Trout Fishing Unabated

I've been fishing so much I'm losing track. I should post every day....

December 5th:

Friday:

Thursday under a bobber:

A few days earlier:

All were caught using my new candy cane pattern in size 16, fished wet across the stream with very small 1 to 3 gram added shot at the tippet knot, and no float--except on Thursday. The take was so subtle that in all cases it was basically just retrieving to begin the next cast and feeling that there is something on there.

There was a short session between these two when I watched a trout follow my own wooly bugger repeatedly. I hooked it once but it quickly shook me off. Fun to watch that--you usually only go by feel. To see the shake is illuminating. It is faster than you can react to.

And yet a few more days back--10 days ago on a Wednesday, I caught one on my big fat buzzer (see previous entry) and the strange thing was what I found in the stomach: hemlock leaves!  The green ones combined with red dying ones looked a lot like the buzzer fly:

And yet even a few days earlier on a weekend, I got one off the bridge, drifting a wooly bugger downstream and then intermittently twitching or swimming back upstream. Sure enough this worked and it exposed this pool as productive!

These two pools are just loaded with trout. The first week after the stocking, they went crazy for a brown wooly bugger, and also hit the rapala. Then they got harder. For a week or two I kind of thought they were all fished out. I'd already eaten two out of one of the pools.

But it turned out they were there. I'd see a rise and say, "aha!"

And so before going home for Thanksgiving, I invented the candycane fly pattern. Well it isn't a big invention. I'm sure it's been tied a million times. But it turned out to just drive redbreast sunfish in Pennsylvania crazy. So when I came back after Thanksgiving, I gave these pools some more time, and I quit constantly streamer fishing and started wet fly methods. And that worked.

It is really interesting, working through all the possible ways that fish might be feeding and what might interest them. But being stocked rainbow trout, these fish are perhaps especially weird. I don't think they really know what food is.  The big fat buzzer fly I made up tuned out to look exactly like a pile of hemlock leaves. I know because I took one of those fish and ate it--and that's what the stomach was packed with!

But the other three I took from these pools had very little or no food in their stomachs. They are maybe super hungry. And yet they still show selectivity. I haven't had any luck on dries, nor in the surface film. Until I put a shot on my tippet knot, the candycane wets don't get hit. The streamers did, but they are weighted more.

I am thinking of tying some variations with different colours but the same pattern, out of curiosity. The fly is really simple to tie.

1. red 140
2. green metal wire (chartreuse)
3. pheasant tail tail.
4. white hackle.
You tie in the tail, tie in the green wire, run the red forward a bit, wrap the aft quarter shank with green wire, tie it down, wrap the middle quarter with the red flossy thread, with the wire under it, then you wrap the green wire another quarter, then tie it down and tie in 4 wraps or so of white hackle, then a red head and you are done.

I have done some with mallard wings, and some with hot pink hackle, and different tails---they are actually a simple take on a royal coachman---green, red, green. From the bottom, you can see #16, then #12, then #8 baithook, #6 baithook, and a #8 fly hook with wings.

We'll see what happens.