These Fishing Reports are something I’ve wanted to get back to for many years. Long ago, the Troutbitten crew had a private forum. It was just us, and we exchanged ideas and stories every day. At the heart of those stories were the fishing reports. We all fished hard, and we fished often. Those reports contained the details. Often, it was nothing but the conditions, the tactics, the flies and an account of our failure or success. But what did we learn? That was always the question . . .

The Setup

On the first of December, the boys had a snow day. So after some shoveling, some emails, some leader shop updates and some video editing, I had about three hours of daylight to fish in the first real snow of the year. Good!

I chose my home water, in part to save a few minutes of travel time, but also because I enjoy the challenge of fishing at these extremely thin flows. This is, sincerely, the lowest I’ve ever fished my home water — and it’s been this way since early October. With no real rain from the skies, this spring-fed creek has been bottomed out at its absolute base flow.

I have not guided this part of the river for many months, but I’ve been coming back to fish it for myself, just because it’s hard. I fish often enough that I enjoy unique challenges, and this ultra low water certainly presents a high degree of difficulty.

The Fishing

I started with the mindset to fish small, unweighted fur nymphs with a split shot. I fished a single #20 Olive Walt’s for about the first half hour. 6X tippet. 15-30 cg of split shot. Caught one, lost one and spooked a bunch. Man, the water is low.

Spooking fish wasn’t the problem, really, and I wouldn’t even say that I was spooking more trout than under normal conditions. It’s just that with the low, clear water, I can see more trout heading for the hills — upstream, downstream or for the nearest brush pile.

The biggest problem was the muck on the riverbed. All the summer-green plant life is still there, now in a dead, dark brown sludgy stuff that grabs ahold of anything it touches it — like my flies and split shot.

Nothing has been eating on the drop around here for a few weeks. Colder flows dictate this every year — trout eat in the strike zone, and they’re unforgiving about that.

So, in flows that average about 10 to 20 inches deep, my goal was to ride the nymphs through a zone near that bottom that probably averaged four inches tall. Not much room for error there. And every error resulted in the brown muck on my rig, with about a half minute wasted to remove it.

When that got frustrating enough, I changed to a tracking approach, so I caught one tiddler while floating the sighter and tracking with the lightest weights.

Regardless of the difficulty, my next move was a yellow sucker spawn, very small, with just 20 cg of split shot, riding in the strike zone. I knew the yarn would gather even more sludge when it touched, but trout should be eating eggs by now, because the spawn is nearly over. (I did see at least a dozen redds in my few hours on the water.)

Working upstream consistently produced a couple more trout, all small. In these conditions I got just one or two chances before I felt like trout were spooked, just from the act of dead drifting nymphs nearby, so I kept moving.

Too much muck on my flies forced me to rethink things, so I ran a light drop-shot rig of 30 cg, with an egg in the bottom position and a tiny #20 BH France Fly up top. Nothing ate either fly, even though the rig did run much cleaner though the lanes.

I then swapped the bottom fly to a #18 Cress Bug (just fur on a hook), and I picked up another trout while missing two more. That was encouraging, but the production was all in one patch.

After another half hour with no action, I swapped out to streamers on the tight line with a Crossover leader. This was a good decision. Even in the lowest flows, trout responded well to a Mini Pint. It’s a Half Pint variation on a #8 jig hook with a 3.5 mm bead. It’s two inches long. On the tight line, I landed the fly with contact, controlled the quick descent through thin water and never let it touch. I varied presentations until I found that a down and across head position with a medium, cross-current, ten-inch jerk-strip gained a lot of interest.

Mini Pint doing work.

Water coverage was even more critical with the bigger fly, so I tripled my pace. In these conditions, showing the fly to more trout has often been the best answer, and the streamer did that for me.

In the last hour, I found another ten fish that were interested, and half of those made it to the net.

The sun tucked behind the hills, and I walked out.

Not a bad outing, especially for tough conditions.

The Conclusion

Time: 170 mins
Caught: 11
Lost/Missed: 8

Nymphing may have technically caught just as many trout, but the process was tedious. Streamers were a better choice, but only because I could cover water and be extremely accurate with the presentations. I placed the fly very close to the structure, over and over, as I worked upstream. Without that accuracy, I think the streamer fishing would have failed.

I’m tired of the low water fishing, but I continue to learn things every day. And that’s good fishing.

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