With the coastal trout season in full swing, boxes are filled with new and traditional patterns destined to entice bars of Scandinavian silver. But with the daunting prospect of a new spot and thousands of acres of unfamiliar water in front of you, how do you choose the right fly? An insight in the psychology of fly choice.
Text and photos: Jeroen Schoondergang.
The climb to the cliff top has been hard, the decent possibly harder. But it has been worth it. In front of us lies the ideal coastal trout hideout. Google Maps has kept its promise. The area has the perfect ‘leopard’ bottom structure: large weed patches over white sands. Scattered big boulders and rocks provide cover and swirls in the weak but present tidal current. But as perfect as this spot looks, it is completely new to us. We have left our familiar grounds on the Danish island Fyn and moved away from the fishing crowds to Sjaelland, east of Fyn.
From a high vantage point we overlook the spots with our polaroids. No fish are moving but we do see some possible hiding places. However, with opening the fly box comes the great responsibility of choosing the right fly. My mate Rob picks a bright pink shrimp pattern, while I go for a magnus in burnt orange. Marco, a newcomer in our little group, chooses a grey magnus on his spinning rod with bombarda setup. We start off with three completely different flies. Yet we have all chosen our pattern without thinking twice about it.
The essential retrieves
It seems that when tying a seatrout pattern for coastal fishing, trust in your fly is the main ingredient. I think that in a lot of situations in spring fishing, coastal trout aren't very picky when it comes to fly choice. It is more important to tie on a fly you believe in. You’ll fish a trusted fly with more determination.
Trust in your fly is everything. It lets you focus on your casting and retrieve. I think that the gap between failure and success in spring seatrout fishing, is mainly determined by the retrieve of your fly and the ‘water time’ your fly gets. On several occasions my fishing buddies and I have noticed that a retrieve can make a substantial difference. Optimal water time is achieved by fishing a shooting head setup or a shooting head-like line. This will allow you to get your line out without false casting.
I generally use two types of retrieve, which I call the shrimp- and the fish-retrieve. Basically they are retrieves for smaller and larger patterns. When fishing a magnus, which I use all the way down to size 12, I retrieve the fly erratically with short, but fast strips. I started using that strip two years ago, when two fishing buddies were using the same fly I used. They were drawing a good number of strikes while I was blanking. At the time I used a fairly slow retrieve with consistent, twenty centimetre pulls. My mates had shortened their pulls to about ten centimetres and fished them in an erratic stop/pull motion.
My big fly retrieve was shown to me by Jan Bach Kristensen. He often fishes a size 4 Grå Frede: a shrimp pattern that might double as a baitfish fly. Jan likes to use a double handed retrieve. Not only does this make your fly travel in a natural uninterrupted way, it also assures a better hookup to bite ratio as you always have tension on the line. Once a fish bite all it often takes is speeding up your retrieve a little bit. This will usually result in a solid hookup.
For any retrieve goes: the way you tie your fly on your tippet determines how your fly acts in the water. In his unmatched series of seatrout DVDs, Danish film maker and fisherman Niels Vestergaard shows this with underwater footage. He filmed a shrimp pattern tied on with a tightened uni-knot and then filmed the same pattern tied on with an open loop Rapala-knot. The difference is astounding. The open loop knot lets the fly move freely, while the closed knot setup just drags the fly through the water.
Ragworms
So, can you throw any old fly to a spring coastal trout? Well, eh.. You often can, but then there are these moments that trout get finicky. I have witnessed three situations where the only way to connect with trout is to match your fly to the food on offer.
A moment in the season every local fly fisher eagerly awaits is the ragworm swim. Usually this occurs around the end of April, beginning of May. Ragworms looking for a mate change from bottom dweller to surface swimmer. Once this happens coastal trout and any other predator in the area will only have attention for the worms.
When fishing for seatrout in spring I always carry a box with a couple of worm flies for the occasion. There are many pattens around, but the main idea is to make it long, furry and brown or rust coloured. Fish the worms with a slow retrieve and stop your retrieve every couple of yards. Trout will take a worm fly during a dead drift.
During this year’s spring trip we were outsmarted by seatrout that were obviously apparent, but refused to take anything we threw at them. It was a very quiet day. The spot we fished was quite shallow and had a lot of weedy patches. From the moment we arrived fish were splashing in the surface. They were obviously feeding and because of the shallow area and the abundance of weed I gathered that they were on the hunt for some kind of crustacean. We started fishing any shrimp pattern we had in our box, from big, size 4, to minuscule, size 14. But none of the flies got even a glance from the feeding fish.
Sandeels and Gammarus
Only after we arrived home I heard the solution to this problem. I told my Danish mate Jan about our encounter. Without hesitation he replied that these fish had probably been ‘sandeeling’. A tiny sandeel pattern would have been the answer. Jan proved his theory a couple days later, by hooking a nice set of seatrout from a similar spot and situation, using a sandeel pattern.
The third and final example of the need to ‘match the hatch’, happens to us every now and again. Last year was one of those times. Conditions had been terrible, with very cold weather and as a result wintery water temperatures. Most seatrout chose to wait out the cold weather offshore with the schools of herring. We had only managed to hook a couple of fish during the entire trip. No fish had shown themselves in the surface, which is pretty unusual for late spring.
On our last day we fished a well-known spot on the west coast of Fyn. The area has very large patches of weed and a sandy bottom. I had been wading deep to try to intercept fish making a short dash to the shallower areas. My mate Rob was more patient. He had been wandering the shoreline. In the corner of my eye I noticed that Rob made a couple of short casts over a very overgrown area. Seconds later he was into a good fish. I stumbled to the shore and ran towards Rob who was ready to land his trout. He netted a slender, slightly coloured male fish measuring 65 centimetres. “I had seen fish tailing around the weed patches”, Rob said. “So I decided to check out the weed and saw there were hundreds of gammarus crawling over the weed.” A pale yellow scud sealed the deal for Rob.
Paging through my journals I have seen some similarities in conditions and areas when and where we encountered tailing seatrout. Almost every time it was an overcast or drizzly day. And most of the times the water temperature was colder than usual for the time of year.
In conclusion I think that coastal trout aren’t very picky when it comes to fly choice. But the few situations when they do limit their diet, make that we stay on our toes when fly fishing for one of the most exciting adversaries in the cold, coastal water of Scandinavia.