned about locating trout in a river came from a tuna captain. Fishing with Steve “Creature” Coulter, 40 miles off Hatteras, North Carolina, I stared out at the horizon and asked him how in the world he went about finding fish in the open ocean. “It isn’t so hard,” he said, smiling. “It’s just like trout fishing.”
For the record, Creature might be one of the most decorated big-game fishermen on the Atlantic sea-board, but his closet fishing passion is chasing trout with flies. “How do you figure that?” I asked, perplexed by the comparison.
“Fish like changes,” he said. “Changes in currents, changes in depth, changes in water color, changes in structure. If you find a patch of sea grass floating in the open ocean, that’s a structure change, and you’ll find fish under it. If you find a place where currents converge, baitfish will school there and bigger fish will follow them. Reefs, wrecks, and rock formations attract fish too, as do underwater ridges and canyons.”
Apply that thinking when you go to the trout river. Look for changes in currents, where swift water meets slow water; changes in structure, where rocks and trees create holding water; changes in depth, like shelves and pools; or changes in color, which usually signals a depth or structural transition.
“It’s all pretty much the same,” Creature told me. “You trout guys can walk or row a boat to find those changes, but you’re essentially doing the same thing a tuna boat captain does in the ocean.”
Find the changes, find the fish. —K.D.
That rock in the middle of the river or jutting off the bank should always get your attention. Why? Because that slab of granite affects the flow of the river, altering the current and creating subtle microcurrents around it. From downstream, you’ll be able to see two distinct current lines to the right and left, where the water folds around the rock. Eventually, those currents merge like the bottom point of the letter “V.” That’s where cast number one should land, at the bottom of the “V.”
White circles indicate changes in current, depth, water color, and structure—all likely spots to hold trout.
Your next casts should be right up the two current seams. The fish will usually be where the fast water meets the slower water. That dead spot right behind the rock might also be worth a cast or two, although the fish usually don’t tuck their noses right onto the stone.
Think about it. The food is washing downriver, packed into that seam where the current meets the slower water. The fish could swim out into the heavy water, but that takes energy, and the insects there are moving by at a quicker pace. If you were a fish, wouldn’t you hang out where you have to use as little energy as possible to hold your position, especially when the buffet is churning right there? —K.D.
Bonefish guides are always looking for patches on the water with telltale ripples that reveal movement under the surface. They call it “nervous water” or (in Mexico) “agua nerviosa.”
When fish move through shallow water in schools, they make a subtle disturbance that reveals their presence, even when their fins do not beak the surface.
This is also true with trout, especially in fat water like slowmoving spring creeks and lakes. It’s always worth looking for nervous patches of surface water when you are figuring out where to make your first cast. —K.D.
When reading water, ask yourself this simple question: If I were a trout, where would I be? Understand that your life revolves around three things: eating, not being eaten, and making little fish.
In the context of fly angling, the eating part is most important. Playing the role of trout, you understand that you primarily eat insects and smaller fish. You know that you’ll find more of both closer to the banks, so that’s a good starting point to choose where you want to hang out in the river. The insects you eat come in all forms: nymphs, emergers, adult bugs hatching, adult spinners falling to the surface to lay eggs, terrestrials falling into the river, and so forth. You know that mayflies, for example, like to lay eggs on gravel bottoms, and that that is where nymphs, emergers, duns, and spinners are likely to concentrate.
Currents also concentrate insects. Bugs get trapped and collected in the seam where fast water bumps up against slow water, for example. You (the trout) want to be near that seam, in a place where you aren’t expending more calories to swim than you can consume.
At the same time, you don’t want to become calories for another predator. You want to find cover in those rocks or under that log. Lacking thick cover, my exit strategy is to go to deep water. There has to be a place where I can escape to the depths when I’m threatened.
Making little fish is another matter. We spawn on gravel. Hopefully the angler reading this book won’t mess with me when I’m on a spawning bed.
The more you ask yourself, “If I were a trout, where would I be?” while you are on the water fishing, the easier reading water becomes. Thinking like a fish will make places and targets pop out before you cast. You’ll overlook fewer targets, and catch more trout. —K.D.
Most of us started fly fishing on small streams. They’re easy to wade and easy to read. You have that one log sticking out in the current, scouring the river bottom, and you can guess there’s a good chance that Mr. Brown Trout might be hanging around it.
But what do you do when you get on a big, wide river, like the Madison, the Bighorn, the South Fork of the Snake, the Green, the Colorado, or the Delaware?
Among the guides I’ve fished with on these rivers, from Patty Reilly in Wyoming to Bob Lamm in Idaho to Joe Demalderis in New York, they all say that the key to reading them is to make big water small.
By that, they mean taking a river that’s 50 yards wide and mentally dividing it into five 10-yard-wide sections. If you’re wading upstream, start with the 10-yard section that’s closest to the bank. Look for fish first. Now look for changes in structure—a rock, a log, a dropoff. Also look for changes in currents. Is there a spot where fast water meets slow water? Look for a depression in the bottom. If you’ve found the changes, make your casts: 10 casts, covering all the hotspots on your radar.
Nothing happened? Move out from the bank to the next 10-yard-wide section of water. Look for the same things—current breaks, structure, dropoffs—and cover them with solid casts.
Nothing happened? Move toward the middle and repeat the process. Do this until you can’t wade any deeper (if you’re wading big rivers, it usually is too deep to work all the way across), and until you feel you’ve made enough casts.
Next, wade upstream and start the process over. Make big water small in your mind. Divide and conquer, always working from the bank outward. —K.D.
One early morning, while dry fly fishing a trico hatch on Montana’s Missouri River, guide Pete Cardinal checked me up, then told me to stop casting and watch the water. We were working a seam where fast water, colliding with a slow pool, was creating a foamy bubble line. At times, that bubble line would disperse and spread out in wide fronds of white, wispy water. At other times, the currents converged and collected hatching insects in a tight, white highway that ran straight through the run. Until Pete pointed it out, I hadn’t noticed that the fish were keyed into this system. When the currents dispersed or collapsed, the fish didn’t rise. When the foam line formed a hard seam and collected those tiny mayflies, the trout began slurping away at the surface. The lesson? Follow the bubble line. When you see a pronounced foam or bubble line on the surface, there’s a very good chance that trout will be underneath it, and feeding. —K.D.
Among the most important, yet least understood, aspects of sight fishing is the role played by refraction. Put simply, the fish we think we see 20 feet away in shallow water will actually be closer and deeper than it appears. It will also seem larger than it really is, which may be where all those fish stories get started. —C.M.
One of the best lessons I learned from scuba diving with trout came from watching them react to attractor flies. To set the scene, I had a buddy fishing a two-fly dry-fly rig. The lead fly was a size 12 Stimulator—a big ugly bug that might look like a terrestrial or a stonefly, although its basic mission is, as the name implies, to stimulate a rise. The second fly, trailed 18 inches off the hook shank of the first, was a size 18 Blue-Winged Olive, meant to match the natural baetis flies that pop up on the surface now and again.
Dispersed or collapsed bubble line.
Tight bubble line.
As I watched the fish from below the surface, time and time I noticed them swim up to check out the larger fly, then catch view of the smaller fly and go eat it. The lesson is that if you are fishing two small dry flies, you won’t draw their attention as consistently as you would by using an attractor dry fly.
The same applies to nymph fishing, particularly in swift currents or in tinted water. Your first should be a big ugly bug—maybe a hot pink San Juan Worm or a size 14 Flashback Pheasant Tail. Your trailer fly should be something smaller, perhaps a size 18 Barr Emerger. The fish are going to turn on the big bug that attracts their attention. Sometimes they’ll eat it, but usually they’ll pass on it in favor of the smaller fly. And they won’t eat the smaller fly as consistently if you don’t have an attractor bug drawing them in in the first place. The attractor fly really only works when you are prospecting and when there isn’t a consistent hatch coming off. When you’re fishing a prolific hatch, don’t mess around with attractors. —K.D.
The Woolly Bugger: This is a go-to trout-producing streamer that can be fished effectively on lakes and rivers.
The Pheasant Tail Nymph: A generic pattern, it represents a wide range of immature mayflies.
The Prince Nymph: This is probably the best all-around attractor nymph pattern you can use.
The Parachute Adams: A generic-looking adult mayfly, when wet its gray body can effectively match many insect species.
The Pale Morning Dun: A midsummer staple on many rivers, east and west, this is the mayfly pattern that matches insects with pale bodies (yellow, pink, cream).
The Copper John: Another attractor nymph, it’s valued as much for its weight and sinkability as for its flashy profile.
The Elk Hair Caddis: Use this dry fly on any rivers where caddis hatch in large numbers.
Black Foam Beetle: It won’t sink, and it’s a killer pattern for fish keyed on terrestrials, anywhere.
The Barr Emerger: Pale Morning Dun or Blue-Winged Olive varieties fool the most selective trout.
The Muddler Minnow: It’s a streamer and grasshopper, all in one. —K.D.
There’s no stepping around it: At times our angling success will depend upon how well we wade. Whether it’s a brawling British Columbia steelhead river or a slippery brook, the ability to reach the right position may be the most important factor in catching that special fish.
In a similar vein, the ability to wade with confidence has much to do with our overall enjoyment of the experience onstream, whether we catch anything or not.
The fact is, it’s practically impossible to enjoy fishing if every step along a rocky streambed leaves us afraid of a dunking. Fear shouldn’t be a part of the angling experience.
Good equipment is the first step to safe wading. It begins with a solid sole for gripping rocks. Either rubber or felt soles work fine, though you must thoroughly clean felt after each day of fishing, so you don’t carry invasive species to other waters. If the stones of your favorite streams also come with a slick coating of algae, as is often the case with nitrogen-enriched tailwaters or other altered environments, buy boots with studs that can bite through slime into the rock.
Once you’ve acquired the proper gear, including a stout wading staff, relax, bend your knees, and enjoy. —C.M.
We’ve all made the mistake of removing a perfectly good line from a spool, then forgetting to mark its weight and design. The result is a drawer full of mystery lines that otherwise could be put to work. Lefty Kreh devised an ingenious coding system, using a waterproof marker and a series of dots and dashes, that lets him identify each line. You can also take a strip of masking tape and write down the proper identification on a storage or spare reel spool. Devise a system and use it, or else you’re going to have a bunch of useless line on your hands. —C.M.
The deadly combination of bright sunshine and a calm surface creates line shadows that spook fish. One way to avoid this is to position your cast so the line’s shadow doesn’t pass over the fish during delivery. When this isn’t possible, or when the sun is directly overhead, consider using a roll cast instead. Measure the distance so that only the monofilament leader passes over the fish. —C.M.
On sunny days, take extra care not to line a fish when you’re casting.
Here’s a slick trick that will impress your fishing friends and make life easier: When moving from one spot to another, always keep the fly line-to-leader connection pulled through the tip top of your rod. Trying to pull the knot through the end guide in a hurry with bent rod on the stream is a pain, and is also a good way to break the tip.
With the knot through the tip top, hang your bottom fly on a guide halfway up the rod, drape the leader around the reel seat, and reel in the slack so the fly line connection remains outside the guides.
When you are ready to fish, undrape the leader from behind your reel, let the line hang free, then give a gentle tap or two on the top of the rod, just above the cork handle. The slight vibration will pop the fly off the guide, and your line will fall into the water. No reaching up the rod and picking the flies off (or sticking your fingers). Let it hang, give it a tap, and you’re good to go. —K.D.
The more you develop your casting and reeling abilities with your “off” hand, the better fly fisherman you’ll become. Here’s a simple way to start developing a cast with your non-dominant hand, shared by guide and writer Kim Leighton on the Yellowstone River years ago:
Cast as you normally would, using your dominant hand, but as you do this, gently cup the reel with your off hand. This will build a sense of timing and tempo that you can eventually transfer from one hand to the other. If you’re only able to develop a casting ability with your off hand that is 25 percent of your good one, you’ll still better off when you find yourself in a tough spot where the river, cover, and currents make an opposite-arm delivery your only viable option. —K.D.
The first decision about picking a fly rod has nothing to do with your height, weight, strength, location, or casting skill. The physical weight of a fly rod is also insignificant. The first thing to decide is what line size you need. Every fly rod made is designed for a specific line size (although some may handle several with some adjustment in casting style). These sizes are based on the weight in grains of the first thirty feet of the line, regardless of whether the line floats or sinks, because it’s the weight of the line bending the rod that lets you cast. Luckily, you and I don’t need to memorize these grain weights because all fly-fishing manufacturers use a number system that ranges from 1 through 15, where each line size correlates to a grain weight. It’s used by every maker of fly rods throughout the world.
The smaller the number, the lighter the line. Lighter lines, in sizes 1 through 4, deliver a fly with more delicacy. They cast small flies and light leaders best, but don’t cast as far as heavier lines and don’t handle the wind as well. As lines get heavier, in the 5 through 7 range, they lose some delicacy but gain in their ability to deliver larger flies and longer casts, and you won’t have to fight the wind as much. These middle sizes are most often used for trout and smallmouth bass. Sizes 8 through 10 are considered the basic rods for long casts, big flies, and lots of wind, and are the sizes most often used by saltwater, bass, and salmon anglers. But they splash down heavier and won’t protect a light tippet as well as the lighter rods. When you get into line sizes 11 and heavier, you’re really looking at a rod designed to fight big fish, because once you get to a 10-weight rod, you’ve probably maximized the distance you’ll get and going heavier only gives you more power to turn the head of a big tarpon or shark.
Just by looking at this small stream with clear water you can expect that a 4-weight line would be about perfect.
Fortunately, the flexibility of the rod needed to throw each line size corresponds perfectly with its purpose. Rods designed for lighter fly lines are very flexible, so it’s easier to play a trout on a two-pound tippet with a flexible 4-weight rod. If you fish a leader with a two-pound tippet on a 9-weight rod, you’ll most likely break most fish off on the strike because the stiffer rod is not as good a shock absorber, and besides, fishing a heavy 9-weight line on top of spooky trout will send most fish running for cover before they even see your fly. Playing a small trout on a 9-weight rod is not much fun, anyway, because the rod will hardly bend against the wiggles of a ten-inch fish. And playing a ten-pound redfish on a 4-weight might be fun for a few moments, but the lighter rod just does not have the strength to land a big fish sounding under a boat, something a stiffer rod will do with ease.
I once asked a tournament caster if there was an optimum rod length for casting, ignoring all the other tasks we ask of a fly rod. Without hesitating, he answered “eight and a half feet.” The physics of fly fishing are not easily understood, and air resistance, line weight, loop shape, and line speed all come into play, so I won’t begin to theorize as to why eight and a half feet is the optimum length. But if all you ever wanted to do was cast out in the open with no wind, and had no conflicting currents to worry about, you’d want an eight-and-a-half-foot rod.
To manipulate a fly line over these tricky currents, a fly rod nine feet long or longer would be the most efficient tool.
But fishing is much more than casting. In small, brushy places, an eight-and-a-half-foot rod gets tangled in the brush as you walk from one spot to another, and the wider casting arc of a longer rod offers overhanging trees more chances to snatch your fly and leader. A rod that is between six and seven and a half feet long is better for brushy streams, with the really short ones best for almost impenetrable woodland brooks, while rocky mountain streams with wider banks, where if you can get midstream you have plenty of room in front of and behind you, allow rods up to eight feet long before they get clumsy.
Rods longer than eight and a half feet are best for bigger waters. It’s easier to keep your back cast off the ground behind you with a longer rod, they are better at making casts over fifty feet, and when you need to mend line or hold line off the water to prevent drag, those extra six inches make a surprising difference. Nine-foot rods seem to be the perfect length for saltwater fly fishing and give a great balance between making longer casts and the ability to play a large fish. It’s actually easier to play large fish on a shorter rod as opposed to a longer rod, though, and that is why 14-and 15-weight rods for huge sailfish, marlin, and tuna are usually made in eight-and-a-half-foot lengths. They don’t cast as well as nine-footers, but these species are typically teased close to the boat with a hookless plug or bait so casts longer than fifty feet aren’t needed.
Really long rods, ten feet and over, are best when tricky currents require the angler to manipulate the fly line once it hits the water. Because the swing of a fly is so important in salmon and steelhead fishing, and these fish are often caught in very wide rivers, two-handed rods up to fifteen feet long are sometimes used with special casts called spey casts that can pick up sixty or seventy feet of line and deliver it back on target without false casting and without the line ever going behind the angler.
For fish like smal trout, panfish, and bass, a fly reel is simply a line storage device. It keeps your line neat and orderly when you walk to and from fishing, and also keeps excess line from tangling at your feet and around the clutter that fishing boats seem to attract. Nearly all of the reels you see are single action, which means that one revolution of the handle moves the spool around once. Unlike spin fishing or bait casting, where you retrieve line after each cast and a multiplying action comes in handy, it’s not needed in fly fishing. In the past, automatic reels with springloaded spools and multiplying reels with gear systems were made, but these reels proved to be heavy and clumsy, not to mention difficult to maintain in good working order.
Smaller reels don’t need strong drag tension, either. All that’s needed is enough tension on the reel to prevent the line from back-lashing on the spool when you pull some off, and perhaps some light tension if a bass or trout pulls a few feet of line when fighting. This tension might be provided by a simple click mechanism composed of a spring and a small metal triangle called a pawl, that engages teeth on the reel spool, or it can be from a small disc drag system. The main considerations when looking for a small reel are how nice it looks and how much it weighs, as the more expensive reels are lighter and more attractive than the less expensive entry-level reels.
A narrow arbor trout reel on the left compared to the heavier, large arbor saltwater reel on the right.
Many fish run a hundred yards or more when first hooked. Big trout, salmon, steelhead, and most saltwater species will yank from five feet to a hundred yards of line during a battle, and it’s difficult to put tension on a reel by grabbing the fly line with your fingers, as it is neither precise nor uniform, and grabbing a fly line when a fish is running usually leads to a broken leader. These fish require a mechanical, adjustable break system or drag to help you tire them; otherwise they’ll just swim away until they steal all your line and backing. Fly reels for these species employ a disc drag system like the brakes on your car, and these drags are most often made with a cork or plastic disc against the aluminum frame of the spool. These bigger reels also require extra capacity for the one hundred to four hundred yards of backing you’ll need. Thus, when looking for a reel for these species, check the capacity to make sure it will hold the line size you have plus the maximum length of backing you’ll need.
In big-game fishing for tarpon, marlin, sailfish, or tuna, where the fish run as fast as a car and may keep up the pace for hundreds of yards, drag strength is critical, as is the ability of the reel’s design to dissipate the heat generated by the friction of the drag surfaces. In the middle of a battle with a marlin, lesser fly reels get so hot they smoke and then seize up completely. There is no way for a consumer to tell if a fly reel is up to this challenge, and the only way to assure yourself of a reel that will hold up is to buy a large, expensive big-game reel with a first-class reputation.
When picking a pair of waders, regardless of what other decisions you make, the most important point is the correct fit. Waders should be loose enough to let you do deep-knee bends without constricting your movement so you’ll be able to step over logs or climb a steep bank once you get to the river, but they also should not be excessively loose, as baggy waders present more resistance to the current and will also wear more quickly because the fabric chafes and eventually wears through. Buy waders at a store where you can try them on, or carefully study the size chart on a Web site and buy from a retailer that offers easy return privileges if they don’t fit.
