Went to a small trout stream up in the mountains, the kind you can almost jump across. Birds were out chatting it up all morning, the air was crisp and clean, and the sky was lightly overcast. Explosions of flowers were everywhere along the meandering stream as it cut thought high meadows and rocky clefts. Hiked about 3 miles in and started fishing after about 1 mile in, to get away from the most heavily fished part of the stream.

Fished both wet and dry flies and did not get much action. The fish here are very skittish and difficult to catch and sometimes you have to creep along the stream bank very low and cast sort of blind over the grasses and brush. Caught one using this technique. The rest of the strikes were mediocre, the fish not very aggressive. You could see them swirl and take peaks and long looks but just nibble at the fly in some half-hearten attempt at a meal. Of course trout are territorial and some strikes you get can be unrelated to a meal ticket. Had one larger trout go after my fly (in fast water) and he made quite a boil but missed the fly altogether, too excited. This happened just a second after the fly hit the water and is not that uncommon an occurrence. I recall a really wild trout that leaped clean out of the stream, again in fast water, and land on a rock in the middle of the stream while attempting to slash at my fly. Made me roar with laughter.

So anyway, I did not bag a lot of trout. Still, it was a most enjoyable and pleasant morning.

Happy Fishing,


-Zeno

if its saltwater your probably not going to catch anything

nice TR Zeno. my favorite river is on fire right now so not sure if I'll even get out this year.

just practice in your backyard some. on the yellowstone its much easier to catch the cutts with flies than anything else. and you dont have to be good. go around buffalo ford in the park and you will do fine. the fish will be around 16 to 22 inches long.

At the very least, I will be pitching spinners in Grebe Lake...I figure I will have precious few opportunities to catch a Grayling in my lifetime, so I'm hoping to take advantage of this one.

We'll see about that...

the grayling arent too big in grebe lake but okay. you might do better on a small black fly than spinners. and the water tapers out some so you may want to bring waders or something so you can get out. its not a bad hike in. if i remember right its about an hour.

Do yourself a favor and buy a newer rod. If you dont want to spend a ton of money check craigslist, you can usually pick up a used rod pretty cheap. A fully functional reel is a must if you are fishing for big fish or you have a chance to tag onto one. When i went fly fishing up in alaska the first thing they told me was to fight the fish on the reel. A functioning drag makes the fight much shorter which also means that the fish has a better chance of surviving.

If you dont know what you are doing or you are going somewhere there is a chance you will run into a bear i would get a guide. Guides usually will provide pretty decent gear and they are pretty good at teaching novices. They also come prepared with bear spray.

Ive been fly fishing for quite a few years and i have to say it is an awesome way to enjoy the outdoors. just as a word of advice.... some practice in the backyard goes a long way

I was able to run out to one of the local reservoirs in the evening, and I have a question from casting just the line with no leader/tippet/fly.

Should my goal on the forward cast be:
1) Line closest to me lands on the water first
2) End of the line lands on the water first
3) Most of the castable line lands on the water at approximately the same time

Oh, and LOL at chucking a spinnerbait before and after doing this...it's like alternating between one of my golf clubs and one of my wife's golf clubs.

3

oT

I always try to get my students to look at the horizon, or tree top in a distance and get them to cast their line there.

You want to try to have the line parallel to the water surface and GENTLY land the first 20' at the same time.

Also, picture tacking in a nail to hang a picture. Slow accelerate to 11:00 o'clock, the rap and stop SHARPLY at ten. Repeat on the back stroke. You are looking to have your line shape as a long THIN! oval.

Also picture your rod tip being VERY close to the same altitude throughout both strokes. Your rod tip should never drop below 10:00 0'clock until the final delivery of the tippet.

Should we talk about hauls and dbl hauls yet?

Update:

My wife outfished me 3-1 on small cutthroat at Cascade Lake where we were both pitching spinners in a high wind. I tried casting a Woolly Bugger briefly, but just couldn't handle the wind. My total would have been higher, but I lost a couple before I could officially release them.

We got skunked on the Lamar River, she with the bubble-fly combo and me with the flyrod (see following questions).

I got a small brown and lost a couple of others on the Gibbon, using an Elk Hair Caddis (yay!)

We both got skunked on the Madison.

Questions:

Given the following situation:


1) Under "typical" conditions (yeah, I know) what angle should A (the angle between shore and my target) and B (where A + B is when I take the fly out of the water) be? Assume the novice caster is fishing from shore and there are no specific fish I'm trying to cast to.

2) Whatever B is, what is supposed to happen next? I snapped off a couple of flies in the water in the Lamar and later realized I had too much line out, it would get caught in the current, and then as I tried to pull it all out, it would eventually overstress the knot and break off the fly.

To remedy this, I cast slightly upstream and started stripping in line to account for the line/fly drifting in front of me. When the current started to drag the fly, I would either do a back cast and a couple of false casts to get the line back to the angle I wanted...should I take the line out of the water as it passes directly in front of me (ie, A + B = 90 degrees?)

3) Assuming a 7.5 foot pack rod, how much line (again, as a novice) should I realistically expect to be able to cast? (I should have asked this earlier.)

Thanks, everyone for the tips - I could very easily see getting hooked (heh) on this, as the time on the Gibbon where I actually caught fish (and had some rise to take the fly that I either missed or didn't land) were tremendous fun!

you would cast slightly upstream from B in to the A section and let the fly drift down half again as much past B, until the line is straightening out. thats when you get the hits from trout that are following your fly downstream. this is not for dry flies.

for dries you pick your spots where you are casting to a particular;ar fish or an area where you can get a decent drift before the current ruins your presentation.

