There’s an intangible quality built into the best anglers. It’s about being comfortable and natural around the water. It’s about having an instinct and a guiding intuition on a river that informs decision without even giving it much thought. It’s an innate knowledge of the environment and what will happen next. Knowledge of the woods, water, weather and the trout comes together with ease and adds up to something that is hard to identify.
It’s the companionship and teamwork, along with the effort and commitment required to get down the river. It’s about a good lunch and friendly banter as much as the novel approach to tactics and the pure advantage of accessing more water.
From the put in to the take out, boating changes everything. It’s a wonderful way to learn a river and to connect with friends.
From the bottom to the top, when the bugs transform from water born to airborne, meeting the with an emerger often sells the presentation.
Our conversation in this episode covers those emergences . . .
My friends join me for a tough discussion. What are the benefits of guiding? What are the good things? How does it help anglers? Does it actually help people and make our sport or this fishing scene better, or does it just put money in the guide’s pocket and put more pressure on the trout?
We consider the full life cycle of a caddis: the pre-hatch, the emergence, the egg laying phase and death. And at each of those stages, we ask what the bugs are doing, how the trout respond and how we can imitate the bugs to fool a trout.
On Tuesday, February 27 at 8:00 p.m. EST. Troutbitten LIVE Podcasts begin on YouTube.
Join us live. Help us out, and be part of the conversation through the live chat box. Or just kick back and see where the discussion goes.
This episode is about tension and slack. It’s about how we manage fly lines and leaders on the water while nymphing. My friend, Austin Dando, joins me to walk through the tight line advantage of keeping line off the water and what happens when we give that up. Fishing greater distances often requires laying line on the water, and how we manage that line, how we plan for it, makes all the difference between a great drift and a poor one . . .
Once you leave the water’s surface, weight is necessary for the presentation. Here’s what weights to choose, for nymphing, why and when. You can’t avoid it. Weight is the fundamental factor. Meaning, it’s probably more important than the fly itself. More weight or less is more consequential than what dubbing, feather or ribbing is wound around the hook shank.
We use all types of weight, and there are good reasons for all of these: tungsten beads, split shot and drop shot . . .
A few weeks ago, the Troutbitten Podcast crossed the 1 Million downloads milestone. Spencer Durrant, the news editor for Midcurrent and host of the Unhooked Podcast, got in touch to ask if I’d answer a few questions for the occasion.
The Midcurrent publication is part of the glue that binds this industry together, so I was happy to oblige. Answering these questions also got me thinking about where this Troutbitten Project has been and where it’s going.
So as Troutbitten enters the year of its tenth anniversary, here’s a look into one of our favorite branches of this Troutbitten media company and how it became so important to the Troutbitten community . . .
This episode features what might be the most important concept of nymph fishing. There are three different ways to present a dead drifted nymph to the trout — three ways to imitate what trout commonly see from the naturals.
In the third part of this critical nymphing concepts series, we consider the advantages and disadvantages of fishing with a suspender.Â