Streamer Fishing In The Riffles

The red dirt road has dried from the rains two days previous. The car temperature gauge reads 59 degrees. What a great spring day. No jacket required! And there is only one car at the access ladder. I leave the yellow streamer tied on from the previous trip and fish my way downstream, casting to the far bank and stripping it across stream as it is carried by the current downstream.

After forty minutes, my shoulder muscles start to hurt and not having caught a trout yet, I remember why I usually nymph fish. When nymphing I can usually catch a few fish in the first forty minutes. Secondly, there are a lot fewer casts. Streamer fishing is fast fishing. You are not casting upstream and letting the nymph float back slowly downstream in drag-free fashion, but rather casting across to the opposite bank, making a few quick strips and immediately casting again. Repeating this every couple of seconds makes for a lot of quick, forceful casts. Arms can get tired quite fast doing this. Nevertheless, the potential is there for large trout. This, of course, keeps me casting away.

I place a small split shot at the head of the streamer and make sure I work each of the deep holes. Voila, after forty-five minutes and hundreds of casts later, I’m rewarded. Wouldn’t you know it; I get a hit in the shallow riffles, not in the deep holes which I was targeting. My first thought is “at least I didn’t get skunked.” After forty minutes without a strike you begin to wonder: Am I using the right fly? Are the fish biting? Is the water too cloudy or too high? Anyway, hooking this big fish on a streamer makes my day. What’s more, he jumps a couple of times and puts up a good fight. This is why I come out to the stream.

I reach back and grab the handle of my net and with a yank, detach it from the magnet. The fish takes out line again, which makes it difficult because now I’ve got the net in one hand, the pole in the other. I need to reel in the big brown that is taking out line. I contemplate throwing the net on the shore. But then I’d be left without the net. I awkwardly reel in line with the net still in my hand. Then I lift the rod high to bring the fish close enough to slide it into the net in my outstretched hand. Whoa, this is a nice fish. Not as big as the one I caught last week but definitely a nice fish. I go to take the hook out and the trout starts squirming. The hook is actually in quite deep and the fish was well hooked. This is another thing I like about these big hooks. Once you get a fish hooked, the hooks usually don’t slip out like the little midge hooks sometimes do. As I take a picture, the fish seems to say “I’m not going to take this laying down!” The fish is about 17 inches long and is happy to be placed back into the water.