Thanks Ray,

So if there is no obvious hatch going on, is it more typical to fish a nymph/streamer like this, then switch to a dry fly once fish start rising?

Is it better to wait until the sun is higher before trying some kind of terrestrial? It seemed like the hoppers didn't really start making noise until after noon.

no fish rising tend to go subsurface. during hopper season they come up for them even if there are none on the water.
hatches of insects can occur at any time of the day. best is early and late. they come from below the surface and change into a flying insect from a crawling one on the bottom.
hoppers and ants and such land on the water as the days temps go up and they become more active.

You belief seems to center on the fact people get a guide for the "kill". I learned with the help of my Dad and guides in Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado. Never did anything but catch and release and still have only eaten my fish when backpacking in the wilderness. Every guide I have ever had is a huge conservationist and abhors barbed hooks and non catch and release.

Also, even though both of us are now experienced, we still get a guide when we got to a new place. It is just nice to have someone who knows the water and spots to go.

I was going to try the West Walker River this past weekend, as we were heading from the BBQ festival, through Tioga Pass, and down to Fresno. Unfortunately, there was an absolutely insane windstorm going on...I didn't have my camera with me, but Mono Lake looked surreal. It was beyond whitecaps, more like the whole lake was frothing, and there was so much spray being thrown up, it looked like there was steam coming off the water.

The west side of the mountains in the Merced River was also an option, but the holiday crowd was still all over the place on that side of the park. Oh well, maybe later in the year...

Following on Ray’s advice you should learn to mend your line upstream during the drift of your fly, this is done with a gentle roll flip of the rod that tosses a portion of the line upstream a bit and lets the fly have more drift time. This is important if you are fishing fast water or have differing currents within the stream that you must adjust for. This may seem tricky to a novice but a little practice will help you realize that it is an important talent to have. This is a bit more difficult if using dry flies but still can be useful at times.

You can do easy fly-fishing with streamer flies by casting almost directly downstream along a run (a section of fast water) or cross-stream and letting the fly drift/float.

Casting skills are important but just as important are skills in reading a river or stream and knowing where to fish (the most probably place that steelhead is lurking for example) and what manner in which to present the fly. This skill is just learned by years of patient practice and help from other more experienced fishermen. The details of currents, eddies, slower water, sandbars, logs and brush, rocks and rock ledges etc are all things that you need to study and know about, aside from the task of learning to cast. Sometimes the best thing for a novice to do is just stand or sit on a riverbank and study everything about a pool or run, before you even get the line wet. This will also help in having your fly spent more time in the water than in the trees or brush along the bank.


Glad you enjoyed the fishing and I hope you stick with it. I assure you fly-fishing is a challenge but worth it and is both a joy and a rewarding experience.

-Zeno

Fly fishing is a great sport that I was lucky enough to get into at a very young age. Although I have only fly fished for trout on one occasion, I feel like I have enough knowledge in this area to be of some help.

Tying your own flies isn't a necessity obviously, but can be of some help when you want to fine tune your approach to a specific insect hatch (not to mention save you a lot of money, and I also find it quite fun).

I think a guide can definitely help you if you have little to no experience in fishing rivers specifically. The areas where the fish are usually found can be a little hard to identify unless you've actually seen fish there. I definitely recommend a guide especially if you have a limited amount of time to fish.

More advanced casting techniques are easily learned with practice - roll casting is really easy in my experience, and can be a fly saver if you're fishing around overhanging trees.

When I was in Colorado, I found it quite easy to find current info on the internet on specific insect hatches for most of the popular rivers in the area.

Goodluck to you

Thanks, I actually do have some experience, albeit with bait, walking small rivers like the Merced and Carson and larger rivers like the Kings, so the concepts like where fish are likely to be holding and casting in such a way as to put the bait/lure in front of them aren't foreign to me. Hopefully that will be a plus moving forward.

I went fly fishing for my first time today. It was a lot of fun. I'd always had some vision
of my first time(s) being a complete disaster being tangled up in lines, etc. Casting wasn't
nearly as hard as I had expected, although I'm sure there's tons to learn. Navigating thru
the water was more challenging, I'm usually hiking on trails beside the rivers. It was really
cool seeing things from that perspective. Ended up catching a half dozen brown trout
and 1 rainbow. Definitely something I'd like to continue doing.

Originally Posted by Zeno
Following on Ray’s advice you should learn to mend your line upstream during the drift of your fly, this is done with a gentle roll flip of the rod that tosses a portion of the line upstream a bit and lets the fly have more drift time.


Don't discard this information. It is very important if you want to catch fish on the fly. While it is easy to put a lure in front of a fish, if the drift of the lure (dry or nymph) in relation to the current of the river is wrong you won't catch anything big. Big trout, having been caught and released probably many times before are smart fish, although bad technique will easily catch the small ones.

That's what I'm counting on!

Does anyone know how to read these charts?

I'm trying to figure out if the Merced River below Yosemite is fishable, in particular around Briceburg, but the two charts don't make sense to me. I was in the park (so pretty far upstream) on Labor Day, and the fork that runs along the main road looked like it still had a fair amount of water in it, but the CFS reading seems very low.

google a fly shops site near by where you fish. most have a current fishing report on the area. thats the best and easist way to find out about rivers.

I don't comprehend not getting out

Hello all...we have another trip planned this year; this time to the Canadian Rockies. I don't have the specifics in front of me, but we'll be in Kootenay/Yoho/Banff National Parks and will visit Lake Louise and Lake O'Hara.

Any experience/suggestions?