Some anglers lend too much credence to the hatch charts for nymph selection. A nymphing angler must be careful not to take every dry fly concept and principle underneath.
Never forget, what you see on the surface or in the air does not necessarily correlate with the best fly choice under the water. Tan Caddis may be all over the water’s surface, but are they easily available as a nymph to the trout right now? We can’t know that for certain, but we can test the theory . . .
Season fourteen is a ten-part Troutbitten Skill Series, all about Streamer Presentations. Streamer fishing is salesmanship. But how do we sell it? What are the animations? What are the things we can do with a long fly, to make it look like a baitfish, like a crayfish, a sculpin, maybe a small trout or a fall fish?
Most anglers hate this wasted time. In fact, all of this preparation just to go fishing puts a lot of anglers off in the first place. And the colder it is, or the longer you plan to be out there fishing, or the more tactics you plan to use the more all of this pre-trip prep is required.
We want a system for minimizing the time between cutting the car engine to walking away from the vehicle with our fly rod in hand.
You can tell a lot about a fly angler from a quick look at their leader. If there was an educational course for working at a fly shop, that’s something the teacher would share early on. And I’ve seen this trick pulled countless times in shops, when the answer-to-question ratio was getting pretty thin . . .
“Hey, go grab your reel, and let’s see how you have things set up.”
There’s nobody around for miles, you have every braid and river bend all to yourself, and there’s a real possibility of the biggest fish of your life to the net. The prospects of marginal water are tantalizing. But you have to be willing to cover miles of river, wade the rough stuff and accept a slim fish count, all for the low percentage chance of a couple trout where they aren’t supposed to be. You have to fish hard.
. . . Success on marginal water takes some time and patience to get it right.
When everything you expect to work produces nothing, don’t blame the fish. Think more. Try harder.
When your good drifts still leave the net empty, then don’t settle for good. Make things perfect. Never blame the fish . . .
I’ve replaced fishing hours with writing hours. In truth, I could be back out there wading, casting and catching again, but I’ve fallen into a daily cycle of coffee at the keyboard all morning. Sure, family stuff and other commitments have broken the spell on occasion, but I’m working fast on the book project that I’ve been looking toward for so many years. And once I start a big project, I don’t like to stop.
A good streamer bite comes with a shot of adrenaline, especially when the strips are fast and aggressive. As we see a wild trout attack the fly, our natural reaction is one of excitement. We set the hook, and all too often we continue the fast and aggressive motions of our retrieve. The trout never has a chance to get back down through the water column, and we mistakenly fight the fish fast and near the surface. Unfortunately, that’s the worst place for a trout, if you want it to stay attached.
Thirty minutes following the morning alarm, an hour-and-fifteen on the winding roads, ten under the hatch of the 4-Runner, and twenty more minutes hiking through a dawn drizzle that taps on the hood of your raincoat, the atmosphere feels soft here — and still. It’s cold for a fall morning. As you climb the hill through a stand of oaks, headed for the far valley, puffs of warm air escape your lungs and billow forward. You outpace your own breath. Even as progress slows with the steepening hill ahead, your breath trails behind. And you push forward through the dissipating fog of your own carbon dioxide.
“Keep walking, keep moving up the hill. Make it there before the sun crests,” you whisper to yourself. There’s no point in getting up at 4:30 if you can’t get in an hour of fishing before sunlight changes the game. At the top of the mountain, you pause, seemingly for the first time since the alarm clock — not to catch your breath but as a reminder that all of this is not a race. It’s an adventure. And a good wanderer stops to look around once in a while.
Every fisherman in the parking lot seems to have a thirty-inch fish story, don’t they?
You know what I hear when someone says a fish was “about two feet long?” I hear: “I didn’t measure the fish.”
Bass guys don’t put up with this stuff. My friend, Sawyer (a dedicated bass and musky guy), is dumbfounded by the cavalier way trout fishermen throw estimates around. In his world, if you didn’t measure it, you don’t put a number on it. They take it seriously. We trout fishermen embarrass ourselves with estimates.