Get breathable waders. Clammy waders can ruin your day, and although those thick neoprene waders may look warm, your body condensation stays inside them all day long. (Besides, you can wear layers of fleece inside breathable waders and stay just as warm.) And you only have to wear neoprene waders once on a 90-degree afternoon under the blazing Montana summer sun to realize you made a big mistake.
Waders come in two basic styles: boot foot and stocking foot. With boot foots, the boot is an integral part of the wader and you just slip them over your socks. Some have laces for extra security and some are just plain rubber boots. They are the easiest waders to put on if you aren’t very nimble. Stocking foot waders, which incorporate a breathable upper with neoprene booties, require a separate wading boot. They give you a lot more flexibility, so if your foot size does not correspond to what is common for your height and weight, your chances of getting a better fit are greatly increased. You can also pick a lightweight wading boot for travel or a heavier boot for more support on long walks or rocky streams.
The boot-foot waders on the right come with boots already attached and are ready to use. The stocking-foot waders on the left will need a pair of separate wading shoes.
Your first fly line should be a tapered line of the size called for on your rod. And it should float. When you look at fly line designations, you’ll see something like this: “WF5F.” The first two letters represent the taper, which is less important and is covered in the section below on weight forward versus double taper lines. The middle number is the line size, and it must match the designation on your rod. The last letter, F, tells you the line floats, which is what you want.
Even in deep water, you can fish with a floating line by adding weight to your leader and adjusting your presentation.
Why is a floating line so important if you won’t fish many dry flies? First, it’s much easier to pick up a floating line off the water when you’re casting than a sinking one, because you have to lift all of the line free of the water when making a cast, and getting a submerged line moving and above the water with a single back cast is difficult. Next, you can fish nearly every kind of fly—floating or sinking—with a floating line because you can use a weighted fly or weight on your leader to sink a fly, but you can’t fish a dry fly with a sinking line. Third, floating lines land much lighter on the water, and when you’re starting out, you’ll need all the help you can muster to keep your fly line from landing on the water too hard.
For trout fishing, I use a sinking line less than 1 percent of the time, and could probably live without ever using one. A floating line is also the basic line for Atlantic salmon, bonefish, redfish, and bass, so I’m not just suggesting this line for the novice. Unless you fish for saltwater fish in deep water or fast currents, or fish for trout in lakes in midsummer after they go deep, you may go for years without feeling the need for a sinking line.
Side-arm casting
The combination of wind and fly fishing scares many people away, but with a few basic tips you can easily fish in winds up to about twenty miles per hour. Above that it does get pretty hairy. Here are some guidelines for casting on windy days:
• Keep your casts short. Spend more time getting close to fish. Fish are not as spooky on windy days so you can afford to creep right up on them.
• Cast side-armed instead of directly overhead. The wind is lighter closer to the water, and by casting at 90 degrees to the vertical you keep the fly and line farther away from your head.
• With a tailwind, put more energy into your back cast and aim it higher, and put less energy into your forward cast. With a headwind, reverse the process.
• If you have a crosswind, try to make sure the crosswind does not blow the fly across your body. Turn around and cast, or change positions.
• Shorten your leader and tippet and try to use flies that are less windresistant.
• On long casts with a light wind, I would rather cast into the wind that with it. I find that a wind behind me pushes my back cast below the tip of the rod and ruins my forward cast. I find it easier to let the wind help me on my back cast, and then I overpower the forward cast.
Turning your cast to the side on a windy day will give you better control of your line.
Most fish of all types are caught at forty feet or less, but eventually you’ll need to reach out and touch a distant spot, especially if you do any fishing in salt water. The first thing to remember is that excessive false casts, which are the normal response to a long cast, are counterproductive. The more your line is in the air, the greater the chance you’ll eventually screw up. Take your time and slow down. Hold some loose line in reserve, either in big coils or in a stripping basket. Increase your false casts to about thirty-five or forty feet, which is where the rod really begins to flex and pick up energy. Make no more than three false casts. On the last one, release the excess line and aim your rod tip slightly higher than you would on a shorter cast, to help the extra line clear the guides on the rod.
Increasing your false casts to about forty feet and holding some line in reserve will help you make longer casts.
Remember that as you increase the length of line you cast, your timing will be a bit slower because it takes longer for the line to straighten behind you. Also, raise your arm up above your head and increase the length of your casting stroke. On a short cast, the rod should move mostly up and down. On a long cast, you should add length to your stroke by moving the rod back and forth in addition to up and down. Yes, you will go beyond that sacred two o’clock position you learned from your uncle, but you need the longer casting stroke to move the longer line.
Most people can cast well up to fifty or sixty feet (depending on the rod and the caster) without adding a double haul to the mix. However, to increase your line speed (and the amount of line you can shoot on each cast) you’ll eventually want to learn the double haul, especially if you’re faced with wind. The double haul is simple in principle and difficult in execution. When you raise the rod into your back cast, you haul downward on the line with your other hand. The line hand then drifts back to meet with the casting hand as the back cast straightens, and as the rod hand moves forward on the forward cast, the line hand again hauls downward and then releases the shooting line.
There are as many styles and opinions on how much to haul and when to do it as there are casting styles. It often helps to haul on the back cast and let the line fall to the ground behind you. Then take a look at your hand position (hands should be together as the back cast straightens) and make the forward cast with a haul. You’ll be amazed that even with the line on the ground behind you, a decent forward cast is possible because of the increased line speed you generate with the double haul. Keep practicing it until you suddenly feel the fly line try to jump from your hands—then you’ve got it.
In a small mountain stream like this, a full-flex action will load the rod better on short casts.
I hesitate to open the messy box of jargon that fly fishers use to describe rod actions, because few people understand what a fly rod really does. But in the convoluted world of choices in fly rods today, we all need guidelines besides just length and line size. You’ll hear the words fast, medium, and slow to describe rod action. To one person, fast means a rod that bends more close to the tip than it does down into the middle of the rod. To other anglers, a fast rod is one that’s stiffer than others of the same configuration. Or you’ll hear rods described as “still” or “soft.” Orvis uses a standard that, I believe, is less confusing because it describes exactly how a rod bends under a given load, and can be measured and duplicated from one rod to the next. This system uses the terms tip-flex, mid-flex, and full-flex. A tip-flex rod bends mostly at the tip and a lot less in the middle, mid-flex bends down into the middle of the rod, and in a full-flex action, the rod bends right down into the handle.
Obviously there are degrees of each action, but putting rods in those broad terms is enough. So what do these terms tell you about what the rod will do for you? A tip-flex rod develops higher line speed and tighter casting loops, which means it is a rocket ship that will shoot a lot of line. It also has more reserve power for long casts, and most anglers feel this action has better accuracy on long casts. A full-flex rod is great for short casts and light tippets; because the rod bends so much it acts as a superb shock absorber. It’s also more fun with small fish because the rod bends so easily. A mid-flex rod, naturally, is somewhere in between and is a great compromise between close-in accuracy and power for distance.
You might find you like one action type for all your rods. That’s fine; one of the actions just might fit your personality and casting style. For instance, if you are a type-A person you might always want a tip-flex rod, and if it takes a life-threatening situation to get your pulse going, you might want a laid-back full-flex rod all the time. I prefer a tip-flex for saltwater fishing where I know I’ll have a lot of wind and will be forced to make frequent long casts. For small-stream trout fishing I like a real full-flex action. For basic trout fishing I like a mid-flex. Fortunately, reliable fly shops will let you “try before you buy” so if you’re not sure, you can experiment with different actions before you decide on the right one for you.
Fly casters often get frustrated when the fly catches the rod, fly, or leader on its path, and this happens most often on the forward cast. The first thing to check is the wind—make sure you don’t have a crosswind blowing the fly into your rod. With no wind to blame, the most common reason for this problem is a closed or “tailing” casting loop.
To understand what happens on a bad loop like this, you have to first see what happens on a good loop. Examining your own casting loop is tough. You’re not at a good angle to see what’s happening. My advice is to watch a good caster in action, either live or on a video. You see that a good casting loop on the forward cast looks like the letter J turned on its side, or a candy cane. As the forward cast unrolls, the bottom of the loop gets longer and the top gets shorter. In a good cast, the top loop always stays above the bottom loop. A tailing loop happens when the top of the loop drops below the bottom, and the fly catches on the line.
Tailing loops can be tough to correct, and the only therapy is practice. Some casters respond better to knowing what their hand and arm are doing wrong, and others find it easier to correct problems just by thinking about the rod and line. A tailing loop is usually caused by the caster using too much wrist on the forward cast, too soon. The weaker wrist muscles are better at giving the forward cast that final crisp snap, so when you make a forward cast, try to initiate the cast with your forearm and follow up with a wrist snap. If you find it easier to relate to what the rod and line are doing, remember that the tip of the rod has to get out of the way of the line quickly, and the best way to do this is to concentrate on pointing the rod straight out in front of you, at waist level, as quickly as possible.
A nice loop like this one won’t catch on itself.
The flip answer to this question is, “You are doing something wrong on your cast,” but, truly, almost anything you do wrong will give you puddles of line instead of a nice straight cast. However, two errors are the most likely suspects. First, examine a bad cast and determine if the line is piling right in front of the rod tip, or if it’s slamming on the water some distance out from your position.
Line piling right in front of you is almost always caused by a poor back cast and then not putting enough quick power into the forward cast. When you practice casting, turn around and watch your back cast every time. Not putting enough power into the back cast, or dropping the rod tip too far behind you, dumps the line below the tip of the rod so that it can never form a good casting loop on the forward cast. Once you are able to drive the line up and behind you so that the line at the end of the back cast is straight and parallel to the water, it’s a simple matter to point the tip of the rod quickly in front of you. It’s hard to make a bad forward cast with a great back cast.
Line slamming into the water, surprisingly, does not come from too much power on the forward cast. It comes from aiming the tip of the rod at the water rather than straight out over the water. If the tip of your rod never drops below a horizontal angle on the forward cast, you can put as much power as you want to in the cast—your line will never slam on the water.
Great casters make full use of the rod’s bend to develop casting energy.
Before you decide which direction to fish, you should have a basic strategy in mind. Will you be fishing primarily with a dry fly, nymph, wet fly, or streamer? Dry flies are best fished at an upstream angle to prevent drag, and because dry-fly fishing is usually practiced in shallow water where fish can see the surface, working against the current keeps you behind the fish, in the blind spot in their rear quarters. Swing a wet fly or a streamer on a downstream angle, and by working slowly downstream, you can cover all the likely water by swinging the fly across the current, taking a few steps downstream, and repeating the process.
You can fish nymphs at almost any angle you can think of, depending on water conditions and the rig you’re using. The most popular way to fish nymphs is across-stream, casting on a slight upstream angle, so when fishing them you can move either upstream or downstream. If the water is shallow it’s a good idea to work upstream, as you would with a dry fly, so you can sneak up on the fish. If the water is swift and it’s too much work to constantly fight the current, you may prefer to move slowly downstream.
This angler is swinging a wet fly downstream, making a few steps between each cast so he covers all the water.
Most fish are lost at the strike or during the final moments of landing. The rest of the stuff in between might be exciting, but it’s not where many fish are lost. To be sure of landing a fish, the best approach is to have a buddy with a net, preferably the long-handled variety so your assistant doesn’t have to get so close to the fish or swipe the water for the fish. In a current, get your buddy downstream of your position, and once the fish gets in close, move your rod tip off to the side and downstream while the net handler holds the net under water. As soon as the fish passes above the net, a quick upward sweep captures it with a minimum of fuss. Swiping at a fish with a net is a quick path to a broken leader.
Without a friend with a net, assuming you have one yourself, try to lead the fish upstream of your position with the tip of the rod, reach out and place the net under water, and then let the fish drift back in the current and lift the net under the fish. If you find yourself without a net and connected to a very large fish (or a fish that won’t fit into the puny net you’re carrying), the best approach is to beach the fish. Scan the shore for a shallow beach where you can lead the fish until it gets into water so shallow that is has to turn on its side. Once it does, you can back up and slide it easily into shallower water where it can’t move at all.
During a close-quarters battle, whether from a boat in deep water or in a current while wading, remember that a fish can only swim in the direction its head is pointing. It is not easy merely to crank in a big fish, and it requires a lot less force to just turn the fish’s head. Keeping the rod high over your head and pointed directly at the fish gives the fish only one option—to swim away from you and down, and any time the fish gains distance from you the fight will be longer. Keeping your rod to one side or another leads the fish back and forth, but it has to swim on an angle toward you if you keep its head pointed in your direction.
The best way to land a big fish in fast water is to have someone hold the net underwater and lead the fish over the top of the net.
The easiest way to describe drag is to demonstrate when it is absent. Throw a twig into moving water and watch how it floats—it moves at the mercy of each little micro-current on the surface, never cutting across currents of different speed. This is how an insect drifts. Few insects have the power to swim contrary to any amount of current, and the movements they do make are tiny hops and pirouettes, not enough to throw off a wake. A fly that creates a wake telegraphs a message to a feeding fish that the object in question is not food because it does not behave like the rest of the insects.
When attached to a leader, a fly can streak across currents when the leader or line is in a different current than the fly. This will happen, eventually, on every cast you make, and avoiding drag is merely ameliorating what must happen when something is attached to a floating object. Drag can be very overt, when you can see the wake from thirty feet away, or it can be minuscule, arising from tiny current threads and invisible to an observer just a few feet from the fly. But trout can always see it.
The best way to avoid drag is to fish in uniform currents and cast straight upstream. If the line and leader float at exactly the same speed as the fly, drag won’t develop until the fly is almost even with your rod tip. But fishing straight upstream is often not practical or even desirable, because on a long drift it puts your fly line right on top of the fish. So most times when fishing with a dry fly or nymph we cast at an angle that is somewhere between straight upstream and directly across the current. At this angle you’ll often get a decent drag-free float for four or five feet. However, you’ll often be faced with trout feeding in slow water along the far bank and fast water between you and the fish, so without some tricky moves you might get only an inch of drag-free float. Here are some of the tricks to use, either alone or in combination:
• Change positions. Often just moving a few feet will give you a longer drag-free float.
• Instead of fishing quartering upstream, fish quartering downstream. If you can, also make a quick mend upstream just before your line hits the water. This is called a reach cast, and that upstream arc in your line has to invert before the fly drags.
• Add an extra-long tippet to your leader. The tippet will land in loose coils, which will have to straighten before your fly begins to drag.
• Make a sloppy cast. By this I don’t mean one that slams on the water, but an underpowered cast of controlled sloppiness that throws big piles of slack line on the water. You’ll have to cast more line than you think you need because some of your line will be taken up in the loose piles on the water.
People drown every year while wading in rivers. Most of these accidents are preventable. The first rule is to always wear a wader belt. Waders with air trapped inside them are quite buoyant (no, you won’t float upside down and drown; Lee Wulff proved that eighty years ago by jumping off a bridge while wearing waders) and by keeping the belt tightly cinched around your waist, you’ll hold a lot of air inside. Besides, in a moderate spill you’ll only get wet from the waist up.
The best way to fish a treacherous river like this is to shuffle your feet slowly, keep your profile sideways to the current, and never wade downstream when you don’t know what’s below you.
In addition, keep these tips in mind to avoid an accident:
• When crossing fast water, always angle upstream. You will be sure you can retrace your steps to safety, whereas if you wade downstream in fast current and find yourself pushed into a deep hole, you may not be able to retreat.
• The best places to cross are in riffles and the tails of pools, where the water is shallowest.
• Keep your profile sideways to the current to present less resistance to the water.
• Use a wading staff, which adds amazing security and balance to your wading. If you don’t have one and need to cross some raging currents, find a hefty stick to use as a temporary staff. It’s like growing a third leg.
• Shuffle your feet along the bottom, making sure your forward foot has a secure spot before moving your other foot forward.
• Look for patches of sand and gravel, which typically show up as lighter spots on the bottom. They are much easier to negotiate than rounded boulders. (It goes without saying that you should wear polarized glasses so you can see below the surface better.)
A good cast requires a nice follow-through of the rod tip, with it ending up comfortably at waist level, parallel to the water. This is especially important when practicing, as there seems to be a natural tendency to then point the tip back up to about the ten o’clock position. I think this comes from those of us who learned to fish with a spinning rod before we learned fly casting. But this causes problems most times, as when the tip is up there swinging in the breeze it moves the line backward from where you just carefully placed it with your cast, and it leaves a big loop of line in front of you to be shoved around by the wind.
In all cases when fishing in still water, saltwater or fresh, your rod tip should move down to the surface of the water after casting. Here you have more control over your fly line, and in fact some bonefish guides recommend that you put the tip just under the surface of the water and keep it there when retrieving your fly. When fishing moving water, if you are swinging a fly downstream or making a long cast in uniform current, then again your rod tip should be held low. However, if you’re fishing in places with lots of swirling currents, or if the place your fly lands is in a different current lane than where you’re standing, it makes sense to hold the rod higher—high enough to keep the different current between you and your fly isolated from the fly line.
A low rod tip like this keeps your line under control, especially when fishing a streamer.
Unlike humans, trout do not like variety in their diets. Feeding exposes them to predators, and eating something novel that may or may not provide useful calories could be a waste of energy. So they eat what is safe, which means familiar or abundant prey. Of course they do experiment or they’d never find a new source of food, but if a recognizable morsel is available they’ll invariably choose it.
So when a particular species of insect is hatching in great numbers, trout may pay attention only to something that is similar in size, shape, and color, ignoring everything else. In that case you will do best trying to match the hatch. However, during the course of most days trout feed on a number of species of insects, crustaceans, and baitfish, and in that case they’ll strike a wide variety of flies as long as the flies are within a range of what they’ve eaten recently. For example, several weeks after a killing frost has retired all the grasshoppers for the season, I’ve been able to tempt trout with a grasshopper imitation. From my experience I’ve found that trout keep the memory of a prey item as “safe” for about three weeks.
There are times when your fly has to be close to the natural, as this sparkle dun is to the natural mayfly. But many times it’s not as critical, especially when a number of different insects are on the water.
Sometimes there may be several insects hatching at the same time and trout may be picking off all of them. In that case, chances are if you fish a fly that looks at least close to one of the bugs you see on the water and your presentation is realistic, you’ll do okay. So unless trout are feeding heavily and there appears to be only one insect present, you may not have to worry about matching the hatch.
The natural place to look for trout around a big rock in the middle of a river is behind the rock, where the fish are protected from the brunt of the current. However, the force of the current also digs a trench in front of a midstream rock and along its sides, and a cushion of low-velocity water also builds up in front of a rock. Trout will lie in all of these places, so when fishing around big rocks it’s important to make accurate casts behind a rock first, then a few casts to each side, and finally in front of the rock. By starting downstream behind the rock first you’ll avoid spooking trout in front of the rock with your fly line.
In most trout streams, nymph fishing is the most reliable way to catch trout. Surface feeding exposes trout to predators, so unless enough insects cover the surface to make this risk worthwhile, trout stay deeper in the water column and pluck food at their level. The best way to get started in nymph fishing is with a strike indicator, because not only will it let you see when fish take your fly, it will also give you an idea of where your fly is drifting, and whether your artificial is dragging across currents in an unnatural way.
