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“He called it . . . shadow casting, keeping his line above water long enough and low enough to make a rainbow rise. And I realized, in the time that I was away, my brother had become an artist.” — Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It (1976)

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I was about fifteen when I first saw Brad Pitt standing on a midstream rock with sunlight highlighting the aerial dance of a fly line above him. That iconic moment merged with all the other fishing scenes in that wonderful film, and it pushed me over the edge — I wanted to be a fly fisherman.

The movie created a wave of anglers, like me, who were captivated by the possibilities of a long stick, a thick line and a dry fly. The influx of interest and the following revenue for well-positioned brands and businesses changed the fly fishing industry forever.

More trivially, the shadow casting scene left me wondering, to this day, if it is possible to create a hatch.

All Those Bugs

What if you knelt near the edge of the riverbank, your presence obscured by tall ferns growing right up to the border, and flipped beetles into the bankside flow? What if you tossed in a beetle every thirty seconds? And what if a sizable brown trout saw every one of those beetles floating and twisting downstream in the bank current right above its nose?

Could you convince the trout that it’s beetle season?

I did exactly that on a cool summer morning about twenty years ago. And after twenty beetles or so, still nothing happened. No takes.

My anecdote doesn’t mean much. Maybe the trout noticed my movement through the ferns. Maybe he was uninterested because he ate two crayfish overnight. Or maybe that trout didn’t like to eat beetles.

So the question remains: How many beetles would it take to spark the interest of an average trout? How many bugs need to travel down the chum line before a trout decides the opportunity is one that should not be missed?

What if we could do this with mayflies on the surface or just above it? What if Brad Pitt was onto something?

Yes, I’ve tried shadow casting, but it never worked. And I’d imagine that all the false casting happening in popular stretches of our favorite trout streams might just be enough to give it a fair test too.

Seriously, I don’t think shadow casting could work. But it’s a beautiful concept that also provided a nice metaphor for Maclean.

Shadow casting wouldn’t work (theoretically) because trout follow the emergence of mayflies, midges, caddisflies, craneflies and stoneflies. They eat every stage of the lifecycle. So trout are well aware of what’s on the menu, from bottom to top. For waterborne insects, I don’t think you can create a hatch.

But what about terrestrials?

My friend, Sawyer, with one hell of a good wild trout.

Of the Earth

Trout throughout this region had not seen a cicada in seventeen years. In fact, we don’t have a hatch that comes close in size. Our waters have no salmon flies. Sadly, even grasshoppers aren’t around these rivers enough to show such a large meal to our trout.

But then, somewhere around the end of May, 2025, the first trout in central Pennsylvania took a chance on a two-inch, live cicada. Then another, and another.

With terrestrials, trout have no signal from underneath that a new bug will be available on the surface. They just appear. They plop down.

So the concept of creating a hatch — or an opportunity — seems more plausible.

I’ve done this countless times while fishing dry ants every summer. In the best spots, if no fish responds on the first pass, I often repeat the presentation a dozen times. Instead of casting to the same line over and over, I mix in casts away from that spot. Then I hit it again five casts later. So just like the beetle test, I’m showing trout the opportunity about every thirty seconds.

I’m an impatient angler, and I’ve honestly never done this for more than five minutes. It works sometimes. Or should I say, I’ve eventually caught a trout while doing it once in a while.

There are too many questions left with this strategy to really know anything. Won’t repeated presentations just show trout what not to eat, over and over? Because, most drifts are imperfect from even the best angler, therefore teaching trout that things looking like that fly are unnatural. It’s fake, afterall. It’s material tied around a hook, and it’s not much like the real beetles that I flipped into the water years ago.

But creating an ant hatch makes me feel like Brad Pitt (maybe like a dollar-store version). And it seems to spark the curiosity of a trout once in a while, just as it satisfies some odd curiosity in me.

Cicadas

This season’s cicada event provided the chance to test the DIY hatch theory, both before and after the actual presence of big bugs making it to the water.

In the beginning, cicadas emerged from the ground and crawled up a tree trunk to mature in the leaves and the thin branches up top. Even as the song of cicadas grew, trout still hadn’t gotten a look at them on the water. At that time, it was difficult to fool a trout with a cicada pattern. Repeated drifts, attempting to create a hatch, were about as successful as they’ve been for the last seventeen years (not very successful). Sure, you might fool a trout or two with any fly on any day. And the foam cicada converted a few trout as an attractor, but its unusual size probably put more good fish down than turned them on.

At the end of the timeline, creating a hatch was more successful. The cicadas were gone for a couple weeks, and I still found large fish clearly on the hunt for the big bugs. Those trout ate with confidence. They knew the insect. They’d probably eaten hundreds over the last month, and if they didn’t eat on the first pass, repeated drifts sometimes seemed to spark their interest, provided the drifts did not drag or skitter first.

Was I creating a hatch? I doubt, but I like to think I was triggering their memory a bit.

Variables and Tests

The truth is, I do not think you can create a hatch. But I’ve had enough fun through the years, testing the concept in key spots at specific times, that I keep doing it. Because every once in a while, those extra drifts have seemed to make a difference.

Fishing if full of variables. And fishermen are full of ideas.

Fish hard, friends.

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Enjoy the day.
Domenick Swentosky
T R O U T B I T T E N
domenick@troutbitten.com