We're pleased to see Andrew Fowler back in ESF. In this article he looks at how he overcomes lining fish on the streams he fishes in South Africa.
Most of us have witnessed trout scattering in response to an overhead disturbance. That disturbance may have been your kids walking onto a bridge over a pool in a berg stream. Or it might have been you popping your head up over the rim of one of those weirs at an expensive resort in Mpumulanga.
Either way the fish will have seen movement above them, and if the light was right, and you were watching, you would have seen mayhem as they darted around looking for somewhere to hide.
When we fly fish we keep our heads down. We have been taught that, and most of us have taken note. In every second picture of a fly fisherman you will see that he is stooped, taking a few inches off his height (and no doubt speeding the onset of an old man's posture!).
This is commendable. The bulk of our human form is giant - to the trout, and we do well to keep it from him. Our rod and line are slight by comparison. Tiny threads of graphite and pvc alike. But they move. They move fast, and they flash in the light. We all know that we must dress in drab colours and move slowly on a stream so as to go undetected. We can’t really move our rod and line slowly, since our cast requires some speed of movement. We could dress the rod as we ourselves dress: drably. But for reasons known only to them, practically every rod maker on the planet makes their product as shiny as possible. I have stripped and re-painted a very cheap rod with matt black spray paint. I can’t bring myself to do that to my Sage! (But I really should!)
So for the meantime let's look at four aspects of negating that flashing rod and line passing overhead our quarry, that won’t require a nerve-wracking paint stripping incident.
1. Side casting. By keeping the line passing over the water close to the water we achieve two things. Firstly the fish has less opportunity to see what is coming. I can explain this with a diagram of the fish's cone of vision, but rather than bore you to death with that age old sketch, consider this: you are walking in the bush. A passenger jet passes over at 37,000 ft. You watch it for a full five minutes as it goes by. Then a helicopter comes over, flying at treetop level. Quite apart from the fact that it scares the hell out of you, it has come and gone in seconds. Get it? The other aspect, is that instead of the arc of your line being oriented vertically over the fish (in which case it sees it coming in low, and rolling out directly above that too), the arc in a low side cast means that either the forward pushing line, or the unrolling loop will pass over the fish, but maybe not both. This reasoning probably only holds true for the single cast delivery, which I will mention later on. It is subtle!
2. Casting to the side. If, due to wind, casting ability, or pull of the moon, you are going to need several false casts, why do all that flailing directly overhead the very fish you are hoping not to scare? Get your "dirty washing" done slightly off to the side, placing only your final delivery on target. A positive spinoff of this, is that you will be able to see from your false cast, if you have got your distance right.
3. Casting less. This has to be the single most important thing to remember. You are sitting out on the stoep. It is misty. You think you see a flash of lightening. You really are not sure. Then it happens again, and you are sure of it. If something flashes overhead once you might not see it. Second time around you probably will. A lot of fly-fishermen think it is unrealistic to propose a single false cast, or none at all. It really isn't. You can achieve it by having the line ready and available in your casting hand, by wiggling the rod tip to get a fair amount of line out of the end eye before you start, and by loading the rod immediately (the bow and arrow approach is a good technique to achieve this). The other thing to do of course, is to creep in close, so that you don't need a long cast. This will mean you have less drag to cope with too, but it will mean that you have to keep extra low, and approach with more stealth.
4. Concentrating on getting the first cast to the sweetest spot: You now have three techniques. The secret is to use them on the cast that counts: the first one! There is little purpose in only remembering the above pointers After you have sent the fish scattering. I would go one step further, and say that in some circumstances, you should be aiming to fish a pool with only a single cast. Those circumstances would be when you are approaching flat water, perhaps in a cramped space, with clean water and bright light.
In other words where there is every chance that the fish will be skittish, and that within a cast or two, your fly could hook in the tree hanging over the pool. In these circumstances, you don't want to scare the largest fish in the sweet spot of the pool, while making some preliminary or exploratory casts in the margins. So consider foregoing those margins, and approaching the pool with a single shot at it. One caution on this approach though: the sweet spot might not be where you think it is! So stop and watch and think before you deliver the only presentation that is going to count.
Many fly fishermen conduct their fishing in a way which clearly signals that they have lost sight of what it is they are doing. As fly fishermen, we are stalking our prey and attempting to go undetected while doing so. We easily conform to the camouflage methods that we are familiar with, like the wearing of camo clothing. But we often, somewhat illogically, forget about some of the most obvious practices that give away our presence to the trout. Hopefully the four measures above will get you thinking about what else you might be doing to inadvertently alert your quarry to your intentions.
Be sure to take a look at Andrew's excellent Truttablog that covers everything from his fly fishing experiences in South Africa along with some neat poetry too