Try to keep your initial nymph rig as simple as possible. Tie a weighted nymph or a beadhead pattern to the end of your tippet and then attach a strike indicator on the upper part of your leader. The indicator should be one and a half to two times the water depth up on your leader because the fly seldom hangs straight down, and you want your fly to be suspended a few feet off the bottom. Cast at an upstream angle and watch the indicator like a heron stalking fry in the shallows. If it hesitates, wiggles, or darts upstream, set the hook instantly—it’s easy to miss unseen strikes to a nymph, so better safe than sorry.
The Copper John is one of the most popular nymphs used, and features a wire body, brass head, peacock feathers for the thorax, and partridge feathers for the legs.
Nymphs seldom drift as deep as you think, so if you don’t hang up on the bottom on a dozen casts, you are probably not fishing deep enough. To get deeper, either move the strike indicator higher on your leader or add a couple split shot to the tippet about ten inches above the fly. Once you feel comfortable with a nymph rig, add a second fly by tying sixteen inches of tippet to the bend of the upper hook and adding a second fly to this piece. Two weighted flies often help you get deeper without adding shot to the tippet, and you can fish two different patterns to find out which one the trout prefer.
Whenever you see trout rising, it’s important to figure out what insects are on the water, not what bugs you see flying. Often, one type of insect is hatching while another variety is migrating upstream, and the ones most visible to you may not be on the water at all. This is particularly common with caddisflies, because these moth-like aquatic insects, while very important to trout, live for weeks after they hatch and migrate upstream in clouds that sometimes obscure the far bank. If you see caddisflies in the air, moving purposefully upstream in a straight line, chances are they’re migrating. If you see them flying in a slow, erratic pattern, or if you see them bouncing on the water’s surface, they are more likely to be hatching or returning to the water to lay eggs, and thus available to the trout.
Often you’ll find a large insect hatching along with smaller, more abundant ones. It’s natural to pay more attention to the bigger fly (and perhaps also wishful thinking because big flies are easier to see), but if the smaller flies are more abundant, the trout may be eating them and ignoring the big juicy ones. It doesn’t make sense to us, but when trout zero in on one insect they may ignore all others, despite how good the big ones look.
you can tell a lot about what a trout is eating by the way it rises. This brown trout (can you spot it just to the left of the rise?) is probably taking something very small or an emerging insect in the surface film because the rise is very subtle.
Try to watch a fish rising to see what it takes. This is not as easy as it sounds, but if you can find a fish that is rising steadily, focus in on that spot until you can figure out what the fish are taking. Some anglers carry a pair of pocket-sized binoculars just for this purpose. If you see a fish rising to what appear to be invisible insects, there are three possibilities:
1. The fish is eating tiny, dark insects that are too small to see from your vantage point. Try a small, dark fly.
2. The fish is eating insects that ride low in the surface film. These could be spent mayfly spinners, egg-laying caddisflies, ants, or beetles. If it’s evening, try a size 16 Rusty Spinner (this fly imitates a ton of mayfly spinners and is a good bet anywhere in the country). If it’s during the day, try a size 18 ant or size 14 beetle.
3. The fish is eating emerging insects just under the surface. If you don’t see any bubbles along with the rise form, this is often the case. Fish an emerger, or don’t false cast your dry fly so it drifts just under the surface.
The thought of learning entomology scares many would-be fly fishers as it dredges up memories of high-school science class. Is it helpful to learn a little basic aquatic entomology? Absolutely, because different groups of aquatic insects have different life histories and different behavior, and knowing, for instance, that most stoneflies crawl to the shallows to hatch and don’t ride the current when hatching might save you from needlessly fishing a stonefly dry fly, even if you see a lot of them in the air.
As you learn about these insects, you naturally learn more about their life history, and when you understand the behavior of trout prey as well as trout, you’ll develop a canny instinct for predicting what the fish will do next. My advice is to learn at least to identify the four most important orders of insects and then learn a little about their life histories. These four orders are mayflies, caddisflies, stoneflies, and midges. Learning to identify the adults in the air and the larvae when you turn over rocks in a river is not hard and may even add to your enjoyment and appreciation of all aquatic life.
• Mayflies fly slowly after they hatch and look like sailboats on the water and tiny butterflies in the air. The nymphs have threadlike gills along the abdomen.
• Caddisflies skip and bounce on the water when hatching and look like moths in the air. Most caddis larvae build cases of stones and sticks, although some common species don’t build cases. These “free-living” larvae usually look like green or tan grubs. All caddisflies have a brief pupa stage between the larva and adult stages that is not often seen but is very important to trout.
• Stoneflies are clumsy fliers in the air, and two pairs of wings are visible as they fly. The nymphs are fat with thick legs and tails, and crawl onto rocks along the shore to hatch.
• Midges are tiny insects with only one pair of wings and look like gnats in the air and on the water. The larvae look like tiny worms and are often bright red or green. Like caddisflies, they have a brief pupa stage and the pupae are typically dark brown or black and very appealing to trout.
It’s pretty easy to figure out what fly to use when fish are rising because you often observe what insect the fish are eating. However, if you suspect trout are feeding underwater on nymphs, the clues aren’t so obvious. One of the first things to do is to turn over some rocks to see what kind of aquatic insects are present. The best rocks to check are fat ones in riffed water because these are more hospitable for larvae. Many nymphs migrate to the shallows before hatching, so check the rocks closest to shore. Better yet, carry a small aquarium net and stir up a small bit of gravel and stones with your feet, holding the net just downstream to pick up the animals that get dislodged. The reason this is better than just turning over rocks is that some insects bury themselves in the gravel or silt and don’t live on the underside of rocks, and seining in this way may turn up crustaceans like crayfish or baitfish like sculpins.
If a little olive mayfly nymph is the most common one you see when sampling the stream bed, choose your imitation accordingly.
Now it’s a simple matter to poke through your fly box for a fly that is about the same size and color as one of the critters you’ve dislodged. The most abundant one is your best bet, even if it isn’t the biggest, juiciest one you see. If that doesn’t work, try an imitation of the next most abundant creature.
If all else fails, just try some of the most popular artificial nymphs until you find one that works. Over the years, flies get popular because they work well in trout waters throughout the world, as the insects from a trout stream in New Zealand are not that different from the bugs in a California mountain stream. You can’t go wrong with a size 14 Beadhead Hare’s Ear, a size 12 Prince Nymph, or a size 18 Pheasant Tail Nymph. One of those will work most days in any trout stream in the world.
Behavioral studies of trout have shown that they prefer current speeds of about ten to twelve inches per second, which is about the speed of a slow walk. Try pacing it out with your foot. However, while they like to lie in water of this speed, they also like to be on the edge of a faster current, because the faster the current, the quicker food is brought to them. Thus the best place to find trout is where fast currents meet slower water, known as a seam. You can see these obvious breaks on the edges of fast surface currents, but there are also hidden seams below the surface.
Hidden seams are found on stream bottoms with rough texture, because each rock on the bottom makes turbulence and slows the downstream progress of currents. Thus, a piece of water studded with large boulders will hold more trout than one with a smooth sand or gravel bottom. The friction of water running along a bank creates a seam as well, and here, too, a bank with a rough or uneven shoreline will hold more trout than a smooth bank where the current runs swift and unbroken.
This angler is fishing to the other side of a distinct seam where fast water meets slower current.
Changes in depth also create hidden seams. Any place deep water meets shallow will be likely to hold feeding trout, as long as the shallow side is at least eight inches deep. Trout will feed in surprisingly shallow water if not disturbed, and if threatened they can quickly dart back into the depths to hide.
The hooks used in most trout flies are small and very sharp. Trout jaws are almost the perfect medium for sinking a hook, and if you have trouble setting the hook, the problem could be your Reflexes—but it could also be the fish. Trout quickly detect the fraud in our flies, and unlike when caught with bait, they eject a fly in a flash. If you don’t set the hook the moment a trout takes your fly, you’ll miss the opportunity. They won’t wait around gumming your fly until you get your act together. Striking to a trout is simple—just raise your rod tip enough to take all of the slack out of your line and tighten the line until you feel resistance—no more, or you can risk breaking the tippet.
If you keep missing fish and are sure you’re striking quickly enough, it may be the trout and not you. A trout that moves to a dry fly but changes its mind at the last minute because it doesn’t like the fly or sees it suddenly begin to drag still has forward momentum and can’t put on the brakes quickly enough. What happens is that the trout splashes at your fly with its mouth closed. We call this a refusal, and it means you were close but not close enough. Change your casting angle to avoid drag or try a fly one size smaller if you think you are getting refusals.
Trout also chase streamers, and sometimes seem only to want to move that obnoxious, gaudy thing out of their territory. They sometimes just bump the fly or even throw a cross-body block at it without connecting. Try fishing the same fly slower or faster, which seems to be more productive than changing flies.
Setting the hook on trout is a matter of just lifting the tip of the rod enough to tighten the line.
In most dry fly and nymph fishing, the best presentation is a dead drift, which means the fly moves at exactly the same speed as the current, no slower and no faster. When swinging a wet fly in the current for steelhead, salmon, or trout, the best presentation is usually obtained by having the fly line in a straight line as it swings in the current. And when fishing a sinking-tip fly line, it’s important to keep the floating portion of your line from pulling on the weighted part because the floater will draw the sinking part back to the surface. Forty feet of fly line cast across several different currents never behaves the way you want it to, and this is where mends come in handy.
Making a mend is easier than deciding when and where to use one. If you make a cast straight across a uniform current, you’ll see that the line in the middle of the cast begins to move downstream faster than the line that is held close to the rod tip, and faster than the fly and leader, which are slowed down by resistance to the water. As a result, as the line swings round, the fly begins to accelerate like the end of a whip. A little acceleration at the end of a swing is sometimes desirable, but left unattended it’s too abrupt to appeal to most fish. By reaching out with the rod and making a quick flip upstream, you can straighten the fly line, or actually move the arc upstream in a mirror image of itself, depending on how much you want the swing to slow down or how deep you want your sinking-tip fly line to descend.
There may be times when you want a downstream mend, especially when your fly lands in fast water and the current between you and the fly is slower. In this case you mend in the opposite, downstream direction. Mends can be done with a stiff arm, a quick flip of the wrist, or a combination of the two. The more line you have to mend, the longer your rod should reach and the higher you’ll have to reach with the rod. It doesn’t matter how you do it as long as you move the line without moving the fly.
When faced with a fat expanse of water with no current, even experienced fly fishers panic. Lakes are not as easy to read as rivers, trout can be anywhere because there are no currents to keep them pinioned to one spot, and in lakes you have both geography and depth to worry about. Local knowledge is best, but there are a few tips that can help you narrow down the possibilities.
• Scan the lake surface with binoculars for rising fish early in the morning or right before dark. Chances are any trout that are hungry will come to the surface then looking for hatching insects.
• Inlets and outlets are always hotspots in lakes. Trout spawn in moving water in spring and fall, and inlets bring in hatches of insects.
• In the cold water of early and late season, look for trout in shallows where the water is warmer than the depths.
• Springs coming into a lake will attract trout in both cold and warm water, as springs are warmer than lake water in the early spring and colder during the summer. If springs aren’t obvious, put a thermometer on a long string and take temperatures close to the bottom at various places.
• Submerged weed beds hold more insect life than sand or rock bottoms, so look for trout close to aquatic vegetation.
Inlets and outlets are always hotspots in lakes.
Too many anglers spend too much time worrying about fly pattern and not enough thinking about presentation.”
—Ted Trueblood,
“Fish and Fishing” Department,
Field & Stream, May, 1947
In what it called the “Ultimate Lure Survey,” published in March 2008, Field & Stream magazine asked 1,000 of its hard-core readers to name their favorite lures. The winners for the Trout category were:
In-Line Spinners, 65%, Mepps Aglia
Spoons, 15%, Little Cleo
Jigs, 9%, Marabou Jig
Soft-Plastics, 6%, Berkley Gulp! Worm
Plugs, 4%, Original Rapala
Beautiful to look at, the great blue heron is universally disliked by trout anglers who see the bird as a poacher on their favorite fish—especially after they have seen ugly holes in the backs of trout. Stop to consider the heron’s fishing tactics, however, and you might see your own catches improve dramatically. Regard the heron as it lands in a likely spot, wades into position, then stands rock-still as the minutes go by—minute after minute, patiently waiting, for as long as it takes. Emulate this strategy on water holding trout that are either feeding or lying in the current. As you try to approach the trout and get into good casting position, they will spook. The trick is to get into position and, just like the heron, get your fly ready in your hand, get enough line out to cast, keeping it and your rod tip low and away from the fish, and wait … and wait … and wait. Sooner or later the fish will go back to feeding or lying in the current where they were before. Bingo.
In a Web site centered around fishing Pennsylvania’s legendary spring creeks, such as the Letort, www.limestoner.com writer Gene Macri comes up with what he titles, “How to Get 10 Years Fly Fishing Experience Immediately.” Macri’s system is based on studying the surface of your favorite spring creek with binoculars. You will see the bugs, what they’re doing and not doing, and the trout, what they’re doing and not doing, in a way you’ve never imagined.
“The big hatches are over, trout are well-fed and spooky. What’s going to bring them to the surface? The answer may surprise you…. Anglers bombard the water with hoppers when another insect is far more important. That insect is the beetle. Scientific studies reveal that terrestrial beetles are three to seven times more common in trout diets than grasshoppers … most anglers don’t imitate them, so trout haven’t seen a plethora of fake beetles.”
—Jeff Morgan, in the article “Meeting the Late Summer Challenge,” www.westfly.com. Get Morgan’s new book The Oddballs: Productive Trout Flies for Unorthodox Prey, Amato Publications, 2010, at www.amazon.com. Also check out his previous book, Small-Stream Fly Fishing, Amato Publications, 2005.
“I became a beetle addict after seeing how well they work on highly pressured summer trout water such as the Henry’s Fork, the Yellowstone region, the Green River, and the many streams in the Missoula area. No other patterns brought the consistent success and confident rises that beetle imitations elicited.”
—Jeff Morgan, in the article “Meeting the Late Summer Challenge,” www.westfly.com. Get Morgan’s new book The Oddballs: Productive Trout Flies for Unorthodox Prey, at www.amazon.com. Also check out his previous book, Small-Stream Fly Fishing.
“Most anglers have little confidence in a pair of Size 20 nymphs in a 200-foot-wide trout stream. To overcome this reluctance, use tiny nymphs behind something a little meatier, such as a Pupatator. [The Pupatator is Jeff Morgan’s buggy-looking nymph creation.] My standard ‘starting’ rig on new waters is a Size 8 Pupatator, a Size 16 rusty or olive beadhead Hares Ear, and a Size 20 Blue-Winged Olive nymph, Brassie, or scud. This allows me to cover an array of foods in a spectrum of colors and sizes. Once one fly outshines the others, I can then retool my approach with what-ever the trout are keying on.”
—Jeff Morgan, in one of the regular articles he
writes for www.westfly.com
In fast water, even big trout will grab prey that comes floating by.
© Stu Apte 2010
Small streams that flow into some of the best wilderness streams don’t have the amounts of food and insect life of the large rivers. The water is swift, and the trout will quickly grab prey floating into view. Some anglers mistakenly think these trout are stupid, but they’re not. They’re just hungry. Use floating flies like Royal Coachmen, Stimulators, and Humpies.
When tying a dropper leader to a dry fly or strike indicator, make the dropper in a lighter strength than your main leader. When you hit a snag, you’re better off losing the dropper fly instead of your whole rig.
When it’s to be tied to a dry fly, most experts and top guides prefer dropper leaders in the 18-inch range. Much shorter, and you’ll be fishing too shallow. Much longer, and you might as well be using a strike indicator instead of a dry fly.
It’s easy—and somewhat fashionable—to fall under the spell of trout anglers who preach the gospel of using the shortest rod possible. They point to its ease of casting under trees and brush, and to the sense of feel you get from a fighting fish. Long rod disciples are out there, however, arguing that short rods leave too much line on the water, more than you can handle with ease. One of the best of the Long Rod contingent was Leonard Wright, superb angler and writer, who once did an article in Sports Afield called, “Long Live the Long Rod.” (February 1974). In it, Wright said, “The most overrated piece of fishing equipment in America today is the short fly rod.”
Most trout guides tie the dropper leader to the bend of the dry fly hook. Some tie it directly to the eye of the dry fly hook. My personal choice is to use the bend.
Whether your dry fly is one to search the water, or one to match a specific hatch, make sure it’s large enough, and buoyant enough, to give your dropper leader and nymph a good floating platform, visible throughout its drift. If your dry fly is too small, or your nymph too large and heavy, you’ll defeat your entire purpose.
Back in September 1951, Ted Trueblood wrote a remarkable, ground-breaking article for Sports Afield. In the story, called “A New Theory of Flies and Leaders,” Trueblood described dyeing his leaders in the kitchen sink to imitate string moss, which did not seem to spook trout in his rivers. He experimented with green and brown dye with pinches of blue. A few days later he went to Silver Creek. He caught and released 21 trout on 2X. He went on with his experiments and found that, “In most waters I found I could hook fish on tippets a full size larger, and occasionally two sizes larger, than before.” In the article, which has been reprinted in the book Sports Afield Treasury of Trout Fishing, The Lyons Press (1989), Trueblood also has some startling observations on flies trout take. “Except during the spawning season, all activity of trout is governed by two overwhelming stimuli: fear and hunger. They are hungry most of the time, the severe cold season excepted.” Trueblood maintained that trout will take almost any fly, as long as it looks like something to eat and they aren’t frightened by the leader.
“Mayfly adults provide a lesson in life. In no other insect is the adult stage so brief and with such singular purpose. We must appreciate its qualities as we might a sunset, for too quickly will it be gone. And we must appreciate, also, that a whole sport has grown up around it.”
—Jay Cassell, “Mayfly Artistry,”
Sports Afield, May 1982
Every year when I’m in the deep clutches of winter, I enjoy receiving the catalog from Craig Mathews Blue Ribbon Flies out in West Yellowstone, Montana (www.blueribbonflies.com.) They always come up with some new flies that snag my attention, and I particularly enjoy reading Mathews’ rundown of his experiences in the previous season. Mathews and his associate, John Juracek, have some great books and DVDs, along with detailed maps for fishing the Yellowstone area.
Among the lessons about trout fishing that have cost me considerable gobs of both time and money, one of the most important has been the realization that even on those rare days when hatches occur, they do not happen everywhere. Don’t expect the entire surface of the river to burst with emerging caddis and mayflies. Hatches occur—when they occur—in scattered sections of the river, in varying water types. A riffle, a smooth glide, a deep pool—all might harbor hatches at different and varying times. You might have great fishing in hatches at one small section of the river at dusk, then meet your buddy at the truck later and learn that he saw nothing—no rises. Big rivers or small streams, that’s the way it goes.
Stu Apte loves trout fishing almost as much as he does fishing for tarpon and bonefish. His favorite strategy is to fish part of a big river or small stream upstream with dry flies, then take a break and rig for nymphs and streamers and fish back downstream. This system can be particularly effective when you’re fishing dries early in the morning, then switching to nymphs and heading back downstream as the sun gets overhead.
The name rings with promise—Big Sky Fishing. And the Web site, www.bigskyfishing.com, delivers with superb information and coverage of high-country rivers and lakes.
