Fly-Fishing Western Trout Streams by McLennan Jim

Author:McLennan, Jim
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780811742948
Publisher: Stackpole Books

Fishing to Pods

On rich spring creeks and tailwaters, it’s common during heavy hatches to find fish rising in tight groups. These can vary from three or four fish to a dozen or more, gulping greedily in an area the size of a hot tub. It’s a behavior often exhibited by large fish, and it can make quite an impression on an angler who hasn’t seen it before. I recall another Missouri River experience, when I was fishing the same stretch of water two consecutive days. The second day, I was working my way along the bank, casting to individual rising fish, when I noticed a riffle a hundred yards or so up the river. This puzzled me because there hadn’t been a riffle there the previous day. As I got closer, I saw that it was a pod of about twenty big trout rising so greedily they created a disturbance that looked like a riffle from a distance.

Pods of trout can be addressed from any direction, so long as you stay out of the fish’s sight. It is my preference, however, to cast up or up and across. This is another example of how greed influences our approach—except that this time the greed belongs to the angler. By fishing from downstream and working on the fish nearest you and on the outside of the group, it’s often possible to pick them off from the bottom up, catching several before the rest realize something’s up. When a fish takes your fly, pressure it quickly and firmly toward the wide side of the river to try to keep it away from the rest of the group. With this firm suggestion from you, the hooked trout will usually peel off to the outside and go downstream, running and jumping and carrying on. If you fish from above or across, you’ll have a very good chance of hooking a fish, but if it’s one from near the front or inside of the pod, it will disturb the whole gang when it feels the sting of the hook. Because the biggest fish often takes the position at the head of the pod, fishing downstream is often a good way to catch that fish, if you don’t mind sacrificing the rest of the pod to do it.

Trout feed in pods only when the bugs are very abundant. They try to get as much food as they can as quickly as possible, perhaps inspired by competition from the other fish. They are generally quite difficult to frighten and will allow an angler to approach fairly close and cast to them without becoming alarmed. They seem to compensate for this by cranking up the selectivity dial, and fish feeding in pods are often quite difficult to fool.

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