Sometimes, two is better than one. Fishing a second streamer is nothing new, but it’s a habit I picked up early. When I had no experience upon which to base my own decision, I did what I was told. I did what I read in the magazines and in the few books I had. As a...
Fishing a streamer is our chance to sell the illusion of life. With dry flies and nymphs, we dead drift them, painstakingly preventing our hitched leader from influencing the flies. But fishing a streamer releases us from those restraints. With creativity, with...
In this Streamer Presentations series, the focus is on how a streamer can move. Instead of starting with the gear first — with flies, leaders and lines — the chapters in this series consider the movements of a streamer. The equipment necessary to achieve those...
If you find yourself thinking about hooksets or how to fight and land fish, then you’ve already done something right, because fooling a trout is the hardest thing out there. Burying the hook and bringing the fish to hand is another skill set entirely, and it’s a...
Keep moving. That’s the key to streamer fishing. And moving downstream with the currents makes it possible for hours at a time. Wade down and fish up . . .
You can move the fly ten inches across seams. You can jerk strip, jig and twitch the streamer with jumpy and choppy motions or you can do all of it super smooth. Which do the trout prefer?
Something electric happens when we hook into the fish of the day, the fish of the season or maybe the fish of a lifetime. Our hearts beat faster. The adrenaline pumps because the stakes are raised. This is the fish we’ve been waiting for, and we don’t want to lose the opportunity.
By mixing jigging into our streamer presentations, we add a new dynamic. We no longer just slide and glide, cross currents and hover. Now we dip and rise, dive and climb through the column. It’s another dimension to be explored. Offer it to the trout, and let them decide.
You do not need a jig hook to jig streamers. Can you jig a big articulated fly? Absolutely. And while the up and down motion may not be as pronounced as a smaller, thinner, head-heavy fly, jigging works with big and bulky flies too.
Rolling the bottom, gliding mid-current along a knee-deep riffle and slow-sliding off the bank — these maneuvers are just as enticing and catch just as many trout as do flashy retrieves. But we tend to forget them. Or rather, we might not have the discipline to stay with an understated look for very long, because the modest stuff isn’t as exciting as the razzle-dazzle.
This handful of subtle moves requires an angler with restraint and commitment. Otherwise, the rod tip and line hand are back to big motions and brash, bold movements in no time . . .
Every fisherman in the parking lot seems to have a thirty-inch fish story, don’t they?
You know what I hear when someone says a fish was “about two feet long?” I hear: “I didn’t measure the fish.”
Bass guys don’t put up with this stuff. My friend, Sawyer (a dedicated bass and musky guy), is dumbfounded by the cavalier way trout fishermen throw estimates around. In his world, if you didn’t measure it, you don’t put a number on it. They take it seriously. We trout fishermen embarrass ourselves with estimates.