You would think that my years in magazine editing, particularly those at Sports Afield and Outdoor Life, would have seen me working with writers on the Skwala hatch out in the high country, but I missed it. Many top guides and anglers have not been missing out, however, and on rivers like Montana’s Bitterroot this hatch of stoneflies in March (lasting into April) signals the beginning of some serious trout angling. The hatches are sparse and localized, but the action is good in pockets when you find them. This is cold weather fishing, of course, so wear gloves, base layers, the works. Check outfitters and guides all over the high West to learn how you might cash in and kick off your season. Flies include Olive Stimulators and Skwala Stones and custom patterns like the Designated Hitter Skwala Stone from The Fly Shop, www.theflyshop.com.
Located in Redding, California, The Fly Shop is one of angling’s premier spots to find every thing you need, from flies to great destinations. Their catalog is second to none, and their Web site, www.theflyshop.com, has it all. I particularly like their flies—always some interesting new patterns there.
You may risk being scorned, laughed at, even cursed at, but at times you might be so fed up with your lousy luck fly fishing for trout that you feel like nuking them. That’s when you long for a fly imitating trout food pellets. Now you can buy one—at The Fly Shop, www.theflyshop.com. Their Pellet Fly is listed under Stoneflies and Attractors, Size 10, $1.75 at this writing.
A fly that you use all the time can actually be a pretty good imitation of a trout pellet. It’s the Muddler Minnow, which, in its small sizes, has a predominate, bulbous head that looks very pellet-like. Whether you’re thinking “Trout Pellet” or not, the Muddler in small sizes is a terrific fly to fish, dry or sinking.
“The fish in the tail shallows were nymphing, and they hovered just under the surface, drifting forward restlessly in the current when they took something in the flow. Their mouths would open lazily, expelling water past their gills, and flashing white each time they intercepted a hatching nymph.”
—Ernest Schwiebert, “The Mill at Longparish” in
Death of a Riverkeeper, Dutton, 1980
Do everything you possibly can to find a small trout stream tucked away among the hills and mountains—the Appalachians, the Rocky Mountain high country, the New England ranges, the midwest forests, the northwest peaks. Once you find a stream that’s just right, lots of clean water and trout (most of them won’t be big, but so what?), completely isolated, enjoy it to the hilt as often as you can by strapping on a small backpack that has everything you need for a full day’s fishing, pick up your light rod, and go. If you’ve never done this, I hope you give it a try. Someday you’ll thank me!
Writer, fly tier and creator, and expert angler Jeff Morgan says in his book Small-Stream Fly Fishing, Frank Amato Publications (2005), that his favorite technique for fishing streamers in small streams is “sinfully easy.” He crimps a split-shot near the eye of his fly and uses a floating line with 8 feet of 4X tippet. The fly is fished straight downstream. For other Jeff Morgan tips, see his archived articles at the WestFly Internet site, www.westfly.com, and see his newest book, Productive Trout Flies for Unorthodox Prey: The Oddballs, Frank Amato Publications (2009). See Amazon for listings of Jeff’s other books.
Small streams can give up some surprisingly big trout.
Those who share my interest in great writing will be applauding Fly Rod & Reel magazine’s first collection of stories that have been recognized over the years in the Robert Traver Award competition. Published by Fly Rod & Reel Books in 2009, the softcover book called In Hemingway’s Meadow includes eighteen original tales of fly fishing. Since 1994, the award has gone to stories and essays in honor of the late John Voelker, who used the pen name Robert Traver on such trout classics as Trout Madness, St. Martin’s Press (1960), and the best-selling novel Anatomy of a Murder, St. Martin’s Press (1958). The title of this collection references the “meadow” where Hemingway’s “Nick” camped in his immortal story, “Big Two-Hearted River,” and is from the award-winning story by Jeff Day. The book was edited by Joe Healy. You can find it at places like the fly-fishing site, The Book Mailer, www.thebookmailer.com, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon, or by going to www.flyrodreel.com.
You help your dry flies float with a little flotation spray or powder, so remember to do the same to flotation devices like strike indicators.
It’s frustrating, but there it is: Another angler is ahead of you on the stream. Unless you’re going to leap frog far ahead of him (not just the next pool), you’re better off doing two things: 1) Rest the water for a few minutes, if you can; and 2) Use different tactics than the angler ahead of you, provided you can see what he’s doing. If he’s fishing a dry fly, go to nymphs and streamers. If he’s ripping streamers through the pools, try a dry fly with a nymph dropper.
Handling awkward sink-tip and full-sink lines on small streams is unnecessary. Use tiny split-shot or beaded sinking flies to get down when you have to.
In his outstanding book Small-Stream Fly Fishing, Frank Amato Publications (2005), Jeff Morgan questions the wisdom of putting certain flies on your dropper attached to a dry fly. Since your attached nymph will be riding 18 to 24 inches (the preferred length of the dropper leader) below the surface—not on the bottom—the nymph being used should represent a fly found in mid-currents, not on the bottom. The flies Jeff says he avoids for using on the dropper—because they’re bottom-dwellers—are “stonefly nymphs, caddis larvae, midge larvae, sowbugs, fish eggs, aquatic worms, crane fly larvae, and most scuds.”
Fish small trout streams slowly and carefully in an upstream direction. Keep your casts short, popping your fly into tiny pockets. Short, accurate casts are everything.
Seams are places in the river current where a slight change-of-pace in the flow occurs between fast water and slow water. Imagine a rock in the stream. Think of the water rushing past on both sides as the fast lanes. The slow or still water behind the rock and directly in front are the slow lanes. Between the fast and slow lanes will be seams of intermediate flow, perfect for trout to ambush prey.
© Jay Cassell
New york – Pennsylvania fishing guide Gary edwards took this big brown that hit an ant pattern in the middle of a sulphur hatch.
His book of essays called Trout Bum started the John Gierach surge in angling reading popularity some years ago (the book has been republished several times since), and by now the surge has turned into a tsunami of books, all of which should be on your list for reading pleasure. Gierach not only takes you fishing with him in his home Colorado waters, but everywhere else where the fishing is interesting, even when it’s not always good. Gierach is the “everyman” trout writer, with engaging prose that makes you feel like you’ve met a friend for life. His books are everywhere, and likely some are in your local library.
Maine outdoorsman, writer, and painter Tom Hennessey gave me a tip on buying a full-sinking fly line—not a sinking tip or high density sinking, just a regular sinking line. Tom said he’s had better luck with sinking lines by dropping down in size one weight. For example, if your rod’s an 8, he’ll buy a 7 sinking line. It will cast much, much better, says Tom.
The fluorocarbon leaders cost a lot more than the traditional nylon. Are they worth the extra dough? You get greater strength, far less visibility. They’re perfect for the conditions when stealth counts for everything in your trout fishing—low, clear water and super-wary fish. There are a lot of anglers sneaking up on trout with fluorocarbon leaders these days.
Flowing up clean and cold from aquifers and chalk beds inside Mother Earth, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, spring creeks are worth every hour and every cent trout addicts spend to find and fish them. Here are trout you can see, prolific insect hatches, and easier wading than the rough-and-tumble freestone streams. They are tough to fish, but … so what? You can find plenty of them in Pennsylvania, scattered throughout the upper Midwest and far West, and in England the chalk streams are angling destinations to die for.
Running smooth and clear with no breaks or riffles to cover the sound of your wading or awkward casts, spring creeks are a challenge for any angler, especially the novice. They’re fun, yes, but challenging. Veteran angler and writer Ted Leeson describes the situation in his wonderful book, Jerusalem Creek, The Lyons Press (2002): “Nothing about a spring creek hides your presence or want of skill, or a faulty presentation or the inadequacies of tackle or miscalculations of method.”
One of the most frustrating experiences in trout fishing is to find yourself in the midst of a big hatch of insects, with trout taking them eagerly, and you just can’t seem to get the right fly onto them. This happens all the time with hatches like the tiny Tricos. Instead of letting frustration overwhelm you, try putting on a fly that totally changes the pace of what’s going on. Use a No. 16 Royal Wulff or Fan-Winged Royal Coachman, for instance, or a buggy terrestrial imitation. And there’s always room for the Adams, the go-to fly when nothing else is working. The Stimulator ranks high with go-to flies also.
“Spring creek trout have a reputation for being moody, which often means they are difficult, but when they’re in the mood to feast, almost nothing—not sloppy wading, not poor casting, not a ridiculous choice of flies—will dissuade them.”
—Ted Leeson, Jerusalem Creek,
The Lyons Press, 2002
The farther you get from a road, the better the fishing is going to be.
“I am nymphing a favorite run of broken water, using a weighted Perla Stonefly Nymph with a splitshot crimped to the leader 6 inches up to get it down quickly in the fast water. I use a tuck cast to further enhance the nymph’s entry to the water. A cast developed by George Harvey and made famous by his friend, another local fishing fishing legend, Joe Humphrey.”
—Chuck Robbins, writer and guide, in his Pennsylvania
fishing days recalled in his first book, Odyssey at Limestone Creek, Tussey Mountain Publisher (1997).
Chuck now guides and writes in Montana. See www.chuckngalerobbins.com
No one especially likes fishing in the rain—and thunderstorms are downright dangerous—but there are times when rain comes in just the right amounts at the right time to get trout moving and feeding. The rain washes all kinds of terrestrials and morsels into the stream, and the trout go after them with vigor. The only way you’ll find out if it’s a “good rain” or “bad rain” is to be out there. Chances are you’ll have the stream to yourself. And, whatever you do, don’t miss the spots where other streams or runs pour into the main river.
The town of West Yellowstone—home of guides and tackleshops and the main entrance to Yellowstone National Park and its angling treasures—is not the only game in town. On the other side of Yellowstone, to the east, lies Cody, Wyoming, on the Shoshone River and entryway to the Shoshone National Forest and the eastern side of Yellowstone. Cody has the Buffalo Bill Museum and is home to Tim Wade’s North Fork Anglers, headquarters for fishing the Shoshone rivers and the park. Their site is www.northforkanglers.com. They have everything you need to crack into the Yellowstone region’s backside.
Some fishing tips seem so simple—like sharpening your hooks—that most people probably ignore them. A simple one that I hope you will not ignore is this: Fish where the road leaves the river. Walk to where the crowds don’t go, and you will be rewarded with better trout fishing. Most people will not walk there. They just won’t do it. At a health club I sometimes go to for workouts, I watch in fascination as people maneuver and jostle their cars into parking positions close to the front door. All that so they don’t have to walk a couple hundred feet across a big parking lot. Walking … to do the very thing they came to the club for, getting exercise. It makes no sense. Neither does not walking into the woods to fish where you can’t see the road. But that’s what people do.
In the West they have the glorious Pale Morning Dun hatches that fill the air with greenish-yellow bugs. In the East and upper Midwest, the highlight of the springtime hatches sees the arrival of a similar mayfly— the Sulphurs, most in the genus Ephemerella in various sizes with other Latin subtitles for those who take their fishing and fly-tying with textbook correctness. Where I fish, mostly in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, the hatches begin in mid-May, a week or so after the storied Hendricksons have played out. The party goes on until late in June, with the fishing getting tougher as it progresses.
The Sulphur hatches bring out anglers by the droves on eastern and mid-western trout streams. Try to catch the earliest Sulphur hatches you can to beat the crowds. Look for cloudy and rainy days to be the best for Sulphurs. As the hatch goes on, look for the best action to occur from late afternoon into the evening, almost dark.
Sulphurs aren’t the only mayflies you’ll see in late May. They come at the same time that Green Drakes, Brown Drakes, and Gray Drakes can be on the water. A friend returning from Spruce Creek in Pennsylvania, where he had gone to fish the famous Green Drake hatch, told me he did not do well until he figured out that the trout were rising to the Sulphurs, not the few Green Drakes showing.
“Most destination anglers don’t travel to the West during the off-season … I have recurrent dreams about the spring Baetis (Blue-Winged Olive) hatches along the upper Bighorn near Thermopolis, Wyoming, and the innocent, chubby rainbows and browns that rise freely to them. The pods of 18-inch trout that begin their first surface-feeding frenzies on the Missouri, alone and unmolested by boats and anglers, beckon. The newly restored Madison River with its reliable prerunoff flows and its superb wading flats and reliable hatches are high on my list of destinations, as is the lower Henry’s Fork around Ashton and other streams nearby. I have never hit a Mother’s Day hatch on the Yellowstone, or a giant stonefly or Skwala hatch either. But they are on my list of sparkling experiences that lie ahead.”
—John Randolph, Editor, Fly Fisherman Magazine, in the article “Spring Hatches,” in May 2004.
I once wrote a story for Sports Afield called “Mid-Stream Crisis.” It’s about, among other things, being slap in the middle of a great Sulphur hatch coming off just at dusk. A big fish broke me off. I had no reading glasses, no penlight or even flashlight, and I simply could not see well enough to tie on another fly. How can you call yourself an experienced angler and be so unprepared? Fish were rising and taking all about me as I sloshed out of the stream, excited, but sad in defeat.
“When Brian Clarke and I were engaged in writing The Trout and the Fly, we carried out many experiments with underwater cameras on fly lines … This proved, at least to us, that dull colors such as green or brown were far less fish scaring … ”
—John Goddard, John Goddard’s Trout-Fishing Techniques, Lyons and Burford, 1996
In his wonderful book The Ways of Trout, The Lyons Press (1985), the noted angler and author Leonard M. Wright, Jr., culminated years of research by nailing down the period when you can expect maximum trout feeding activity. The secret: the time when the water temperature is rising faster toward the optimum of 63 degrees. At 63 degrees, feeding activity slows, the blitz is over. Reveals Wright, “Fish feed best when the temperature gradient toward the optimum is steepest.” Wright found the reverse to also be true, fishing rising when the temperature is dropping back toward 63 after being much higher for hours.
“ … I have never recorded an ‘active,’ much less an ‘aggressive,’ rating for lights feeding during a low or falling barometer.” (“Lights” being Wright’s feeding pellets used on his home Never-sink River to study trout feeding habits.)
—Leonard M. Wright, Jr., The Ways of Trout, The Lyons Press (1985)
In his book John Goddard’s Trout-Fishing Techniques (1996), the noted British author John Goddard outlines why and how the following fly-casting techniques can help you catch fish. There are 13 very specific casts, ranging from “The Parachute Roll Cast,” through such casts as “The Deep-Water Tuck Cast,” “The Wet-Fly Swing Cast,” “The Puddle, Pile, or Parachute Cast,” “The Storm or Wind Cast,” “The Bow and Arrow Cast,” and “Curve Casts.” As you can see, the skill of casting with a fly rod can be a never-ending learning and experience process.
The surest sign a certain stretch of a trout stream or creek is a real hotspot for action is to see a few trucks or SUVs parked at a nearby opening in the woodlands. Such a visual tip means a lot more than the free advice you get in tackleshops.
In a strong current, wading upstream is best done with sideways steps. Lean your whole body into the flow slightly.
Noted Pennsylvania trout author Charles Meck did some serious testing on fluorocarbon leader tippets with his Patriot dry fly. What conclusions did he draw? “First, fluorocarbons appear to work. Second, use the finest fluorocarbon leader you can. Of course, there’s a tradeoff: If you use 6X and 7X you’re more likely to break off heavier trout.”
—Charles Meck, Fishing Limestone Streams, The Lyons Press, 2005
Continuing Charles Meck’s fluorocarbon tippet tests: “I did not catch any trout on the dry fly in that very clear water until I used a 5X fluorocarbon tippet. I caught even more trout on the Patriot dry fly when I used a 6X fluorocarbon. I feel confident that had I used a 7X fluorocarbon leader I would have done even better.”
—Charles Meck, Fishing Limestone Streams, The Lyons Press, 2005
It’s fun and easy to get into stocking up on trout flies just before you make a big, long-anticipated trip. If it’s to be a guided trip, however, do the family exchequer a favor and hold up on the flies until you arrive on the scene. Chances are the guides will have plenty of the ones you’ll really need.
To catch more trout on flies, concentrate on fishing beetle imitations, particularly June Bugs, not only in high summer, but throughout the season, from spring into winter. You can spend all the time (and money) you want trying to imitate the famous mayfly and caddis hatches, but beetles are what the trout are feeding on most of the time. Reporting in a fantastic article in Field & Stream, September 1955, called “Mr. Botz and The Beetle,” Angling Editor A. J. McClane discussed stomach contents taken from brown trout caught in New York’s Catskill Mountain streams in April, May, June, and September. Beetles, far and away, were the insects being digested. Make beetle imitations a mainstay of your trout fly offerings, and you’ll catch more fish. And don’t forget that many superstar flies like the Muddler Minnow may be mistaken for beetles by trout, along with other popular flies as well. McClane adds, “There’s no doubt in my mind that some of our standard wet-fly patterns, such as the Silver Doctor, Leadwing Coachman, and Black Gnat are mistaken for beetles by the trout.” McClane also puts the Royal Coachman in the same fish-taking category because of its appearance under certain light conditions.
Required in many trout streams, barbless hooks have a lot going for them in every form of light-tackle fishing, fresh and salt water. First, they are easy to extract when the angler sinks one into his hand or body. Second, they are easier to extract from the fish, allowing your catch to be released and live to fight another day. Finally, they sink deeper than barbed hooks, making most hookups just as effective as barbed hooks.
There are so many trout streams today that require barbless hooks, anglers need to be doubly on the alert to make sure the flies they are using in these waters are legal. Even after the barb has been mashed down with pliers, the hook may not pass the test. What tests? Fishermen in many states are confused over this issue and are asking for legal guideposts. One state, Arkansas, spells out its definition in the 2007 Trout Guidebook as, “Crimped completely, the hook is smooth and will not snag when passed through cloth.” That sounds pretty clear. If it will not pass through cloth without snagging, it’s not legal. Until a better uniform definition comes along, that one sounds reasonable.
For large bass lures, you’re probably going to have to file the barbs down or replace the sets of hooks with new barbless ones (readily available, see separate sources). For trout flies, the procedure is simpler, but there are right and wrong ways to go about it. The correct way is to fit the point and barb of the fly straight into the head of the pliers. (Do not turn the hook crossways to the pliers.) Mash down carefully, working around the barb until it has been smoothed flush with the hook shaft. You might find it easier to use a special set of pliers for holding the fly, and another, more precise one for mashing the barb.
As this is being written, there are already several makers of barbless hooks for both fly fishing and fresh and salt water light-tackle fishing. By the time the book is in print, due to the rapidly growing interest in the subject, the list will no doubt be much longer. Check the Internet by Googling “Barbless Fish Hooks.” At present, for treble hooks one of the easiest ways to change hooks on your favorite bass baits is to go to the Boundary Waters Journal site, www.boundarywatersjournal.com. The magazine has been offering sets of treble hooks since barbless hooks became the law in the Quetico. Another site is www.QueticoFishing.com. Familiar hook manufacturers who have been active in the barbless area include Gamakatsu and Eagle Claw and Umpqua for barbless flies.
Falling down while wading and fishing isn’t fun— on any kind of water, small creeks or big rivers. You’ll get hurt, break or lose some tackle, or at least get wet, possibly very wet. Small streams have rocks, slippery and rounded. Large rivers have powerful current, and sometimes, as a bonus, slippery and rounded rocks. If you’re a geezer, you already know darn well you need a wading staff. If you’re coming onto geezer age, you’re probably thinking about using one. If you’re young and strong, you probably think wading staffs are for geezers only. Wading staffs, clipped to your fly vest, whether homemade or store bought, make life so easy. If your legs are in the least unsteady, try using one. You’ll never go wade fishing again without it.
