Fly Fishing Tips for Stocked Trout
My first memory of bringing a trout to hand with a fly rod took place back in the spring of 1990, on a seasonal trout stream, located 45 minutes north of Atlanta, GA. It was a far cry from a trophy trout at 10-inches, but that freshly stocked rainbow trout, touched my eleven year old fishing soul to the core. I’ll never forget the excitement I felt watching that stocker chase down and eat my olive woolly bugger at my feet. It felt really good for a change, not relying on that plastic blue can of worms to get the job done. From that day forward, I never looked back, and I’ve moved on to become a respectable trout guide in my area and I’ve fly fished for trout all over the world.
Read More »Competitive Fishing and Responsibility
This article, like many I’ve written, began with a conversation I had with my brother, Tom. Tom and I are brothers separated by a mutual hobby. We both love to fish but in very different ways. Tom gets after bass on gear. A skill I respect but don’t especially prefer. I suck with a gear rod and it’s just not the experience I enjoy. It is, however, extremely technical and the guys who are good at it carry a wealth of knowledge on the species. I honestly think that being a good bass angler is harder than being a good trout angler. Tom is good. He’s had a little trouble with his boat. By a little trouble, I mean it was totaled in an accident while he was towing it. This led to him fishing a tournament on the back of someone else’s boat. A guy he did not know. I’ve been plenty vocal on how I feel about competitive fishing. If you haven’t caught that, let’s say, I’m not a fan. I think competition usually brings out the worst in people. Not everyone, but enough folks to make it something I don’t care for. You could feel any number of ways about that and I know from experience that my feelings on the subject make a lot of folks blow steam out their ears. That is, of course, exactly the kind of behavior I’m talking about and it has no place in fishing, as far as I’m concerned. Back to Tom’s experience. This guy he was fishing with had forward facing sonar on his boat. Not how I like to fish but I don’t have a problem with it. It’s the way bass guys often do it and if it makes you happy, knock yourself out. I see no … Continue reading
Read More »Don’t Hate the River
I was talking with a friend the other day about doing some fishing in Colorado, his home state.
This is a good topic to bring up if you are trying to lure me into an extended conversation. Colorado is near to my heart. He was throwing out places we might fish and said “I know you love the Dream Stream, but I hate that place”. This really took me off guard. How could anyone hate that place? If you’ve never fished it, trust me, the name says it all. A gorgeous high elevation tailwater, this section of the South Platte snakes thru a quant little valley between two reservoirs, bending back on itself time and time again, each glass clear bend stacked with big, beautiful, educated trout. What’s so terrible about that?
I do love that place and I’ve had some great days there the best being the first. Kent and I showed up with one of the S. Platte’s famous trico hatches in full swing. Glass calm runs turning into boiling caldrons of rising fish. Kent’s triple trico was born that day. The hatch was epic but we caught great fish all day using everything from dries to streamers. How can you hate a place like that? The answer is pretty simple, pressure.
You can’t put a stream like that a couple of hours drive from a major metropolitan area and not expect the word to get out. It’s true that the Dream Stream sees a ton of traffic but I’ve always had good experiences there and on a lot of other highly pressured rivers and I think it’s more than luck. Some of it is strategy and some of it is outlook.
Read More »Browns Rising
Back in 2013 Kent Klewein and I were in a tire commercial.
I was encouraged by a reader to reshare this video from 5 years ago. It seems like yesterday but our readership has grown so much since then that plenty of you have not seen it. If you have, please excuse the old news. If you haven’t, take a few minutes and enjoy some cool fishing footage. It is of course a tire commercial, so there’s that too.
BROWNS RISING
Read More »Rob Smith’s Rusty Enema
THE STASH IS BACK!
Rob “The Stash” Smith is back to share one of his favorite redfish flies with us. The Rusty Enema is a proven producer anywhere redfish are found. It’s a great attractor pattern that pushes a lot of water, which is like ringing the dinner bell for redfish in dirty water. Put a couple of these in your box to keep you catching redfish on a regular.
Watch the video to learn how to tie this fly and find out how it gets it’s name.
Read More »We be Grubbin’
By Chris Dore
Things are hotting up in Southern NZ and to many Southern locals, this means Willow Grubbing time!
Willow grubs are the larvae of the Saw Fly (Pontania Proxima) , and pupate within those angry red blisters found on the leaves of willow trees. As they emerge from these leafy cocoons, many fall into the rivers and streams these trees line. To the trout, this is a terrestrial smorgasboard and they feed in frenzy like fashion on, in and below the surface. To the angler, this can mean a frustrating time as casts after cast goes unrewarded, and fly after fly is lost forever to low hanging branches. However this doesn’t have to be so.
The key to successful grubbing is to imitate the minute movement of the natural, but how can you imitate the tiny pulses of an often size 20 or smaller morsel in the film without overdoing it?
By letting the fish see the drop of your fly. It’s often that simple.
Now another problem is in seeing such a tiny, sparse imitation at 20 to 30 feet. My solution is to simply attach your grub pattern on a short dropper behind a hi-viz parachute, blowfly or beetle pattern. If the cast goes astray, the fish may even hone in on your indicator fly. Its a win-win really. You can also use a tiny yarn indicator, or a smear of strike putty on your tippet knot.
