I have certainly benefited from advice from other anglers. My dad got me started fishing when I was about 5 years old, and my uncle introduced me to fly fishing five years later. Trips with them were always filled with tips for success.
I continue to pick up new ideas from friends when I fish with them, or at our Payson Flycasters Club and Gila Trout Chapter of Trout Unlimited monthly meetings. More often than not, though, I fish alone. That comes with the territory of being an angler, as we really need quite a bit of space between anglers.
I still get feedback on my fishing technique, often immediately, even when I am fishing alone. The fish have become some of my best teachers, and certainly my harshest critics. They are very critical of clumsy approaches to the stream. I can’t count the number of fish that I have spooked because my eyes were on the deep water at the center of the hole, rather than on the shallow water at the tail of the pool.
The tail is often where a smaller trout or two will take up a feeding position. These fish are quick to dart upstream, alerting the rest of the fish to beware of my presence. The fish will also let me know when a cast is not up to their standards. This is really apparent when a trout is steadily sipping bugs off of the surface. If my cast lands too hard, or the fly drags unnaturally in the current as the fish is inspecting it, the trout will drop to the bottom of the stream and stop feeding for 10 or more long minutes before I can try again.
Bass fishermen talk about figuring out the pattern of the fish. They keep a mental note of where they are catching the fish on a particular day. They keep track of whether the fish were caught on the points, in the bushes, on the flats, or under docks.
I do that too when I fish. I look for patterns of where the fish are, the fly that they like, or how they want that fly delivered to them. Earlier in the week, even though Green Valley Lake is very muddy, I was able to catch bluegills on a fly pretty consistently if I moved the fly, let it sink, and then moved it again. The fish would generally pick up the fly just as I stopped moving it.
Perhaps the little bit of flash and the movement helped them track the fly better in the muddy water. On my last trip, the fish seemed to key in on the initial splash of the fly and grabbed it as it sank. When that pattern emerged, I made more casts than I usually do, to capitalize on the reaction of the fish to the initial splash of the weighted fly in the water.
Arizona allows you to use two flies when you fish, so often I have two flies on my line. I do this to give the fish a choice. I vary the size, color, and weight of the fly. There are certain times that the bigger fly is the favorite, but often it is the smaller fly that produces the most fish. Even the sinking rate of a fly can sometimes make a difference, so an unweighted fly and a weighted fly will often produce different catch rates.
It is fun to track the preference of a particular fly over another. A good test for me is to try two different flies while fishing for crappies and bluegills from the big dock on the big lake at Green Valley Park. If the bottom fly is dominating the catch, I will switch the placement of the flies and see what happens. Sometimes the fish will continue to go after their favorite fly, even in the new position.
Other times, the depth of the fly makes a difference. If they are positioned at a certain depth, the bottom fly gets to them first and is in their feeding zone more than the top fly.
I have to admit that I am not a particularly proficient dry fly fisherman. Dry fly fishing requires the angler to hesitate on setting the hook until the trout takes the fly back underwater. Wet fly fishing requires a much quicker hook-set. Since I fish with wet flies the vast majority of the time, I often pull the dry fly out of a trout’s mouth before he has taken it back underwater. It sometimes takes me five or six misses before I can slow down my timing for hook-ups with a dry fly.
Occasionally, the fish are kind to me. When I fish for rainbows and tiger trout on Woods Canyon Lake, I usually have a dry fly on top, and a small midge about four feet below.
Sometimes on those casts that I have badly missed the trout on the dry fly and the fish is headed down, he sees my midge move from the missed hook-set on the dry fly, and grabs it just like I planned it.
Be sensitive to what the fish are telling you, and it will help you be a better angler.
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