Perhaps nothing in fly fishing is so frustrating as to finally be on the water while a big mayfly hatch is coming off, and the trout just aren’t interested. I personally have seen such inactivity on the Brodhead in Pennsylvania when the long-awaited Hendrickson hatch was underway and the trout were lying doggo— not interested in nymphs underwater or the duns that were floating on the surface like a feet of galleons. The textbooks all say that when the trout aren’t on the duns, they’ll be taking the nymphs down below, or the emergers in the film. It wasn’t happening. The day was cold and dull, and nobody was catching fish. What to do? You tell me!
In an interesting article in North American Fisherman, August/September 1992, well-known outdoor writer Dr. Jim Casada says he’s had better luck fishing tailwaters when they were running full. Most anglers don’t fish then because of the high water and all the canoists and floaters. But Casada says he could always find some wadeable water, out of the main stream, and catch lots of trout there—alone.
Ernie Schwiebert was the first—or certainly one of the first—to write about the Grif fith’s Gnat in the original version of his book Nymphs, Winchester Press (1973). Since then many famous anglers and writers, and countless legions of anglers, have gone on to embrace this remarkable fly, one of the best midge imitations ever. The fly imitates the midge characteristic of sitting on the water with only its hackle fibers touching, not the body. The imitation resembles a single midge or an entire cluster of tiny ones. Expert angler and author Gary Borger says he favors Size 16 generally, but has plenty of others ready. For picky fish, he some times trims the hackle and lets the body rest on the water.
“It pays to add or subtract weight as necessary to keep the flies down near the bottom. Especially in cold water, trout are reluctant to move up in the water column.”
—Writer and Montana guide Chuck Robbins, www.chuckngalerobbins.com
“You’ve got to keep switching gears. The worst thing is to keep plugging away with something that isn’t working in the first place.”
—Writer and Montana guide Chuck Robbins, www.chuckngalerobbins.com
“Streamers fished slow and deep, with or without a nymph trailer (18 inches or so is about right) often provide a wake-up call for spring trout. Vary the presentation pattern, add or subtract weight, until you find the right combination—then stick with it until the trout tell you otherwise. Many times just a subtle variation—size, color, add a shot or two—does it. Other times, it’s more a presentation thing. For instance, start by casting down and across, let the fly(s) swing around; next cast bounce the rod tip a few times during the swing; then toss in a hand-twist retrieve. Next pick up, strip off a little more line and do it again, only this time use a short-pause, long-strip, pause, retrieve. No dice. Add a little more weight, change patterns, and repeat same. In a general sense, the colder the water, the slower the retrieve.”
—Writer and Montana guide Chuck Robbins, www.chuckngalerobbins.com
Trout egg patterns, especially in the fall, consistently take trout, if my experiences and those of my trout-fishing friends are any indicator. These flies need to be bounced right along the bottom, and it’s very hard to tell if you have a bite or have ticked a rock. Sometimes the trout take the fly and spit it out so quickly that you can’t react. In clear water it is sometimes possible to see the fish’s mouth flash white as it takes the fly. Look for lots of strikes, a few hook-ups.
When Czech fly-fishing teams started winning trout tournaments (yes, there are fly-fishing tournaments), American anglers began tuning into their techniques with intense vigor. Today Czech nymphing is so popular and taking fish so effectively that the flies are sold by many dealers (www.cabelas.com; www.theessentialfly.com), articles and videos are posted on popular sites, and entire books are available on the subject. (See Czech Nymph and Other Related Flyfishing Methods by Karel Krivanec at www.amazon.com.) Basically, Czech nymphs are great-looking flies tied extra-heavy to sink fast. The rig to fish them consists of a strike indicator and a triple-dropper setup, each dropper about 10 cm. The heavy Czech nymph is tied to the middle dropper, then your favorite traditional nymphs to the other two. This is high-stick nymphing, with short casts and the high rod immediately following the indicator downstream.
Those cold, black-water wilderness lakes— called ponds in Maine—hold brook trout in sizes and numbers to dream about. Yet, under the long days of bright sun in June, they can seem to be absolutely lifeless. There are no rises, and no matter how hard you fish with streamers, strikes are few—or none. Then, between sunset and dark, the big Green Drakes start emerging, and trout—big trout—start slashing the water everywhere. Here’s how Arthur MacDougall, Jr., described the experience in his wonderful The Trout Fisherman’s Bedside Book, Simon & Schuster (1963): “We had to wait all afternoon … When the sun set, and the wood thrushes began their ventriloquial harmonies, the trout began to rise. As if by summons, they were every where all over the pond. And these were brilliantly colored trout, fat, quick, and strenuous.”
“I have fished little Blue-Winged Olive hatches that have continued for hours on rainy days. Show me a cool, inclement, drizzly afternoon in April and May or September and October and I’ll show you a heavy hatch of little Blue-Winged Olives.”
—Charles Meck, Fishing Limestone Streams, The Lyons Press, 2005
When trout are leaping clear of the water in splashy rises, they are probably chasing emerging caddis.
Yellowstone area expert and outfitter Craig Mathews on his favorite way to cover fish rising to duns or emergers: “I like to use a short, set-length cast— never more than 15 feet. This allows me to pick up and recast after the fly has traveled just enough beyond the fish that I can do so without spooking him and can get back out to him without false casting or stripping in slack.”
—Craig Mathews, Western Fly-Fishing Strategies, The Lyons Press, 1998
In his book Western Fly-Fishing Strategies, Lyons Press (1998), expert angler and outfitter Craig Mathews cites a biologist’s report that cutthroat trout from Yellowstone Lake have been tracked migrating 6 to 8 miles between the lake and the Buffalo Ford area in a single day. Similar activity occurs on the Lamar River, Mathews adds, and other smooth-water rivers in the area. “An area that produces one day can be void of fish the next,” Mathews says.
“Generally, blind fishing a spring creek where there is no surface activity is unproductive and accomplishes little but spooking trout,” says Yellowstone area expert author and outfitter Craig Mathews in his excellent book, Western Fly-Fishing Strategies, Lyons Press (1998). Mathews adds that an exception occurs when terrestrials or damselflies are active.
The legendary angler and writer Joe Brooks did an article for Field & Stream in May 1961, called “The Broadside Float.” In it, he reported having great success holding his streamers broadside to the current as they drifted downstream. He manipulated the streamers into the broadside presentation using line mends. Brooks felt the broadside float gave the trout a better view of their prey.
In high summer, you may be lucky enough to fish trout water that still has fish around. But if you find them all schooled up in pods at spring holes, that’s a sure sign the temperatures have them under great stress. If you catch and release one of these fish, it may not survive the ordeal. Leave them alone until cooling rains and lower temperatures bring the stream back to normal.
Like great baseball players who can bat from either side, trout anglers who can cast left- or right-handed have a tremendous advantage. Even if you’re a righty, and your left hand feels like a foreign object, try to get out there and practice. It will pay off with far more fish caught.
Yellowstone author and guide Craig Mathews, in his book Western Fly-Fishing Strategies, Lyons Press (1998), on fishing nymphs and emergers: “An upstream dead drift is the most productive cast for larger trout.” Mathews says that anglers who float their nymphs down and across, mending occasionally, take smaller trout. They do it because it’s an easy way to fish.
Take short steps when wading your trout stream, big or small waters. And don’t step on rocks that might roll under your feet.
Making wild swipes at the water with your net is a sure way to knock a trout—big or small—off the line. Jabbing at the fish tail-first is another bad move. The right way: Submerge your net, pull the fish over it headfirst, and lift. You’ve got him!
“When fishing’s fast, move slow! When the fishing’s slow, move fast. Above all, keep moving.”
—Chuck Robbins, author and fly-fishing guide.
Check the Web site he maintains with his wife, Gale,
for his blog, articles, and information on books, www.chuckngalerobbins.com.
“Beyond mastering the basics—casting, wading, reading the water, fly selection, etc.—the hardest thing for beginners to grasp is to keep moving, making the first shot count, then move on.”
—Chuck Robbins, author and fly-fishing guide.
Check the Web site he maintains with his wife Gale
for his blog, articles, and information on books, www.chuckngalerobbins.com.
“Regardless of the rig—streamer, nymph, dry— strive to make each cast different. Lengthen the cast, move a step or two, change the angle, change the retrieve, etc. The only exceptions are when casting to visible fish—rising, feeding, resting underneath cover, whatever.”
—Chuck Robbins, author and fly-fishing guide.
Check the Web site he maintains with his wife Gale
for his blog, articles, and information on books, www.chuckngalerobbins.com.
“Most urgent [in nymph fishing] is to add whatever weight necessary to keep the nymphs on the bottom. A wise man once observed, ‘The difference between a great day nymphing and a skunking is often one measly split-shot.’”
—Chuck Robbins, author and fly-fishing guide.
Check the Web site he maintains with his wife Gale
for his blog, articles, and information on books, www.chuckngalerobbins.com.
Advice for fishing western rivers from a top guide and author: “Lacking a hatch, it’s tough to beat a pair of nymphs rigged 5 or 6 feet or so below a strike indicator. Limited to just two patterns, a No. 10 Pat’s Rubber Legs and a similar-sized red San Juan Worm would be my picks though my nymph box contains a good selection of beadhead and standard nymph patterns—Prince Pheasant Tail, Hare’s Ear, Micro-May, Bloody Mary, Copper John, etc., in a variety of sizes and variations.”
—Chuck Robbins, author and fly-fishing guide.
Check the Web site he maintains with his wife Gale
for his blog, articles, and information on books, www.chuckngalerobbins.com.
During extremely hot weather, the real dog days of summer, you may not find trout bunched at the mouths of spring creeks entering your river. Look for them up the creek itself. They’ll be very spooky, but they’ll be there. Realize that many trout anglers do not fish during times like this, when the fish are under stress.
When trout are in holding water, they fn slowly, suspended, facing into the current. When they rise to take a fly, the splash or tiny swirl you see will usually be a little downstream of their holding lie. They take the fly, then swim back into their holding position. Keep that in mind when targeting your cast.
As soon as most trout anglers take up the sport, they learn to expect trout to be lying in the pockets behind boulders. The front sides of boulders also contain pockets, and the trout love them.
In an article called “An Olive Afternoon: Problems and Solutions in Autumn Trout Fishing,” on the Field & Stream Web site, veteran writer and angler John Merwin relates dealing with the ubiquitous Blue-Winged Olive hatches which take place in autumn over much of America. And, as Merwin describes, the Olives are enticing trout at a time when most anglers have racked up their rods. Which Blue-Winged Olive imitation to use, however, can be perplexing. “Once I had special fly boxes filled with nothing but Olive imitations in dozens of different styles. Fishing a just-right imitation became an obsession. I’ve finally decided there isn’t one. Just about anything will work sometimes. Nothing works all the time.” Available at www.fieldandstream.com.
John Merwin has reduced the sometimes-bewil-dering process of “Which Blue-Winged Olive should I use?” to easy choices that catch fish, especially in the autumn. “In the past couple of years I’ve settled on four fly patterns, one of which will almost always work during a hatch of little Blue-Winged Olives. Exactly which of the four will work seems to change not only from day to day but also during a single afternoon. These are a Pheasant-Tail Nymph, an RS2 Emerger, a CDC Olive Emerger, and an olive-bodied spinner—all in Sizes 18 through 24.” Available at www.fieldandstream.com.
In angling literature and popularity, the cutthroat sometimes does not get the respect of the popular rainbows, browns, or even our native brook trout. A vast number of anglers, however, agree with some writers who pull out their best stuff in tribute of these beautiful, wild fish found in the high country of the West, from the Rocky Mountains to the Alaska coast lines. Here’s Frank Dufresne at his best in a Field & Stream article, “Trout Trouble,” May 1955: “I’ve never known the right words to do justice to a cutthroat trout … It’s not that they fight so savagely as some other gamefish … Could be it’s that wild Alaska water they live in, the amber-tinted, foam-flecked stretches winding in the midday gloom of valley bottoms where the logger’s ax has never chopped a hole to sunlight…. Good chance it’s the company they keep, because bear, deer, and timber wolves are their neighbors.”
Since July 1959, Trout Unlimited has grown to 450 chapters with 150,000 serious and avid anglers. Their work with stream restoration and trout conservation has been a national treasure. There are lots of benefits for joining. Check them out at www.tu.org.
“Perhaps the most common factor that betrays the trout is its movement. So imprint this upon your mind: movement equals fish.”
—John Goddard and Brian Clarke, Understanding
Trout Behavior, The Lyons Press, 2001
Weeds in trout streams are like signposts that say, “Fish Here!” Weeds not only provide cover for the trout, but for the food the trout needs to live.
You’ll find trout lying in the calmer water at the heads of weed patches, under the weed patches themselves, and downstream where the constant sweeping of the weed arms have eroded the streambed.
Your approach to trout stream pools, and your very first casts, mean everything to your ultimate success. Careless approaches and careless casts will spook trout, sending them bolting from the pool, or—and this happens more often—alert trout that something is amiss. Once alerted, they may not strike for some time. You’ll be thinking, “They’re not biting today.” But that’s not the case at all.
When your fly snags on the bottom or on a rock or limb in a trout stream, do not pull back hard in an attempt to free it. Instead, use a Roll Cast, which will pull the fly in the opposite direction and often free it.
Not only is the Roll Cast useful for freeing your fly from snags, in many situations you will not have room behind you or to the side for a backcast. That’s where the Roll Cast will pay big dividends for every moment you’ve spent learning it.
Its call is irresistible to the myriad of fly fishermen who live in the greater New York and Philadelphia areas—and beyond. The upper Delaware in the vicinity of Hancock, New York, about 300 miles from where it enters Delaware Bay, is the source of New York City’s drinking water and about 80 miles of trout waters. The upper Delaware’s three stems—the West Branch, the East Branch, and the Main Stem—are often called the East’s answer to the storied trout fishing in the American West. The Delaware is the longest undammed river east of the Mississippi. Fittingly, its upper reaches are the homes of myriad wild trout. But they are challenging to fish, as many anglers will attest.
Articles are constantly appearing in popular fishing and outdoor magazines that focus on the difficulties of the wild trout fishing in the upper Delaware, in the vicinity of Hancock, New York. These tomes are fine in their own right, and I always read them eagerly. But, if you’re really serious about fishing these waters, you absolutely must obtain your copy of the definitive book, the absolute must-have journal of fishing the upper Delaware. Paul Weamer’s Fly-Fishing Guide to the Upper Delaware River, Stackpole Books (2007), has Everything you need to know to start fishing this wonderful destination. He breaks the rivers down by sections, and tells it like it is on where, when, and how—including guides, tackle, dos and don’ts. This is one fantastic book!
This truth about fishing the upper Delaware stands out as being an absolute fact: Fishing the water for opportunistic feeders during the day gets you nothing—most of the time. The fly hatches, and all the action, take place at the end of the day. Stretches where you would swear there are no trout during the day come alive with rising fish.
Bright, sunny days on the upper Delaware are tough to fish, with the action occurring at dusk only. The fish are super-sensitive to the light and the dangers that come from above, like the large numbers of eagles and ospreys that abound in the area. On a bright sunny day you may be in for a long boat ride, with splendid scenery but not the hatches and rising trout you came to find.
The realities of picking one of the three upper Delaware branches to fish can be summed up this way: The West Branch, the top water, is smaller than the Main Stem, and much more crowded in mayfly time than the lower waters. The Main Stem is larger, longer, has more places to fish, but considering its size the trout are more spread out than on the West Branch. The East Branch is smaller than the other two, packed with trout, but access is a major issue, and the fishing depends on the water being released from the Downsville impoundment. Of course, if you’re booking a guide, he will know which branch is fishing the best.
If the fish are really on, and the weather is cloudy and right for hatches, you may hit the upper Delaware exactly right with a guided float and have a day or two for the books. If these conditions do not exist, you probably have booked a long and expensive boat ride.
“Riffles [on New York’s upper Delaware] break the surface and help disguise leaders and tippets in the chop. I have caught a lot of trout by blind casting dry flies upriver in the upper Delaware’s riffles, but very few while casting upriver in the pools.”
—Paul Weamer, Fly-Fishing Guide to the Upper
Delaware River, Stackpole Books, 2007
“Once I find a rising fish and slowly move into the proper casting position, I cast only three times for each time the fish rises. If the fish hasn’t eaten my fly by the third cast, I stop casting and watch and wait until the fish rises again.”
—Paul Weamer, Fly-Fishing Guide to the Upper
Delaware River, Stackpole Books, 2007
Although upstream stalking and casting is the tradition for dry fly fishing, many shrewd anglers who fish big-water rivers like the Delaware in the East and the upper Missouri in the West favor a downstream cast. They get into position a good distance above the fish and slightly to the side. They cast quartering downstream to the rising fish, then mend the line upstream to get a straight downstream line-leader-fly float—without drag.
“Many anglers strip their streamers too slow. It is impossible to strip a streamer faster than a trout can catch it.”
—Paul Weamer, Fly-Fishing Guide to the Upper
Delaware River, Stackpole Books, 2007
“What kind of an artificial can be used at all times and anywhere, whether flies are hatching or not? The streamer or bucktail, of course, the development of which in the 1930s represented a major breakthrough in trout fishing.”
—S.R. Slaymaker II, Tie a Fly, Catch a Trout,
Harper & Row, 1976
When you check out a dry fly “purist”—the flyfisher who says, “It’s a dry fly, or nothing”—you’ll often find he doesn’t do any nymph fishing simply because he can’t do it.
Sometimes the only way to get into position to work streamers through likely looking water is from the downstream side, casting upstream. Then you have to remember that your fly is floating toward you very swiftly with the current. To get any realistic movement at all on the fly you need to be retrieving line so fast that the act has come to be called “ripping streamers” by many fly fishers.
“In my method of fishing the nymph, one casts upstream but fishes down. The purpose of the upstream cast is to give the nymph time to sink before one commences to attempt to control and fish it. For this reason, the position for the first cast to any stretch should be some yards upstream of any suspected fish. You will work down to him on succeeding casts.”
—Charles E. Brooks, Nymph Fishing for Larger
Trout, Crown Publishers, 1976
The Muddler Minnow has probably made more “Best Fly” lists than any other. Why? Because it catches trout. You can find it in every fly shop and fly-fishing catalog, in many hook sizes. You can dress it and fish it dry on the surface; you can work it down and across like a streamer; and you can let it bounce along the bottom like a nymph. Like the Woolly Bugger, the Muddler Minnow belongs in your fly box.
“Delaware rainbows are genetically different, something special—a 14-incher can put you into backing. And because it’s got plenty of space and food, every fish has the potential to be 20 inches.”
—Famed Catskill and Upper
Delaware (New York) angler Ed Van Put, quoted in J.L. Merritt’s Trout Dreams: A Gallery of Fly-Fishing Profiles, The Derrydale Press, 2000
“I catch a lot of fish in the last thirty minutes of the evening. It’s not exactly night fishing, because there’s still a little light. I call it ‘dark’ fishing. You can’t see the fly anymore, but you can see the rises. Cast ahead of them, and if the fish stop rising hold your cast until they start coming up again.”
—Famed Catskill and upper Delaware (New York) angler Ed Van Put, quoted in J.L. Merritt’s Trout Dreams: A Gallery of Fly-Fishing Profiles, The Derrydale Press, 2000
Upper Delaware rainbows take surface flies deliberately, and many anglers are spurred into a hair-trigger strike that misses the fish. “You’ve got to strike the rise, not the fly. Even if I can see the fly, I try not to look at it.”
