Fly-Fish Better by Art Scheck

Author:Art Scheck
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780811749268
Publisher: Stackpole Books

No hatch? No rising trout? No idea what to do? If you have enough room, try Grandpa’s method: swim a wet fly, a Muddler, or a small bucktail downstream and across. This old-fashioned approach lets you prospect a lot of water, and it shows the fish a fly that looks like everyday food. The simplest solution often works best.

Fishing in any direction can be tough on a brook hemmed in by shrubbery. The trees and bushes won’t permit the backcasts that let you throw your line across the current. If you want to put the line in the air, you have to keep it more or less parallel with the banks. That seems to mandate upstream fishing. You can, however, roll-cast your way down a small, brushy creek, swinging an old-fashioned wet fly or a midget streamer on a short line, and this kind of fishing can be very pleasant if you have a rod that roll-casts well.

Fishing downstream makes a lot of sense on any river where you have room to cast diagonally across the current. Nowadays, relatively few anglers fish this way; we’ve been trained to turn upstream as soon as we enter a river. But casting across the flow and swinging the fly through an arc lets you cover a lot of water. The flies that lend themselves to across-and-down fishing—streamers and wet flies—represent creatures that trout, bass, and panfish like to eat. A hungry fish rarely turns down a chance to put a minnow into its stomach. Soft-hackled patterns, the Leadwing Coachman, the Breadcrust, and many other old wet flies mimic emerging caddis pupae or diving female caddisflies that have returned to the water to lay their eggs. Caddisflies, like midges, are among the bugs that fish see day after day, and a good wet-fly angler is simply playing the percentages.

Deciding whether to fish upstream or down doesn’t commit you to fishing in only one direction. You can use both approaches, switching from one to the other as conditions indicate. You might start by casting upstream, but then, an hour later, come to a long run that looks perfect for a streamer. Or you might start with a wet fly and come to a spot that looks ideal for some work with a floating ant or cricket.

Look at the water and the surroundings and ask yourself, “Can I fish this hunk of river better by working downstream or upstream?” That question should be on your mind all day. If you’ve never done much downstream angling—and a lot of younger fly fishers haven’t—then stock a fly box with streamers and wet flies and give it a try. Swinging a wet fly or a baitfish imitation might at first seem like blind casting, but it’s not. It’s an excellent way to show the fish lures that resemble some of their staple foods.

GEOLOGY IS DESTINY

The notion of “reading the water” ignores at least half of the story. We need to read not only the fluid that has no choice but to flow downhill, but also the earth through and over which the fluid moves.

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