Bait it! Hook it! Eat it!

I picked this hat up from the riverbank while doing field work a few weeks ago.  I was counting brown trout redds in one of the spawning locations in my study area and just saw it lying there.  The funny thing was, the hat was on the banks of a special regulations section of water, which doesn’t allow the use of bait!

Uncle Mike is a coworker who’s a little older, more experienced in life, and a fly fishing fanatic.  I don’t know a single person who fishes more, on a consistent basis, than Uncle Mike.  He was the only person out fishing the Logan River every day in the dead of winter, with bruises on his thumbs from picking ice off his rod guides.  So an opportunity to learn some of the techniques he’s picked up was something I looked forward to. 

We took off to a nearby fishing destination after work on Friday and proceeded to fish until it was pitch black out.  We started off fishing a deep run in the stream, with the incredibly cold water making my feet ache till they were numb.  The cold water was shooting fast out the bottom of an upstream reservoir, keeping it in perfect condition for trout fishing even in mid summer.  It was much higher than usual, and a bit difficult to fish, or so I thought. 

We decided to fish one at a time, switching after each hooked fish.  Mike started, and with surprise, I saw him throw his fly up against the shoreline bushes with relative ease, and not a single false cast.  That was the first thing he told me,

“You’re false casting way too much, and all it’s doing is scaring the fish.”

Mike switched over to a hopper imitation he’d tied up, and proceeded to hook into a huge brown trout.  We measured it at 16 1/2 inches in the net, which didn’t do this old, thick fish much justice.  It had the head of a 20+ inch trout. 

It was my turn.  And with nary a false cast, I began throwing the big rubber hopper imitation, kersplashing it on the water’s surface for added appeal.

“A hopper doesn’t just gently land on the water surface” said Uncle Mike, ”you need to make it sound real.  The trout can hear that kersplat”. 

He was right.  I got the hopper right at the edge of an undercut bank and ripped out a 15 incher.  We moved up to the next pool, where we each caught another big brown. 

Then, it was on to a long, slow, shallow run, a place where I never would have expected a fish to even exist.  Mike worked the undercut bank with overhanging vegetation with no luck.  However, he continued to work areas in the stream channel that I routinely ignore. 

“You gotta hit all the water“, he continued to repeat.

Then the real surprise came.  He landed the hopper in a four inch pocket of water, and BAM!!!…….pulled out a 13 inch trout!

I smiled in disbelief, and then took my turn casting into the run.  I hit all the good water, and then, just to keep Mike off my back, I cast into the same 4 inch pocket of water, about 5 feet upstream from where he had pulled out his trout.  BAM!!!!!!!  Another brown!!!  I was beside myself.

We kept it up until we couldn’t see our flies anymore, and ended at a pool just above a beaver dam, where I casted, dead drifted the hopper, and waited to listen for the splash of a rising trout……..and waited……and waited……and waited.  And it came!

SPLASH!!!! 

The evening ended with a nice 13 1/2 inch brown, and memories of Uncle Mike’s highly stressed words of advice:

“Never stop a dead drift!!!“.

I intended to write a small piece on the use of circle hooks and their potential to reduce mortality in many fisheries, but found out that Steve Quinn, of In-Fisherman Magazine, put together an excellent article on the subject.  See “The Science of Circle Hooks”. 

For more info, check out these sites as well:

Circle Hooks

StriperSurf: Circle Hooks

Circle Hooks to the Rescue!

Circle Hook Magic

 While I personally haven’t tried these hooks yet, it appears that they’re starting to become much more popular, particularly in saltwater recreational fisheries, and are making their way into freshwater applications.  You can find more articles on circle hooks via a simple Google search.