—Famed Catskill and upper Delaware (New York) angler Ed Van Put, quoted in J.L. Merritt’s Trout Dreams: A Gallery of Fly-Fishing Profiles, The Derrydale Press, 2000
“While Ed Van Put is reputed to fish the Adams exclusively, a glance through his fly box belies this. If no fish are rising, he said, he may search the water with a Chuck Caddis, a Henryville Special, or a Cream Variant. For nymphs he favors the Zug Bug, and he occasionally fishes downstream with traditional wet flies like the Royal Coachman and Cow Dung.”
—J.L. Merritt on famed Catskill and upper
Delaware (New York) angler Ed Van Put in Trout
Dreams: A Gallery of Fly-Fishing Profiles,
The Derrydale Press, 2000
In his book Trout Dreams: A Gallery of Fly-Fishing Profiles, The Derrydale Press (2000), Jim Merritt describes fishing techniques of many legendary fly fishers. This excerpt on Chuck Fothergill, famed for his angling prowess in Colorado’s Roaring Fork and Frying Pan rivers, describes Fothergill’s deadly nymphing technique. What follows is an absolutely deadly way of fishing a nymph. You’ll find it to be one of the most productive of the tips in this book: “Using a floating line with a leader weighted with several twisted-on lead strips, he quartered a short cast upstream. He held the rod high, his arm angled like the Statue of Liberty’s, and kept it that way through most of the drift. As the line drew abreast of him and continued downstream, he followed it with the rod, which he lowered gently to maintain a drag-free float. At the end of the drift he lifted the rod, swinging the nymph toward the surface. Probing the run carefully, he was quickly into a fat rainbow which leaped explosively and stripped line off the reel as it charged downstream.”
Al Troth tied his original Elkhair Caddis from the hairs of a bull elk, then later switched to the cow elk, bleached for greater visibility. First tied in 1957, the Elkhair has joined the ranks of flies such as the Muddler Minnow, the Adams, and the Pheasant Tail nymphs as standard fish-takers. Troth says that besides caddis, “It’ll imitate stoneflies, little hoppers, any number of things. The trout ate it in 1957, they eat it now, and they’ll eat it twenty years from now.”
—Al Troth, in J.L. Merritt’s Trout Dreams: A Gallery of Fly-Fishing Profiles, The Derrydale Press, 2000
“Some 98 percent of mayfly nymphs come to the surface head up. For most imitations, there fore, it’s not a bad idea to weight the upper third of the hook.”
—Famed Pennsylvania angler Joe Humphreys,
in J.L. Merritt’s Trout Dreams: A Gallery of Fly-Fishing Profiles,
The Derrydale Press, 2000
“The easiest time to catch rising fish is at the beginning and end of the hatch. Early in the hatch you’ll find a lot of juvenile fish, but as the hatch gets heavier, the bigger fish appear, and a pecking order starts to prevail.”
—Famed angler and author Al Caucci, in J.L. Merritt’s
Trout Dreams: A Gallery of Fly-Fishing Profiles,
The Derrydale Press, 2000
“Consider the current as an underwater cafeteria line, only instead of the fish moving to the food, the food comes to the fish.”
—Dick Galland, “Master Basic Nymphing,” in Fly Fisherman Magazine’s “Nymphing for Trout” booklet
“Then consider a trout’s other requirements in moving water—relief from the current and shelter from danger—and you’ll know where to begin. Target the edges of eddies, slower-water seams, and deep runs that are close to the main current. Trout swim out, take a food item, and return to cover.”
—Dick Galland, “Master Basic Nymphing,” in Fly Fisherman Magazine’s “Nymphing for Trout” booklet
“If you find yourself fishing a spot that looks ideal, but you are not getting strikes, add weight to make sure the fly is on the bottom before changing flies.”
—Dick Galland, “Master Basic Nymphing,” in Fly Fisherman Magazine’s “Nymphing for Trout” booklet
“Today there is an implied presumption that if you fish a nymph, you must use a strike indicator … Though indicators are a necessity in certain situations, they are a handicap in other circumstances … On some heavily fished streams, the fish learn to associate the glowing orange ball with a threat and they become reluctant to feed.”
—Jim McLennan, “Nymphing Without
Indicators,” in Fly Fisherman Magazine’s
“Nymphing for Trout” booklet
Despite their popularity, strike indicators do have certain negatives: They splat down on the surface when cast … they drag on the surface, causing the fly to drift at an unnatural speed, usually too fast … they present the fly at a fixed depth, instead of getting it to the varying depths of the stream … they sometimes catch the wind on casts, making accuracy difficult.
One of the many things I like about the Orvis site, www.orvis.com, is “Fly Stories” in the fly fishing section. These are short tales told by anglers of various flies they have used—and the fly decisions that were made and what happened. It’s great stuff.
Before losing a courageous battle with Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS) at the age of fifty-six, Gary LaFontaine became one of fly fishing’s greatest anglers, authors, fly tyers, and ambassadors of sportsmanship. His books include Caddisflies, Fly Fishing the Mountain Lakes, The Dry Fly: New Angles, and Trout Flies: Proven Patterns. He is featured in several DVDs and co-authored many fishing guides in book form and pocket form. Living in the Montana high country, and fishing there and all over the world, Gary built a legacy that can be best experienced at the site dedicated to his name: www.thebookmailer.com. Here you will find gear from the LaFontaine private label, plus books, DVDs, and fishing guides from scores of authors and sources. A newsletter is available. LaFontaine Private Label, PO Box 1273, Helena, MT 59624-1273; 800-874-4171.
If you’re thinking about doing a pack trip into the high-country lakes of the great western mountains, you’ll want to read a copy of the late Gary LaFontaine’s Fly Fishing the Mountain Lakes, Greycliff Publishing (1998). The book is available from the site honoring Gary, www.thebookmailer.com. The book is packed with details on everything from planning and packing, to specific mountain lake fishing techniques. Gary loved this type of fishing so much that he became quite an expert on what to pack in—and how to do it—including his decision to always take a kick boat, no matter what packing challenges it created.
Standing opposite a pod of rising trout, as can happen on the best rivers, will likely set your heart racing and your fingers trembling. Now’s the time to be cool, however. A cast right into the bunch will probably scatter them in a frenzy. Try to get into position below the pod, downstream from it, and cast toward a fish on the outside. If he’s hooked, and you can keep him from running into the pack, you may pick off a couple more doing the same thing.
In his book Fly Fishing the Mountain Lakes, Greycliff Publishing (1998), available from the site www.thebookmailer.com, the late Gary LaFontaine describes his favorite technique for fishing from the shore in mountain lakes as “Multiple Roll Casts.” He starts with three Roll casts short of the drop-off. Next three are right on the drop-off. Then five casts beyond the drop-off. The slowly advancing fly seems to excite trout lurking in the depths.
In his book Fly Fishing the Mountain Lakes, Greycliff Publishing (1998), available from the site www.thebookmailer.com, the late Gary LaFontaine describes in detail his favorite gear and techniques. An interesting aspect of his decision on what to pack in is revealed here: “A flotation device—for me it has to be an inflatable kick boat, not a float tube—gives the fly fisherman access to all the areas of a lake that the crowds don’t fish.” LaFontaine was willing to use whatever means possible—goats, alpacas, Ilamas, horses—to pack in everything he needed. If he couldn’t manage a kick boat, he carried a lightweight backpacker’s float tube.
“One of the secrets of mountain lakes is that the vertical winds, not horizontal ones, deposit most of the food on the water. The other secret is that trout in these lakes, given a choice, prefer to feed on the surface.” This tip comes from the late Gary LaFontaine in his book Fly Fishing the Mountain Lakes, Greycliff Publishing (1998). He’s referring to the anabatic winds that “rush up the mountain slopes like the air up a chimney.” He continues, “Look for upslope winds on warm afternoons.” With these tips, you can easily see why you would be foolish to plan a backpack adventure in the high Rocky Mountain lakes without reading Gary’s book. You can obtain a copy at www.thebookmailer.com.
In his book Fly Fishing the Mountain Lakes, Greycliff Publishing (1998), the late Gary LaFontaine describes his technique of picking off a feeding fish when a multitude of bugs are on the water. He watches the direction the fish is feeding, picks up the next most-likely insect, then places his cast an inch or so in front of the natural. Focused on the natural, but with a sudden new opportunity in front of it, the trout usually takes Gary’s fly. You can obtain Gary’s books at www.thebookmailer.com.
In his classic A Summer on the Test (1924, republished by Nick Lyons Books/Winchester Press in 1984), the English writer John Waller Hills takes dead aim at picking the best days to fish the big mayfly hatches of his beloved Test River and other waters. “My experience has been so unvarying, that if I were told I was to have only two days fishing during the period, I should choose my days with every confidence … By the fourth day (since the main fly hatch began) trout have acquired the taste of the newly hatched fly and are taking it confidently … the big fish are moving by then … This is the first great chance, the fourth day. And the next is the twelfth day, by which time the fly is going off and trout know it, and are making the most of the short time remaining.”
Here’s the legendary English writer John Waller Hills on early season hatches in his classic book A Summer on the Test (1924, republished in later editions): “So I finished up with eight fish: a good day…. Now these two days were the opposite of each other; the first, fine and hot, produced hardly any fly and two fish, and the second, bitterly cold, showed an immense hatch and four brace of fine trout. Never, never believe that cold weather hinders fly. You will hear it, always and everywhere; but it is not only untrue but the reverse of truth. Except at the very beginning of April, you get more fly on a cold day than on a warm.” Of course, Hills was speaking of his English hatches, but you can apply his wisdom to your own waters.
In this quote, the legendary English writer John Waller Hills in his classic book A Summer on the Test (1924, republished in later editions) is speaking of dry fly fishing in particular, but his intention to “clear the air” applies to all forms of fly fishing: “ … what I want to impress on any reader who is not a dry fly fisherman is that dry fly fishing is much easier than it sounds. There is a conspiracy of anglers, started by Halford [the English expert and writer] and carried on with increasing momentum by later writers, to make out that the art is so dreadfully obscure that none but the gifted should attempt it. The perplexed beginner, poring over the great masters, reads of the accuracy and delicacy required … how a single mistake is fatal, how he must be able to recognize at a glance each of the hundred and one insects on which trout feed … He despairs of reaching this level … He is completely misled. He believes what is egregious nonsense. The sport has its difficulties, and they are not small; but in the first place anyone with ordinary ability can surmount them, and in the second the price paid for failure is not nearly as great as writers would have us believe. You can make heaps of mistakes and yet kill plenty of fish on a difficult river and a difficult day…. believe me, it is not nearly as hard as it sounds.”
I watched a guy wading into the Missouri River, his rod and fly ready. Clearly, he was looking out in the current, where several rainbows were rising in a nice pod. What he didn’t realize, or take time to discover, was that there were many more fish holding in the current right by the shore. He waded into them, intent on the distant pod. The fish bolted away, taking the pod fish with them. It pays to not be in such a hurry. Look trout water over very carefully before wading ahead.
“Let a large trout get his head down and he will dictate the fight, but keep his head up and he cannot run effectively. You will quickly realize how much easier it is to control a fish on the surface, and to bring the battle to a rapid conclusion.”
—John Goddard, A Fly Fisher’s Reflections,
The Lyons Press, 2002
Watch the water before wading in. Many times, trout will be right at your feet; wade in without looking, and you’ll spook the whole pool.
“I learned early on—and painfully!—that when fishing for trout of 4-pound-plus in weedy water, it is a question of holding on as soon as you set the hook, or the fish is as good as lost.”
—John Goddard, A Fly Fisher’s Reflections,
The Lyons Press, 2002
In studies with English author Brian Clarke for the book The Trout & the Fly, noted angler and author John Goddard reached the conclusion that trout have superb 45-degree vision to the rear and recommends the following tactic to cope: “ … try positioning yourself opposite or even slightly upstream of any trout rising very close to the surface and cast to him from this position as I think he will be less likely to see you, but do remember to avoid any sudden movements and where possible cast sideways with a wrist movement to avoid moving your arms.”
—John Goddard, A Fly Fisher’s Reflections,
The Lyons Press, 2002
The greatest discovery in the history of fly fishing—as far as float-fishing guides in the high-country West have discovered—is nymph fishing. Not the classic nymph fishing of most American trout streams, spawned from English experts like Frank Sawyer and company, but using a couple of nymphs tied in tandem below a strike indicator that floats on the surface. That strike indicator—they come in all different shapes and sizes—is nothing more than an elaborate bobber. Picture this: You started out years and years ago fishing with a bobber. Now, you’ve got the money and time to book a top guide on one of Montana’s top streams, like the Big Horn or Beaverhead, and you’re floating along in the raft chunking out a stretch of fly line (yes, “chunking” is the right word, not “casting”) with a couple of weighted nymphs tied to a “bobber”—aka, “strike indicator”—riding the current. Okay, you’re having fun, catching trout. I have no problem with that, so long as you see the irony.
“Trout are dim, uncertain and nearly invisible. You learn after a time where to look and what to look for. You must not expect to see a whole trout, outlined as solidly as though lying on a fishmonger’s slab; any fool can see that: but what you have to train yourself to pick out is a flicker, a movement, a darkness, a luminosity which if you stare at it hard enough will resolve itself into a shadowy form.”
—The legendary English writer John Waller Hills
in his classic book A Summer on the Test (1924, republished by Nick Lyons Books/Winchester Press in 1984)
You’ll usually have some loose line in your hand when you hook a trout, and now the question becomes whether to pull the fish in by hand, or get the slack line onto the reel first? My own preference is to hold the line fast against the rod while reeling up the slack as quickly as possible, then playing the fish from the reel. I find that when I try to bring in the fish by pulling on the line itself, I lose a great deal of feel and break off more fish. On the other hand, when a big fish is on the line, fiddling around with the line and the reel during the first moments of the fight can be disastrous. I’ve had good results, and bad results, doing it both ways.
Fishing your spinning lure or fly downstream for trout seems a natural and easy way to fish. After all, the fish are lying facing into the current, where your bait or fly is headed directly to them. Fishing upstream, however, gives you the advantage of stealth, sneaking up on the fish.
There’s an old trick that sometimes really does work when you’re into rising trout and just can’t seem to get them interested in your imitations. Switch to an easy-to-see fly like a No. 14 Royal Wulff or an Adams, and you might be surprised by the results.
In high summer in the East and on some Rocky Mountain rivers like the upper Missouri, the hatch of the tiny tricothrids (trico) is a landmark event, luring fly fishers who try to match the hatch. Despite the fishrising activity, trying to get a fish interested in your tiny (No. 22) fly is quite a challenge. Some experienced anglers claim a change-of-pace is needed here. They go to a terrestrial, an ant, or a beetle. When the tricos come, trout have already been feeding on beetles a great deal, and your bogus beetle floated among the tricos may get customers.
Sometimes, the messages in magazine advertising copy are so well done that they simply cannot be ignored. This comes from the Cortland Line Company in an ad on page 22 of the February-March 2004 issue of Gray’s Sporting Journal: “Get down…. Way down… Faster…. Way faster … In this type of fly fishing, you’re either down or you’re out.” The ad was for Cortland’s 555 Rocket QDs, made to get your fly into the strike zone faster. Available at www.cortlandline.com.
“The trout likes the upstream sides of rocks, logs, and … other solid objects … for exactly the same reasons that he likes the tops of hatches: because he has a splendid view of what the current is bringing him; and yet is cushioned from the weight of the water.”
—John Goddard and Brian Clarke, Understanding
Trout Behavior, 2001
“Any fisherman with more than a morning’s experience knows that the water beneath a bridge is a likely lie for a trout; and often, for a big trout. It is that rare phenomenon, the ‘complete’ lie … The narrower a section of the river is, the deeper it will be …”
—John Goddard and Brian Clarke, Understanding
Trout Behavior, 2001
In the United Kingdom, anglers call it a curse. The legendary “smutting rise” occurs plenty in America, too. It happens when trout are feeding in the surface film on tiny larvae and pupa of midges. Often only tiny rings show on the water as they suck in the flies. Reach for the smallest Griffith’s Gnat you can tie on.
The question of whether or not your leader should be a certain color—or no color at all—has been around trout streams for a long time, even back when you had to dye your own leaders if you wanted them colored a certain way. Here are a few choice words from the legendary A. J. McClane, from his fishing column in Field & Stream, November 1949: “I have made dozens of leaders dyed with methylene blue, potassium hydroxide, malachite green, Bismarck brown, tea, coffee, and iodine. Aside from messing up the sink, they left no other mark in fishing history…. I much prefer an opaque or nearly translucent material, the kind commonly labeled ‘mist,’ for all fishing above surface or below.”
Opinions abound on the subject of the perfect rod for small-stream trout fishing. Here’s one you can take to the bank: You want a short rod, 7 feet, to handle the overhanging limbs and close brush along the sides of the stream. You must have a fast, powerful tip. It will get your short line out fast and sure. You want all this in the lightest rod you can find, one that comes alive in your hand. You’ll enjoy every cast, and the feel of a fighting fish will be your ultimate reward. The long-rod advocates will cry “Foul!” at this opinion, claiming to have more control with the longer stick. To each his own. In small streams, go with the short rod and keep your fly and line in the water instead of the trees and bushes.
© Jay Cassell
In small streams like this, it pays to go with a shorter rod. you’ll avoid snagging your fly in the trees, and instead keep it in the water, where it’s supposed to be.
You’ve got your favorite creek or stream all to yourself for a change. What’s it to be: upstream or downstream? The usual method is to fish your floating flies in an upstream direction, while fishing nymphs and streamers downstream. There’s not a thing wrong with that game plan.
“Scientists have found that most of the trout taken on nymphs are within 10 inches of the river bottom … That’s where the food is, and because the food is there and the current runs more slowly, there’ll be a lot of fish there.”
—Lefty Kreh, with Chris Millard, My Life Was
THIS BIG and Other True Fishing Tales,
Skyhorse Publishing, 2008
Author and trout expert Leonard M. Wright, Jr., was a writer I respected and felt privileged to publish when I was editor of Sports Afield magazine. In one, “Give Summer Trout a Moveable Feast,” he went against tradition in urging anglers to use a dry fly fished with a twitch for midsummer trout. Wright reasoned that in midsummer, daylight hours, the nymphs and other bottom-dwellers were hiding under rocks, emerging only at dusk and night. “The main food supply most of the day is made up of insects that have flown or tumbled onto the surface and these, trapped in the rubbery surface film, are carried downstream on top of the water,” Wright wrote in the article, republished in his book Fly Fishing Heresies, Winchester Press (1975).
“To catch a loafing trout’s attention (in midsummer) and to gain his confidence, your dry fly should move—and move as a living insect does. This means a small movement, not a great plowing wake. And it should move in an upstream direction. For all streambred flies, whether hatching out or returning for egglaying, move in an upstream direction.”
—Leonard M. Wright, Jr., Fly Fishing Heresies,
Winchester Press, 1975
“ … you break with tradition and cast your fly in an across-and-downstream direction, when you give it a tiny twitch it will lurch upstream. Then let it float free again as long as it will.”
—Leonard M. Wright, Jr., Fly Fishing Heresies,
Winchester Press, 1975
“A fly twitched slightly on the surface will raise trout all day long on the much-neglected pools and long flats where the dead-drift nymph or dry fly would seem very dead, indeed.”
