Something Learned

On every trip to the river I try to learn something. I am constantly trying new things. Some of these things I have discussed previously; such as strike indicators. Currently I am learning to become a better streamer fisherman. I am trying various streamer patterns to find which ones work best, which ones have better success with hookups, which get the most hits, the best ways to get the streamer near the bottom, tandem rigs, casting, etc.

Since I am currently in the mode of learning to better fish streamers, I rigged my rod with streamers. I placed the large grey and white rabbit fur streamer as the point fly and a dark yellow big eyed streamer as the dropper. I left my 4 weight nymphing rig at home since I was planning on streamer fishing. I expected to find the river a little high and a little off color since it is the time of year for the run off. Surprisingly, the river was at normal flows and clearer than I expected. I was excited to see this. When I reached the intended access point there were six cars parked there. I had never seen this many cars at one access point before. To avoid a crowd I turned around and went upstream to the previous access point and I was the only car parked there. This was a stretch I had never fished before. As I got out of the car I was greeted with a caddis hatch. There were bugs all over the place. Then as I neared the water they coated the shoreline. This gave me another haunting suspicion that I had left the wrong rod at home.  By the end of the evening this proved to be true.

This ended up being a great stretch of water. There were plenty of features and deep pockets. It looked like perfect streamer water. I fished downstream moving quickly until I met the fishermen coming upstream from the other direction. Then I turned around and methodically fished upstream working my way back to the car. I had several hits but none connected. This is one thing I am working on, finding streamers that hook up more often. What I envision is a bulky streamer that has a short shank hook so that if the fish hits the head of the streamer; like it should, it would get hooked with that short shank hook. At the same time I would like the streamer to have a long hook so that if the fish strikes the tail from behind, it would also get hooked. This way I would get more hook ups, rather than just strikes. It is exciting to see the big fish come up and hit the streamer like they did this day, but it would be even more exciting to hook and land them.