Catch
Fish by Not Fishing
Don't
be in a rush to start casting.
 by Eric Peper
Several years
ago, while watching an ambitious young executive
animatedly oversell an idea in a business meeting, a
friend of mine smilingly whispered to me,
"Enthusiasm is often the last refuge of the
ignorant." I've used that line at least 100 times
since, generally in a facetious or cynical vein. Yet, it
has important implications when applied to fly fishing.
Most of us don't get nearly
enough time to fish. (It would probably be safe to say,
"None of us.") When we do go fishing, we
typically plan for several days and drive for several
hours to get to a favorite place. When we get wherever
we're going, we nervously rig the rod, rush to the water,
take a quick look around, and begin casting. Our success
would, in most cases, be greater if we spent the first
half hour to an hour not fishing, and often our
enthusiasm to begin fishing may be cause for failure.
Example 1: Mid-August, 4 p.m.,
The Madison River about four miles below Quake Lake, at
the upper end of what has been called "the 50-mile
riffle." I arrived with rod already rigged, got on
waders, and went to the north bank of the river. Several
caddis were in the air, and I quickly saw a rise behind a
boulder in midstream. I waded into position about 25 feet
from the bank. One cast with a number 16 Elk Hair Caddis
took the 13-inch rainbow. For a half hour thereafter I
experienced an excellent hatch, but no hits, no hookups,
and naturally no errors.
It was a hot afternoon, and I
went back to the car for some ice water. As I sat on the
bank and quenched my thirst, I let my eyes scan over the
river to see if I could determine what the fish might be
doing. After I'd been there about 20 minutes, I saw a
large brown trout slide into a six-foot-long,
eight-inch-deep trough less than a foot from the bank and
less than six feet from my feet. I watched him quietly
sip caddis for about 15 minutes, then I took him by
"dapping" an Elk Hair Caddis while holding my
nine-foot rod at a point midway in the first section so
it wouldn't stick out too far from the bank.
When I stood to play the fish, I
spooked two other "good" fish that were feeding
in the same close-to-the-bank types of lies within 20
feet of where I'd been sitting. The rest of the evening
was a major success. I took several good fish within a
200-foot stretch of river, and I never even entered the
river except to play a hooked trout. Twenty minutes of
observation had serendipitously led to a discovery of
where the fish fed.
Example 2: For a couple of
summers I had a wonderful natural laboratory in
eastcentral Wisconsin in which to study the Tricorythodes
spinner fall and how wild trout fed on it. The location
was within a 45-minute drive of my office, and I tried to
fish for an hour or so each day that the weather
permitted. I located the spot coincidentally while
exploring the stream one weekend morning. It was about a
half mile below an island where the river formed an
estuary below a 100-foot-long riffle as it entered a
slow, deep pond-like stretch.
The first morning I fished it, I
got there just as the trikes had started to fall to the
water. I saw no rises as I reached the pool, but shortly
after I got there a good fish rose. I immediately put a
cast over it, and the trout never rose again, although I
saw both that fish and a couple of others moving through
the pool.
The next morning, in similar
weather conditions, I arrived a bit earlier. This day I
had time to sit on the bank and wait for the spinners to
begin falling on the water. As I watched I saw a slight
bulge on the water near the far bank. A bit later there
was a rise near the same spot. I waited until three good
fish were feeding avidly on the spinners before even
standing up. Even then, I waited to move until I was sure
the fish were continuing to feed. Then I entered the
pool, going only far enough into it to cast to the fish
I'd selected.
Don't overdo it.
What I discovered, beginning
this day and on several days afterward, was that waiting
until the fish were feeding hungrily virtually guaranteed
success; entering the river and casting before feeding
was well underway almost certainly guaranteed failure.
The length of time you need to
spend studying the water and its inhabitants, as well as
the value you obtain from that time, will likely be
inversely related to the amount of time you've spent
fishing that location. This past May I spent my first day
fishing in Arizona, which was also the first time I'd
fished stillwater in several years.
I arrived at a very popular spot
on the Mogollon Rim about 8:30 a.m. along with about 100
others, principally bait fisherman. Most people were
nervously running about, getting rods rigged, climbing
into boats, or casting night crawlers or salmon eggs from
the shore. I had a belly boat with me, but a quick check
of water temperature (49 degrees) made me less than
enthusiastic to use it. I spent a good hour wandering
around the shore, watching insects, spotting a few fish,
turning over rocks near shore, and digging around in some
of the near-shore muck. I hadn't taken a rod from the
car, and, in fact, was kind of enjoying my third cup of
coffee.
Most folks had gone some
distance from the parking area to begin their fishing. At
about 10 I spotted a nice location about 75 feet from
where I'd parked that would allow a good back cast, so I
rigged a rod and wandered over there. I'd found a lot of
damselfly nymphs and a few caddis in my earlier
meanderings, so I selected a number 10 Peacock-Bodied
Nymph with sparse grizzly hackle.