—Leonard M. Wright, Jr., Fly Fishing Heresies,
Winchester Press, 1975
For the outdoorsman, Maryland is a state truly blessed with opportunities—from the beaches of the At-antic, the vast Chesapeake Bay and its environs, to the mountains and valleys in the western part of the state. There are trout streams galore here, of varying quality and stocking conditions, and the perfect guide to finding the stream that’s right for you is the wonderful book Guide to Maryland Trout Fishing: The Catch-and-Release Streams, by Larry Coburn and Charlie Gelso, Falling Star Publishing (2006, updated regularly). It’s available from www.amazon.com and many tackle shops. This is an absolute “must-have” book for trout anglers looking for great fishing on Maryland streams.
Maryland’s Big Hunting Creek, not far from Frederick and a stone’s throw from the famous Camp David, retreat of presidents, is the stream where legendary angler Joe Brooks and others started the Brotherhood of the Jungle Cock group in the 1940s, teaching fly fishing to youngsters. There is a Joe Brooks Memorial in the upper section of the stream, which still ranks as one of Maryland’s most interesting and beautiful to fish. See the book Guide to Maryland Trout Fishing: The Catch-and-Release Streams, by Larry Coburn and Charlie Gelso, Falling Star Publishing (2006, updated regularly).
“The line of drift of the naturals is important to presentation too, and the fly must be placed to duplicate its route.”
—Ernest Schwiebert, Trout, E.P. Dutton, 1978
“It is not fully known if trout and grayling are as sensitive to odor as salmon, but the old ghillie who taught me nymph fishing on the Lauterach in Bavaria believed that a particularly sensitive fish could probably smell his fingers on his flies. His secret was a leader soak box—thick felt pads saturated in trout slime—for his nymphs.”
—Ernest Schwiebert, Trout, E.P. Dutton, 1978
“Fully spent and exhausted spinners are virtually impossible to see on the water. Many seemingly unexplained rises of fish, particularly in late afternoon and evening, are triggered by large numbers of dead or dying spinners lying flush in the surface film. Often the only method of identifying such a spinner fall lies in identifying the mating swarm that precedes it, or observing the dwindling fight of male spinners that remain over the water.”
—Ernest Schwiebert, Trout, E.P. Dutton, 1978
“Always pay particular attention to the fish which are sipping under the banks, and don’t be deluded into the notion that because you see a fish make more break on the water than a minnow would, that he is a minnow, for he is quite likely to be a three-pounder.”
—Francis Francis, Book of Angling, 1867, as referenced by Ernest Schwiebert in Trout, E.P. Dutton, 1978
“It is strange how quietly a big fish will often take fly after fly, close to a bank, with only just his upper lip pushed into the surface to suck in the victim.”
—Francis Francis, Book of Angling, 1867, as referenced by Ernest Schwiebert in Trout, E.P Dutton, 1978
In his magnum-opus, Trout, E.P. Dutton (1978), legendary angler and writer Ernest Schwiebert discusses the improved visibility of bright and white fly lines, saying they’re great for photography and watching your line. But, for serious fishing: “Yet, I still use a dark mahogany-colored line for the difficult, hyperselective fish on my home waters in the eastern mountains, and I feel it has been more effective on the shy fish of our famous western spring creeks. Fishing deep I prefer darker colors … Pale colors are unwise in a sinking line that works deep among the fish and is viewed laterally against the adjacent colors of the bottom.”
From the moment anglers make their first cast with a dry fly, they start learning that drag is the great boogeyman of dry fly fishing. You’ll see it often, and you’ll hear about it everywhere fly fishers gather. Drag occurs when the current pulls the fly line and leader downstream from the fly, dragging the fly across the water, leaving a large, small, or even miniscule wake. It doesn’t look natural, and the fish know it, and won’t hit it. The late George Harvey, Penn State angling instructor, author, and an angler of legendary talent, made studies of drag with an intensity few have equaled and came up with some useful ideas on defeating it. He writes about it all in his book Techniques of Trout Fishing and Fly Tying, Lyons & Burford (1990): “I have seen anglers stand in one spot and change flies for over an hour and still never take a fish,” Harvey says. “On many occasions, by moving just a step to the right or left the angler could, on the next cast, eliminate drag and take the trout on the original pattern.”
In a lifetime of studying drag and its deadly impact on dry fly fishing, the late, legendary Penn State angling professor George Harvey came up with some real answers. He decided that “perfect” casts were not the answer. The problem, he felt, lay in the leaders. When leaders straightened, a dragging fly was the result. He came up with a formula that would allow a leader to fall in S-curves, giving the fly a longer dragfree float. He started by going against the universal heavy-butt requirement of the times. He wrote about it in his classic, Techniques of Trout Fishing and Fly Tying, Lyons & Burford (1990): “ … I do not use the heavy-butt leaders … I want the S curves in the leader to progressively get longer from the fly to the line. The heavy-butt leaders will not give you this progression … If you use this design for your dry-fly fishing, you will increase your catch by at least fifty percent.” Here is the design Harvey recommended for a hard nylon 9.5-foot leader with 5X tippet: Starting with the nail knot, 10 inches of .017; 20 inches of .015; 20 inches of .013; 20 inches of .011; 12 inches of .009; 12 inches of .008; 18 inches of .007; 22 to 30 inches of .006. Although not butt heavy, Harvey’s leaders were constructed with stiff monofilament in the first four butt sections, then soft mono in the rest of the leader. Of course, there are many more details on constructing and using such leaders in George Harvey’s book. Remember: We are talking dry fly leaders here, not leaders for nymphs and streamers, which need to straighten so you can follow the drift of the underwater fly by watching the end of the leader or the strike indicator.
No, you don’t have to tie those George Harvey leaders to cut drag by 50 percent, like George Harvey promised—unless you want to. You can buy them from Frog Hair, the Gamma Technologies company that makes and sells leaders, tippets, and fly flotation dressings (excellent ones, I might add). Look for the Dry Fly Slack Line Leader with George Harvey’s picture on the cover of the sleeve. Frog Hair offers 4X, 5X, and 6X tippet sizes in 11 ½ feet. I bought mine on www.amazon.com, but you can find other sites, including the excellent site www.feather-craft.com. Or Google “Frog Hair Leaders” or go directly to Frog Hair, www.froghairfishing.com. The leaders are knotless and are said to represent the requirements for the desirable S-curve that beats drag. Instructions for casting are on the back of the sleeve.
Author and angler Gary Borger came up with a way to tie S-curve leaders with fewer sections (and fewer blood knots) than in the George Harvey method. He offered his ideas in his book Presentation, which is out of print and sells on Amazon and other sites for more than $225. In the book, Borger has optimum leaders for nymphing and other techniques as well. Perhaps someday an enterprising publisher will reissue the book.
When trout don’t seem to be hitting and are probably hugging the bottom, particularly in lakes, try using a fast-sinking fly line, a short leader, 6 feet or so, and a floating fly like a Muddler Minnow or a Woolly Bugger. Your line will go along the bottom, with the fly trailing behind and above.
Baseball players choke up on their bats, golfers choke up on their clubs. Fly fishers ought to choke up on their fly rods when making short, difficult casts under or between branches of over hanging bushes. Move your casting hand all the way up on the rod itself, several inches above the cork, for more control. Try it in practice. You’ll be surprised at how effective this can be.
Why waste precious time on the stream tying the two-fly rigs that are so popular and effective today? Make it a wintertime project. Pick your floater dry fly, tie a leader 18 inches or so to the shank of the hook (some prefer to tie it into the eye of the dry fly hook), and tie a nymph to the leader. Store them in small plastic bags. When you’re on the stream, all you have to do is tie the dry fly to your leader, dress it for better floating, and start catching fish.
In fishing upstream, to get a weighted nymph down and keep it down before the current drags the line and pulls the nymph back up, Joe Humphrey recommends what he calls the Tuck Cast. To make it, he stops the rod suddenly on the forward stroke at the 10:30 position by having the last two fingers of the casting hand pulling and the thumb pressing. Humphrey says, “It’s a quick, squeezing action.” The nymph is made to tuck back under the leader and drop to the bottom before drag sets in on the line. It’s all in his book, Joe Humphrey’s Trout Tactics, Stackpole (1981).
The successor to George Harvey, the late legendary Penn State angling professor whose writing and influence has been widely felt in the world of fly fishing, particularly dry fly fishing, Joe Humphrey has emerged from the Penn State fly fishing classes as one of Pennsylvania’s finest trout fly fishers ever. He holds the Pennsylvania record for the largest trout ever caught on a fly, a brown weighing 15.5 pounds, in 1977, and is a master angler who shares what he has learned. His book Joe Humphrey’s Trout Tactics, Stackpole (1981), is a loaded with skills that will help any angler take more trout.
The price of the gear mentioned may be out of date today, but the advice is not: “ … a five-dollar thermometer can make more fishermen better fishermen than any other single piece of equipment.”
—Joe Humphrey, Joe Humphrey’s Trout Tactics,
Stackpole, 1981
The renowned flyfisher Joe Humphrey, in Joe Humphrey’s Trout Tactics, Stackpole (1981), has read stream temperatures on thousands of trips, including many with the Penn State “trout professor,” the late George Harvey. In his book, he cites the importance of temperature in trout fishing: “A trout’s metabolism increases with the rise in water temperature. When its metabolism increases, the trout’s demand for food is greater.” Humphrey goes on to name 58, 59, 60, and up to 65 degrees as the “up-and-at-’em” temperatures for all trout species. He warns, however, “ … these temperature ranges are general guidelines, and exceptions occur.” See Joe’s fantastic book for more details on the temperatures that will help you catch more trout.
“There’s an instant of tightness in the normal dance of a leader in current that indicates a trout has mouthed the fly—however briefly or gently—and you can tell, the way you can tell from the sound whether a guitar string has been struck by a musician or say, bumped by the tail of a passing dog.”
—John Gierach, Trout Bum, Simon & Schuster, 1986
The Little Lehigh is one of Pennsylvania’s treasured limestone creeks, with beautiful cool water pumped up by Mother Earth every day of the year. Located in Allentown, in a beautiful park, the Heritage section of the water is a mile or so of fly-fishing-only water from Hatchery Road off Route 309. Headquarters for anglers here is the Little Lehigh Fly Shop, www.littlelehigh-flyshop.com, 610-797-5599, located on Hatchery Road. The river is a treasure to behold, whether you are fishing or just having a picnic, as many Allentown folks and tourists do, with trout in plain sight all up and down the river. The trout are skittish as hawks, very difficult to approach and catch. You’ll see lots of anglers here, few having hookups. Still, if you are longing to see some wild trout rising to flies right in front of you, give the Little Lehigh in Allentown a try.
When catching some of the biggest trout in the river is your objective (as opposed to my usual pursuit of just wanting to catch lots of representative fish and get lots of action), you’ve got to use big-fish tactics. That means focusing on the deepest, darkest pools with big nymphs and streamers and getting deep. Sure, lots of big trout are caught sipping tiny flies off the surface.
If you’re lucky enough to find them, tight lines! But in the main, you’ve got to fish down and dirty to lure out the big trout.
The theory of special tactics for giant trout came into play for me one June morning on a private stretch of Pennsylvania’s Spruce Creek owned by friend Sylvia Bashline. Fishing with writer Nick Sisley, I studied a fine deep pool where the water pressed against a cut bank back in the shadows. I pulled out an olive landlocked salmon fly, about 4 inches long, tied it on, and cast. The instant I pulled the streamer into the shadows, several fish flashed in the pool, and I thought, “Oh, boy!” In the next instant, a pike-sized fish bolted up through the pool with the fly in its mouth. It was a brown trout, huge, powerful, the trout of my dreams. Somehow, I managed to land the fish. Nick took a picture or two, and we measured the beast at 25 inches and released it. As you can imagine, this encounter is one of my favorite trout memories.
When trying to wade the edge of a trout stream that’s flowing through tangles of branches, vines, and assorted gremlins that stop your progress, you’ll be better off if you have a work glove on one hand to help clear your way. It’s crazy how a single branch will find your landing net if you let it.
Mentioning the word “desert” doesn’t exactly conjure up images of trout, but when you make it read “high desert” you’ve got a whole new ballgame. That’s especially so in central Oregon’s high desert country, where private lakes and river stretches offer trout-fishing opportunities of the highest quality. Three of the best are the Grindstone Lakes at www.grindstonelakes.com; Lake in the Dunes at www.lakeinthedunes.com; and the Yamsi Ranch waters, which include the Williamson River, at www.yamsiflyfishing.com. If you’re ready to book some really good fishing and lodging, check them out.
The words Snake River bring to mind mountain men, beautiful high country, and battling trout. Places like Idaho’s legendary Henry’s Fork of the Snake come to mind, as do remote sections of the South Branch of the Snake, which flow through wilderness beyond the roads. Three destinations in Idaho’s Snake River area have linked together their Web sites so you can click onto the kind of fishing that interests you most. The three sources that interconnect on guides and lodging in the area are the well-known Mike Lawson’s Henry’s Fork Anglers at www.henrysforkanglers.com; South Fork Outfitters at www.southforkoutfitters.com; and South Fork Lodge at www.southforklodge.com.
From Kim Sedrovic’s Fernie Wilderness Adventures lodge, in the remote mountains at Fernie, British Columbia, trout anglers get top-notch action wading or floating rivers like the Elk. The scenery has been described as breathtaking in articles in sporting magazines such as Sporting Classics. And there are trout there to match the surroundings. Orvis endorsed. See www.fernieadventures.com.
Fly-fishing the popular Housatonic River in Connecticut can be greatly enhanced by a visit to Housatonic River Outfitters at www.dryflies.com. They’ve got everything you need, and everything you need to know, to meet the hatches and catch trout here.
“The flesh of the trout is a rare delicacy that comes from one of nature’s most tender and perishable creatures…. By far the best time to enjoy your trout is beside the waters where they are caught. Take a fry pan along and some bacon or shortening, and a little cornmeal and salt, and have yourself a feast fit for a deposed king—or an ulcerated millionaire. But first take a trout….”
—Robert Traver, Trout Madness,
St. Martin’s Press, 1960
“Two weeks ago, when it was thirty below, steam rose from the creek behind our home, from the riffle above the bridge. I’d never noticed it before … Then I realized there must be an underwater spring in that section of the creek…. and now I know where I can catch trout in extremes, whether in late August or the last week of November.”
—John Barsness, Montana Time,
Lyons & Burford, 1992
“In western lakes a No. 8 olive Woolly Worm is never a mistake.”
—John Barsness, Montana Time,
Lyons & Burford, 1992
“There is no substitute for fishing sense, and if a man doesn’t have it, verily, he may cast like an angel and still use his creel largely to transport sandwiches and beer.”
—Robert Traver, Trout Madness,
St. Martin’s Press, 1960
There are people who would say I should not be telling you about this particular angling destination. They lament that the place has received far too much publicity already, and that tattletales like Underwood should be thrown into irons for revealing secrets. I don’t see it that way, but be warned that what you are about to learn can change your life, bend and skewer your schedules and priorities toward new directions. It’s happened to many people before you, people who long to fly fish on spring creeks—the clear, cold slick reaches of water boiling out of Mother Earth 24/7 at the same temperature and filled with healthy, hungry trout. The Upper Missouri river is not a spring creek, but it might as well be. From its water release at Holter Dam near Wolf Creek, Montana, down past the fly fishing and lodging headquarters at Craig, eight miles downstream, and on down for scores of miles below that, the Missouri flows smooth and cold. It is filled with rainbow and brown trout and fly hatches to dream about. The Upper Missouri is the kind of water that makes people contemplate giving up their jobs and seeking employment in Helena, not far away. Those who can afford it look to buy vacation homes and cabins there. Some of my friends in the eastern United States, where I live, treasure the Upper Missouri for fall “cast and blast” vacations, combining bird hunting with trout fishing there. There are books galore, maps, and information sites. We shall get to some of them here.
© Stu Apte 2010
Stu Apte displays a Missouri River trout.
The Fly Shop at Wolf Creek, Montana, is a great place for hitting the river along the eight miles from the Holter Dam release to the town of Craig. The Fly Shop, at www.wolfcreekoutfitters.com/flyshop, not only has guides but also rents drift boats and float tubes and is adjacent to motel facilities. Phone, toll free, is 866-688-7688.
The little town of Craig, Montana, is a larger village than its Wolf Creek counterpart, upstream, and hosts lodging, guides, and outfitters for fishing the Upper Missouri. Headhunters Fly Shop, www.headhuntersflyshop.com, is just a short cast from the river at Craig and is a full-bore operation for guides, boats, rentals, gear, lodging, and information. Craig is a colorful stop for the fly fisher, including a bridge over the river right in midtown, a railroad crossing, and ample watering holes to discuss trouting adventures.
Located among other fly-fishing operations in the thriving metropolis of Craig, Montana, on the Upper Missouri is The Trout Shop, a complete guiding and outfitting service where you’ll find just about everything you need to enjoy fishing this fabulous river. Visit their superb Web site at www.thetroutshop.com to see what it’s all about, then pay them a visit in person. You may never leave.
For those who think the “city life” in Craig and Wolf Creek might be a little intimidating, there’s the Flyway Ranch located between the two towns on the Craig River Road. The ranch features lodging right on the bank of the river. Visit their Web site at www.flywayranch.com or call them at 406-235-4116.
“Bob Carmichael taught me about cutthroats in Jackson Hole [Wyoming] … Young man, he rumbled with failing patience, When you know enough about this part of the country to have an opinion about the fishing—you’ll know there’s cutthroats and there’s cutthroats…. These fish ain’t no pantywaists—they’re Jackson Hole cutthroats!”
—Ernest Schwiebert, Trout, E.P. Dutton, 1978
“The fish worked steadily all along the current tongues, and when I finally hooked one it was a whitefish. Forget your matching the hatch! Carmichael always ragged me unmercifully. Fish these big variants right in the rips—and you’ll learn something about real cutthroat fishing!’
—Ernest Schwiebert, Trout, E.P. Dutton, 1978
“While the big news on Limestone Creek (a fictitious name for a Pennsylvania spring creek) is always the coming of the giant Green Drake, the best fishing is usually with one of the various sulfurs. It’s no secret and a favorite saying of local veterans that the best Green Drake pattern is usually a Size 16 Sulfur.”
—Chuck Robbins, Odyssey at Limestone Creek,
Tussey Mountain Publishers, 1997
Ever see and hold one of the Mouse Flies recommended for the big rainbows in Alaska? Well, before the rainbows get totally focused on salmon eggs once the great salmon runs go into full swing, the Mouse Fly is considered a primary weapon, especially early and late in the day. At this time of year—dead winter—when I am inclined to dreaming of doing great things, I have decided to give the big Mouse Fly, complete with its curly tail, some quality time on New York’s upper Delaware. I’ll fish it just at dark, through a pool where I have reasonable expectations of raising a fish. Might work! Can’t hurt!
“So we assume that recognizable West Yellowstone pose: modest, seasoned, and ever so slightly self-satisfied. The implication being, yes, I guess we do know a thing or two about fishing around here, and, no, we don’t really care to go into it. If nothing else, we know how to fit in here. We understand that the less you say about fly fishing, the more people will assume you know.”
