I have a long commute everyday and usually fill the time with podcasts and books. There’s somewhat of a lack of good digital fly fishing books out there and I was looking for something to fill my commute time and came across a great package of ebooks. You get 7 books which are all really good for the cost. The author was selling them individually, but decided to sell it as a package. It makes for good reading to fill the time. You definitely get some good tips. It’s a good value as far as I’m concerned at $27.95 for all 7 books. You could print them out if you wanted to also. Here’s the site: Powerful fly fishing tactics
We’ve gotten hammered with rain here in western PA over the last week and it’s put the stream flows throughout PA, MD and WV in the USGS water watch map terminology “very high”. Today was father’s day and my wife asked what I wanted to do for father’s day, to which, of course, my answer was “go fly fishing of course”. I was a little discouraged last night as I looked over the USGS water watch map and saw all the cyan, blue and black dots signaling that the water levels throughout the tri-state area were “un-fishable”. I slept in this morning til 6 and poked around the house, tying flies and playing on the Internet until the girls woke up. My wife asked why I decided against fishing and I had to explain that I thought the water was un-fishable. At about 9 am, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I had to at least go look at my local stream. So I packed up my gear (because you can’t ever just “go look”) and headed down the road for the 30 minute drive to the DHALO area on my local stream.
As I rounded the bend to where the river is visible, my heart sunk a bit as the water looked like Yoohoo. I told myself “maybe it’s clearer up river” and kept going. I pulled in the lot at the project and noticed another vehicle there. Could someone else be as crazy as me? I figured they were just walking the trail that parallels the river and walked down to the stream to check it out. The water in this section actually didn’t look too bad. It was definetly off color and very high. I could see the bottom in a few places where the water was shallow and about 1 foot deep. I decided to give it a go.
I geared up and immediately thought to put on a streamer, which I did. I put a muddler minnow on and tied about a 24″ section of tippet off the bend of the hook down to a flashback phesant tail (size 16) with a single “BB” shot above the muddler. I walked up stream a good bit to start working my way down. I should mention that I rarely fish streamers, and never really liked fishing them. I remembered reading about a method in the current issue of Fly Fisherman magazine where a guy in Colorado has had great success fishing a streamer with a dropper and pounding deep pools fishing the rig in a dead drift style vs. a stripping style.
That’s how I progressed fishing for the rest of the day. I fished the streamer up into the current just as if I was fishing a tandem rig with nymphs, except with no strike indicator. Within a few casts I had a fish HAMMER the streamer and the fishing continued like that until 6 in the evening. At around 4 a small caddis hatch came off and there were fish surfacing. Normally, I would have thrown on a dry and fished for them, but I was having such a blast with my new found success with the streamer that I just kept fishing the streamer.
There really is something thrilling about having a decent 14″-15″ brown or bow just come up from no where and pound the hell out of a streamer. The point of all of this is that when mother nature throws a curve ball and you think that the water isn’t going to be fish able because it’s 90% higher than it’s normal flow, don’t be discouraged. I ended up having one of the best days on the water that I’ve ever had today (probably 50-60 fish to the net) just because I figured what the hell, I’ll try it. I also left my comfort zone the the streamer, and I am hooked on it now. I don’t know whether the colored water had anything to do with the aggressiveness that these fish had or whether I just forgot that trout usually crush streamers, but I really wasn’t expecting the show that these fish put on for the streamer.
Next time the water looks like it’s going to be unfishable, I’m going to get excited and pitch some streamers!
just had to test out the underwater camera. It’s really short, but I didn’t think he was gonna hang around for a while. First time I’ve tried video underwater. I’ll have to do some experimenting. I really want to dunk this thing in a good holding spot and just let it record. We’ll see. Some pics from todays trip too. I’m too tired to write a full article, but plan to about this trip…
I just thought the spots on these guys were cool. The first one has the faint side spots like you see on wild rainbows. I’ve only seen that a handful of times on browns.
Thought I’d post this here. I made a little watercolor from the wild rainbow pic in the gallery. If anyone wants a watercolor done of a fish, let me know. Also, there’s a bigger version in the photo gallery.