To make a long day's fishing a
short story, suffice it to say I aggravated the bait boys
to no end. When I quit at about 3 p.m. to have a beer,
I'd taken and released over 30 fish. Most had been taken
on the nymph, but at least a dozen fell for the little
Elk Hair Caddis fished both dry and in the film. The most
I'd seen anyone else land was four, though I did share
one of my beers with another fly fisherman who'd been out
in a belly boat who said he'd taken a dozen on damselfly
nymphs. The hour-plus I'd spent in observing the lake and
studying its inhabitants had paid far greater dividends
than that same amount of time would have if I'd been
casting blindly.
On the other hand, I can usually
derive enough information about the fishing status on
waters with which I am familiar by looking around for 10
or 15 minutes and bouncing the derived data against the
information on my mental "hard disk."
What should you look for when
you're observing? Key is observing though you're tempted
to begin fishing, so watch from the shore, without a rod
if that's convenient. Look for places where fish are
holding; not where they're passing through, but where
they stay. Look for food forms in and on the water. Look
for the way the light is hitting the water, and see if
fish behave differently when the light changes. Watch for
fish to start to feed, watch how they feed, and note what
makes them stop feeding. Look in places you wouldn't
ordinarily expect to find fish. You're likely to be
surprised.
Let me offer one final
experience. There's a spot on the Beaverkill, a section
at the upper end of the Wagon Tracks pool, that virtually
every one of the thousands of anglers who fishes that
pool from the south bank each year walks through on his
way to the "best" spots. Wagon Tracks is a deep
run though most of its length and holds a large number of
good fish, yet the spot I'm referring to is only about a
foot deep and within 15 feet of the bank. While wet
wading one June day I found it has a spring seep,
however, and the spring cools a section about as large as
a bathtub. Several dozen times, when I've had the very
rare luxury of having that stretch to myself, I've
watched a good fish move into the "bathtub."
By allowing the fish to get
comfortable in the lie, at least a dozen times I've
caught it. Were it not for spending time watching the
river rather than fishing, I never would have located
that tiny, yet consistently productive piece of water!
Note
What They're Eating
When you're looking for food
forms, be sure you're looking for available food. It only
helps a little to locate food on the bottoms of rocks and
in streambed mud. Fish will generally be feeding on food
that's "in the drift," that is, food that's
floating in or on the water. If you do locate mayfly
nymphs, a good way to tell if they're ready to hatch is
by looking at the color of the wingcase. Typically,
nymphs within an hour or so of hatching will have dark,
almost black, wingcases.
Try to capture food in the drift
with a pocket aquarium net or a small seine made from a
section of window-screen material attached to a couple of
dowels. Be sure to take your samplings at a couple of
different depths.
When you see rising fish, watch
carefully to determine whether they are truly feeding on
the surface or just below it. A surface-feeding fish, one
taking floating insects, will almost always leave a
bubble on the surface following a rise. A fish taking
below the surface will bulge, but no bubble will remain
after the rise.
Match
the Easy Meal
Often you'll encounter
situations where you'll observe several available surface
food forms. As a rule of thumb, a fish will generally
feed on the food that is easiest to capture, because, for
obvious reasons, the fish needs to take in more energy
from feeding than it expends in the act of feeding.
The "easiest" food may
be a function of numbers or of size, but it may just as
surely be a function of the ease with which the food can
be captured. For example, if there are an equal number of
mayfly duns and spinners available to the fish, the fish
will almost certainly feed on spinners because a spent
(dead) spinner cannot escape the rise, while a dun may
fly off.
Similarly, a strong wind or a
rain condition may thwart the emergence of mayflies or
caddis, and the fish may elect to feed on only those
insects that have been damaged in emergence. Careful
observation during a hatch will show some insects that
have emerged with one wing unfolded or with the nymphal
shuck still clinging to the emerged body. You can imitate
this "stillborn" condition by clipping the
wings down on your dry fly and fishing it in the film or
by tying dry patterns with a stubby marabou or fur
"tail" the color of the nymph body.
Eric
Peper 
Eric Peper was
brought up in southern New York State and learned to love
fly fishing on the storied rivers of the Catskill
Mountains. He has been fly fishing for more than 40
years, and fly fishing has led him all over the United
States, as well as to Canada and western Europe. He was
founding editor of the Field & Stream Book Club, and
has written several articles on fly fishing and fly tying
for a number of publications. In fact, "Fly of the
Month," written by Eric, was a regularly appearing
column in "Field & Stream. With Jim Rikhoff, he
co-edited "Fishing Moments of Truth" and
"Hunting Moments of Truth," published by
Winchester Press. Eric lives in Glendale, AZ.
 
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