—John Gierach, Dances With Trout,
Simon & Schuster, 1994
“Most of the fishermen I know—even those who think of themselves as Sportsmen with a capital S— have a creek like this somewhere in their lives. It’s not big, it’s not great, it’s not famous, certainly it’s not fashionable, and therein lies its charm. It’s an ordinary, run-of-the mill trout stream where fly-fishing can be a casual affair rather than having to be a balls-to-the-wall adventure all the time.”
—John Gierach, Sex, Death, and Fly Fishing,
Simon & Schuster, 1990
When I first got into trout fishing, coming to the sport from a southern fishing background, I was quick to attribute missed hits as, “He missed it!” Or, “I snatched it away from him!” Of course, what I was seeing was a classic refusal rise. I just didn’t know what it was.
When a summer cold front is approaching, with thunderstorms threatening, your fishing can turn into a real frenzy of action for a while. You’ll have to eventually take cover, however, or die!
The first couple of days behind a real cold front, with the wind rising and temperature drop ping, can challenge even the most experienced anglers. You can bail out for home, or hang in there and give it your best shot. If you do stick around, plan on fishing deep and slow.
“Game fish are too valuable to be caught only once.”
—Lee Wulff, Lee Wulff’s Handbook of Freshwater
Fishing, J.B. Lippincott, 1939
Dunking worms in deep holes for early-season trout in your favorite stream is relatively easy—as long as other anglers don’t take over your hole. Spinning the entire stream, working your way carefully from pocket to pocket, is a lot more fun and will produce lots of trout, provided you are a skilled caster. The ability to cast light spinners and baits into pockets with accuracy separates the trout anglers who limit-out from the ones who come up empty. They just can’t cast. We’re talking about all kinds of delicate casts, underhand flips, sidearm throws under brush, things like that. It’s not distance; it’s accuracy that counts. The only way to obtain this skill is to practice, practice, practice. You’ll catch lots of trout if you do.
In early spring, it’s tough to beat mealworms as a trout bait.
“Bait is a connection with rivers that no other method of angling quite reaches. We are visual animals; although we use all our other senses to some extent … Bait fishing allows us to see through touch, like a coyote sees through his nose.”
—John Barsness, Montana Time,
Lyons & Burford, 1992
Hitting your favorite local trout stream when it’s stocked with fish in early season is a coveted rite of spring. An absolutely deadly bait—even better than worms—is the mealworm, the larva form of the mealworm beetle. Find a baitshop that carries them, and you are in business. You can also order them live right off the Internet at places like Cabela’s, www.cabelas.com. (They’ll keep in your fridge.) Place a No. 6 or 8 bait hook about three-fourths of the length of the beetle. Notice that stuff will be oozing out of the beetle, creating a fantastic fish attractor. Use a single split-shot to get the bait down. Many anglers like a barrel swivel about 18 inches above the hook to prevent twists. Mealies stay on the hook fairly well. Cast them into pocket water, in front of boulders, around their sides, into deep holes, down through riffles. Using ultralight spinning gear, mealies, and a rig like this, you’re going to catch lots of early-season trout.
If you are a good caster, you can do very well on early season trout in small streams by using ultralight spinning tackle and the smallest, lightest in-line spinners your rig can handle. Mepps, Panther Martin, and Blue Fox are some favorites, but there are many others. The bigger and heavier the spinner, the bigger and deeper the water it takes to fish them without them hanging up constantly. You want the lightest spinners your stream can handle, working them into pockets and under overhanging cover. Casting and retrieving these spinners in a small stream is an art unto itself, as challenging as fly fishing—but a lot more productive most of the time.
When your spinner is swinging on the downstream arc of your cast, just before it swings across the current and the line straightens out below you, don’t be in a hurry. Far from it, realize that the next several seconds may bring the strike you’ve been waiting for. Alternate between little jerks and steady pulls as it swings across. When it’s downstream directly below you, keep it still for a moment, then start a careful retrieve.
The real magicians of small-stream spinning—the guys and gals who catch most of the trout—avoid snagging by careful manipulation of their line with a subtle sense of feel in their rod hand. They don’t make long casts; you might even say they don’t cast at all in the true sense of the word. Instead, they make little flips and tosses, putting the small spinner into the holes with backhand and sidearm moves. They also match the size and weight of the spinner to the conditions, and often hold their rod high on the retrieve to keep the lure from snagging the bottom. A good formula to remember: Flip the spinner out rod-low and retrieve it rod-high, watching the line carefully to make sure your little Mepps isn’t about to snag up.
As in everything about fishing, there are no absolute rules regarding which color to choose for your spinner blades. However, a great many successful anglers like to use bright, silver-type blades on bright days. Use gold blades on dull or dark days.
When adding split-shot to your line to get your spinner deeper, place the shot several inches above the spinner, not on the spinner’s nose. Placing it on the nose will interfere with the spinner’s action.
Tie on an olive Woolly Bugger streamer, place enough split-shot to make the cast about 8 inches up the line, and fish it just as if you were using a fly rod. Whether or not to use a weighted beadhead fly, or the unweighted, depends on the current and depth you’re trying to fish. Olive Woolly Buggers in various weights and sizes belong in your kit with your Mepps and other in-line spinners.
When you’re lucky enough to get a big slow pool all to yourself on your trout stream, don’t make your first casts to the backside. Start by making a series of Fan Casts to the nearest part of the pool, gradually working your casts to the backside. You’ll really be covering the water that way.
We talk elsewhere in this book about the importance of catching fish when you take kids fishing, making sure they get action. One of the best ways to do that on early season trout streams is to use a simple bait-keeper hook, like a Size 8, perhaps a split-shot and barrel swivel about 12 inches up the line, and a bobber. You can use a light spinning outfit, or even a plain long graphite pole or fly rod. Your bait will be one of the many Berkley Powerbaits, a glowing, scented trout tantalizer you carry in a small jar: www.cabelas.com. If you can find a good spot, the kid will see the bobber start dancing, then go under, and you’ll have a fishing partner for life.
If you feel that the trout in your local streams are being pounded too hard with traditional in-line spinners like Mepps and Panther Martins, consider going to an alternative. Two excel lent choices are the Spin-A-Lure and Lil’ Jake Lure, both wobblers with tantalizing action. Available at www.cabelas.com. Work them the same way you do in-line spinners.
B-17 makes fantastic lures in sizes and weights for both fly fishing and spinning for trout and bass, and just about everything that swims. They’re expensive compared to your average spin-bait, but wait until you see and try them. Don’t be put off by the unusual name of their Web site, www.b-17swimsuit.com.
When using small spinners for trout, keep an alert eye on the lure as it swings through a pool or behind the rocks, especially on your first cast into a hole. Even when they do not hit, trout often respond to a spinner by a flashing movement.
The Colorado spinner is thought to owe its origin to a man named John Hildebrant, who, in 1899, put a hole in a dime, attached it to a hairpin shaft, and started catching trout. In much-improved forms, it’s been catching trout ever since. The late Ted Trueblood, angling editor and columnist for Field & Stream, in his Angler’s Handbook, “Thomas Crowell” (1949) as calling it “The most deadly trout lure ever devised for fishing in the United States …” He added, “In various sizes it will catch all other kinds of gamefish.” Fish the Colorado with line as light as possible, and with just enough weight on your line to make the cast. Although some experts do not like baiting the Colorado, I personally have had great success with trout using a Colorado spinner sweetened with a worm.
If you want to catch lots of trout during early season when the water’s cold and the streams are a little high and off-color, leave your fly rod in the truck and go with light spinning tackle. Use tiny jigs tipped with live bait or soft-plastics like Berkley’s Power Nymphs. Small hair jigs work too.
A Web site called Jerry’s Flies, www.jerrysflies.com, is where I first started reading about Matuka spinner flies. Combining a Matuka streamer with a spinner creates a lure you can count on to get trout moving in whatever pool you work it in. Matukas, which I believe originally came from New Zealand, have been a favorite of trout fly fishers for years. Combined with a spinner, they are even more effective. Before Woolly Buggers came along, the Matuka was my go-to fly for searching the water. I like olive.
No need to send your Mepps or other spinner lure out there all by itself. Where legal, you can sweeten your trout fishing spinner lure by tipping it with a piece of earthworm. It spoils the action of the spinner a little, but you’ll catch more trout. They love worms.
The fly-fishing-only crowd hates all this, but what the heck… you’re out to catch some trout. This will help you do it. Maybe someday you’ll get into fly fishing. Right now, you’ll be eating trout
You don’t hear much about “spinning the bubble” these days, but it’s still an effective way to catch trout on streams or lakes where all-tackle fishing is allowed. Tie your spinning line to the kind of ball float that you can get water into to add weight for casting with flies. Set your leader from the float to the depth you think will bring strikes, and tie on a nymph. Cast upstream, downstream, or across and let your rig float down through trout lairs. You’ll catch fish.
Trout are generally thought of as fish of streams and large lakes. However, they can also live in coolwater ponds. Northern beaver ponds are great places for wild brook trout, and spring-fed manmade ponds can sustain stocked rainbows.
Trout do not relate to structure the way warmwater fish do. They roam a pond or small lake and are likely to be found at any depth. The best way to find them is to walk the bank and try different areas. You can catch trout on either natural bait or artificials. Use spin-cast or spinning tackle and 4- or 6-pound test line. For fishing natural bait, you can use either a bobber rig or a very light slip-sinker rig. Bait with a night crawler, grasshopper, commercially preserved salmon eggs, or whole kernel corn. Use a #8 short-shank hook.
If you prefer artificials, stick with tiny crankbaits, sinking spoons, in-line spinners (probably best), and minnow lures. If you’re casting a lure that sinks, use the countdown method to fish different depths.
A boat is a definite help in fishing a large lake or reservoir. Anglers who can move around and fish away from the bank have a better chance of success on these larger waters.
Large lakes and reservoirs are some of the most popular and accessible fishing locations. Most are public waters with boat ramps, piers and other facilities to accommodate fishermen. They usually have large, diverse fish populations, and offer many opportunities for anglers.
What’s the difference between a lake and a reservoir? A lake is made by nature, while a reservoir is made by man. Natural lakes are plentiful in the northern U.S. and Canada, in Florida, along major river systems (oxbows), and in the Western mountains.
Natural lakes come in several forms. Some have rounded, shallow basins with soft bottoms. Others are very deep with irregular shapes and bottoms that include reefs, islands and other structure. In many natural lakes, vegetation grows abundantly in shallow areas.
Natural lakes vary in age and fertility—measures of their ability to support fish populations. Some are relatively young and fertile, while others are eons old and somewhat infertile.
Reservoirs exist throughout North America. These are impoundments formed by building a dam across a river and backing up the floodwaters. Dozens of reservoirs have been built across the continent in the last 50 years to control floods, and generate electric power.
Ethics & Etiquette
Ask First.
Don’t trespass. Never go on private property without
permission. If you find a place you’d like to
fish, seek out the permission of the landowner.
In most cases, the bottoms of reservoirs were once farmlands or forest. The water covers old fields, woodlands, creeks, roads, and other features that, when submerged, became structure.
Reservoirs are divided into two categories: upland and lowland (or mainstream). Upland reservoirs were built in highlands or canyons. They are typically deep and wind through steep terrain. Their coves and creek arms are irregular in shape.
In contrast, lowland reservoirs course through broad, fat valleys. These reservoirs are wider and shallower than upland reservoirs and typically have a long, fairly straight trunk with numerous smaller tributary bays.
The fertility of a reservoir often depends on how fertile the area was before it was flooded. Lowland reservoirs impounded over river bottoms are highly fertile, especially if trees were left standing when the area was fooded. As the trees decay, they release nutrients that support fish. Upland or canyon areas are less fertile, however. This is why upland reservoirs seldom support fish populations as dense as those in lowland reservoirs.
It’s easy for a beginning angler to stand on the bank of a large lake or reservoir and feel overwhelmed. There’s so much water and so many places where fish can be. Start by adjusting your attitude. Since there’s more water, there are more fish, so your odds of success are roughly the same as when fishing a pond or smaller lake.
That’s exactly how to approach this situation! It’s impossible to fish an entire large lake or reservoir. So choose one small part of it, approach it like a pond or small lake, and use the same tactics. Whether they live in large or small waters, fish react the same to similar conditions in their environment. The basics still apply, and the same tactics work in large waters and small. The main difference is that, since they aren’t confined in small ponds, the fish have more freedom to roam, and may migrate from one area to another depending on the season, food supply and other factors. Therefore, when deciding where to fish on a big lake, you have to pick the right small part.
How do you do this? Ask a nearby tackle store operator where the fish are biting. Watch where other anglers are fishing. Try to determine if the fish are shallow or deep. Learn the depth where they’re biting. Use whatever information you can to get an overall picture, then key in on a location.
One aid that all anglers should learn to use is a topographic map. A “topo” map shows water depth and contour changes on the lake bottom. You can look at a topo map and find drop-offs, reefs, flats, creek channels, sunken islands and other types of structure. You can use the map to find these special areas where fish are likely to hang out. For instance, if a tackle store operator tells you crappie are spawning around the shoreline in shal low bays, you can locate shallow bays on your topo map, learn how to get to there, then go fish them.
In essence, topo maps are road maps to hot spots. Get one for the lake where you plan to fish and begin studying it.
Trout are found in cold-water streams throughout much of the U.S. and Canada. Some are native to their home waters while others have been raised in hatcheries and stocked.
This stream angler is doing every thing right. He’s casting up-current, and retrieving his lure back through a deep hole with cover. There is a good chance he will get a strike.
Fly-fishing is a popular, effective way to take trout, but I don’t recommend it for beginners. I suggest sticking with light spinning tackle until you build your angling skills. Then you might “graduate” to fly-fishing in the future.
Stream trout are very elusive fish. Get too close, make too much noise, wear bright clothes, or drop a lure right on their heads, and they’ll dart away. Instead, you have to stay back from feeding zones, remain quiet, wear drab-colored clothes, and cast beyond where you think the fish are.
Trout hold in similar areas as smallmouths. They prefer eddies adjacent to swift water where they can hide and then dart out to grab passing food. During insect hatches, trout also feed in open runs with moderate current.
Since most trout streams are clear, rig with 4-to 6-pound test line. Then tie on a small in-line spinner, spoon, floating minnow or crawfish crankbait. Cast these lures around rocks, logs, weeds and other likely structure bordering swift water. The heads of pools can be especially good early in the morning and late in the afternoon. Also, trout love to feed after dark.
Natural baits are also effective on stream trout. Night crawlers, salmon eggs, grasshoppers and minnows are good bets. Canned corn or small marshmallows will tempt bites, especially from hatchery-raised trout. All these baits should be fished on the bottom with a very small hook (#12) and a split shot clamped 10-12 inches up the line.
Earlier in this chapter I mentioned that fishing large lakes is like fishing small ponds in terms of basics. The same comparison can be made between small streams and large rivers. Big rivers are just little streams that have grown up. They are more complex, however, and contain a much broader range of fishing conditions.
Large rivers are the most diverse of all waters. They contain a wide variety of fishing locations: eddies, bluffs, dropoffs, shallow flats, feeder streams, backwater sloughs, tailwaters, deep and shallow areas, and swiftflowing and calm water. Rivers also hold all species of freshwater fish and North American large rivers offer a smorgasbord of fishing opportunity.
As with small streams, large rivers are also divided into two types: warm and cold water. Most rivers in North America are the warm, deep variety, supporting sunfish, bass, white bass, catfish, walleye, etc. Many are dammed into “pools” to provide enough deep water for navigation.
In contrast, cold-water rivers are typically shallow and swift, flowing through mountainous areas and usually hold various trout species.
Large rivers are most often fished from boats, though you can fish successfully from the bank, especially below dams or in backwater sloughs and oxbows. But whichever method and location you choose, large rivers are topnotch fisheries that beginners and veteran anglers can share and enjoy.
As in small streams, current determines fish locations in large rivers. Understanding current and being able to read rivers is essential to fishing them.
Current in large rivers may be more difficult to figure out. In small streams you can see the riffles and swift runs, but in large rivers the current may appear equal from bank to bank. Look closer, though, and you’ll see signs of current breaks. Points of islands, jetties, dam tailwaters, river bars and mouths of tributaries are all areas where current is altered, and are prime spots to catch fish.
Most fish in large rivers usually hang in eddies or slack water. Sometimes they prefer still water bordering strong current where they can ambush baitfish washing b y. At other times they seek quiet backwater sloughs.
Besides current, three other variables in large rivers are water level, color, and cover.
WATER LEVEL—Rivers continuously rise and fall, depending on the amount of rainfall upstream. The level of the river is referred to as its “stage,” and this can have a direct bearing on fish locations. Many times, when a river is rising and its waters are flooding surrounding lowlands, fish move into these freshly-flooded areas to take advantage of a banquet of worms, crawfish and other food.
COLOR—Large rivers vary greatly in water clarity. While the main channel area may be muddy, backwaters can be clear and more attractive to fish. Or, entire river systems may be muddy or clear, depending on recent rains. Most fish species feed better in clear rather than muddy water.
COVER—Fish react to cover in rivers the same way they do in other bodies of water. Species such as bass, crappie and sunfish usually hold in or close to cover. Structure provides hiding places and a shield from current.
So when “reading” a large river, be aware of current (especially eddies), river stage, water color, and structure. You will encounter a broad range of combinations of these conditions that may confuse a beginning fisherman. But by following the advice in the remainder of this section, you can be assured that you’re on track and that you can, indeed, mine large rivers of their fishing riches.
Many techniques for fishing large rivers are the same for ponds, lakes and small streams. Therefore, the key to catching fish from rivers is finding them and then applying the fundamentals of tackle, bait and fishing methods.
Many large cold-water rivers offer very good trout fishing. Deep runs can harbor lunker browns, rain bows and cutthroats. These trophy fish are very wary, so they’re hard for beginning anglers to catch. However, smaller trout can provide plenty of action for beginners who use basic techniques and who are careful not to spook the fish.
Many cool-water streams in North America support abundant trout populations – both natives and stockers. The best way for beginners to catch these fish is casting tiny spinners or natural bait into holes below swift runs.
As in small streams, current is the most important factor in deciding where to try for trout in large rivers. The concept is simple. Current funnels food into predictable areas, and the fish hold in or around these areas where the pickings are easy. They’ll lie in the shadows and then dart out and grab a morsel as it drifts by.
Pools below riffles or waterfalls are prime feeding locations. So are eddies behind rocks, logs or anything else that diverts current. Undercut, shaded banks on outside bends of the river are prime hiding places for trout as are holes below the mouths of feeder creeks. The trick is to study the current for places next to the flow where trout can lurk and watch for food.
Fish these spots with the same lures recommended for stream trout: spinners, spoons, floating minnows and small crankbaits. Always cast upstream and retrieve your lure back with the current. Decide exactly where you think trout should be and pull your lure close to this location.
Use natural bait the same way as in small streams. Worms, minnows, grasshoppers and salmon eggs will take native trout. Whole kernel corn, cheese, and small marshmallows are good for stocked trout. Fish these baits with a small hook and a split shot crimped a foot above the hook. Make a quartering cast upstream from where the trout should be. Then reel in slack line and feel for a bite as the current carries the bait along bottom. Set the hook at any unnatural bump or pressure.
On rivers, fish natural bait the same way as in small streams.
© Jay Cassell
Mid-sized streams (above) often yield big-sized trout (below).