The final dilemma is how to get those flies beneath or behind low hanging willow branches. Places that grubbing fish like to feed. The answer to this is
Read More »Presenting Your Fly To A School Of Bonefish
Bonefish are on the move!
Presenting your fly to a school of bonefish has to become second nature. There is often not time to make a plan. The successful angler is one who can make split second decisions and place the fly quickly and accurately.
It’s a little like shooting a shotgun. You have to know how far to lead the fish in a given situation and you have to be able to picture that lead to know where your target is. It’s a skill that takes time to master but hopefully this video will set you off in the right direction.
OUR FRIEND JOEL DICKEY IS BACK IN THIS VIDEO TO HELP YOU SEE YOUR TARGET.
Read More »Friends Don’t Let Friends Fish Muds
“THIS IS THE KIND OF BONEFISHING THAT RUINS YOU. THE KIND OF FISHING THAT IMPAIRS YOUR ABILITY TO MAKE GOOD DECISIONS.”
The sky is a perfect robin’s egg blue. Reflections of the morning sun dance on the underside on the mangroves giving the bright green leaves an unnatural glow. A breath of breeze cools my face in contrast to the warm sun on my back. Sixty or seventy yards in front of the boat there is a small school of nice size bonefish moving our way along the edge of the mangroves. It is a perfect morning on South Andros.
This flat is called Dodum. Dodum flat is a large white sand flat adjacent to the ocean at the mouth of Dodum Creek. The sand of the flat is as perfect as fresh snow and the water is a uniform depth of one to four feet depending on the tide. With the tide out, it’s a great wade and with it in, you can spend a whole day poling a boat around it. Dodum is big. Picture a Wal-Mart. Now picture the piece of land a Wal-Mart sits on, parking lot and loading docks included. Dodum is five times that size.
The tide is just beginning to fall and Captain Freddy is poling Kent and me along the mangroves at the edge of the flat. We are picking up fish as they come out of the mangroves with the tide. They are nice fish, averaging five or six pounds and there are plenty of them. We’re putting good numbers on the board early.
This is Kent’s first trip to South Andros. It’s my favorite place in the world to fish and he’s listened to me go on about it for countless hours. It’s our third day of fishing and, though the fishing has been good, Kent has yet to have one of those South Andros ‘magic days’. Almost anyone who has fished this place knows what I’m talking about. When the stars line up, things happen on South Andros that make your friends call you a liar.
Though Kent and I fish together all the time and have made some truly epic trips together, it just hasn’t worked out for us to make this trip. I’ve lost count of the days I’ve spent on Andros, but for me this trip is special. This time I get to show my best fishing buddy my favorite water in the world. Any fish I catch is a surplus to my excitement. Watching Kent, a look of child-like wonder on his face, soak in the beauty of this place and feel the power of these fish, that’s what I’m here for.
“You picked a fine time to leave me Lucille,” Freddy bursts into song as
Read More »One Fly, One Cast, One Tarpon
The bow of the skiff rises and falls under my feet as my eyes scan the vast expanse of blue and green.
We call this riding the bull. Balancing on a casting platform as the boat bobs and shifts in the surf. Out on the ocean side, that’s where you find migrating tarpon. These big fish push past in schools, often single file. It’s challenging fishing and today has been no exception. We’ve seen plenty of fish and plenty of refusals and disappearing acts but no open mouths or flared gill plates.
It’s late on the second day of fishing. We haven’t seen a fish in a while and haven’t fed one all day. My buddy Johnny Spillane and I each put a couple of nice fish in the air the day before, in spite of poor light. We had great expectations when we saw the beautiful blue sky this morning. Neither of us, or our guide Capt. Jessie Register, have an explanation for the attitude the fish are giving us, except that they are tarpon and that’s what they do.
A little red catamaran is cooking up the beach straight for us. It’s up on one hull and the guy is leaning out over the side. As he gets close, we are all wondering if we should be panicking. It really does look like he’s going to T-bone the skiff. It occurs to me that we are all watching the sailboat bearing down on us and that’s exactly the time a nice fish would swim by. I make a quick scan and, sure enough, there she is at two o’clock, and she’s big.
Read More »You buy your portfolio every morning
In the old days I ran a hedge fund.
That’s right. Half a billion dollars doing whatever I told it. Big trades, big profits (and losses) and big pressure. I learned a lot from a decade in that role that has helped me on the stream. (I know, it sounds like a stretch… but it’s true!) One of the prevalent sayings in Investment Management is “You buy your portfolio every morning.” What it means is, the decision to do nothing, to keep the investments you made yesterday, is still an active decision. It’s CHOOSING to go into the battle of that day with your current positions, rather than something else.
The truth in this idea hit me harder than ever on Sunday on a carp flat. I waded out of thigh-deep sand bottomed water to find maybe 150 carp cruising and feeding. They were working 12 to 18 inches of water over super soft mud-bottomed lake and eating like mad. I was so jacked up you could see the end of my 8wt vibrating in my trembling hands.
The fly I had on was too heavy for that shallow water. It was designed to get down with accuracy to fish at three feet deep. Remember… I was coming out of thigh-deep water. But I was stoked and the fish were there and they’re just stupid carp and I can be gentle and what if the wind picks up while I’m changing flies and maybe it would start to rain and what if they saw me and spooked before I got a cast… You get the picture. So I went into battle with the fly I had on because not changing didn’t feel like choosing that fly. It felt like
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