We all look forward to those grand fishing trips we plan each year. The long weekends, camping, and nothing but a full day of fishing on the mind. I’ve gotten used to these trips over the years. Often driving hours to fish one of the many blue-ribbon trout streams in the general area. In doing this, I drive over many trout streams that are much closer to home. Funny how we fishermen do this, drive over trout just to find more trout. It’s a great problem we have here in Montana.
This weekend I explored one of those trout streams I often drive by. It was a nice change of pace to get out for a few hours and incorporate fishing into my daily life. In this article, I detail two mornings I had fishing close to home.
Fishing Close To Home
Over the weekend, I spent both Saturday and Sunday morning fishing a local river that I had driven by so many times on the way to other trout waters. I woke before sunrise (5:45 ish) and left for the river around 6:30 a.m. This put me on the water as the sun rose over the mountains. My goal was to get a few hours of fishing in before spending quality time with my fiance.
As you may have experienced yourself, balancing fishing time with a committed relationship is not an easy undertaking. After eight years together, I’m disappointed to say I’ve yet to figure it out. I still have my fair share of days that I come home later than I said, try to incorporate fishing into trips that aren’t fishing, and talk about it on an overwhelming basis.
This will forever be a conversation in our relationship as we go through the different stages of life. Luckily, I’ve been blessed with an amazing woman who supports my passion and understands what it means to me.
I bring this up as this weekend worked out extremely well, balancing a few hours of fishing and spending quality time with her. It turned out to be one of the best weekends we have spent together this year, enjoying the beautiful fall we are having and planning our wedding. I see great potential in this schedule working for us in the future. A few hours of early morning fishing, being back home by 9:00 or 10:00 am for a full day with her. While I still have to work on getting off the water, I’m excited to work on this and incorporate it more into my daily life and relationship.
Fall is an amazing time to get on the water early. Brisk air, beautiful sunrises, and abundant wildlife are just a few reasons why. This weekend’s trips incorporated all of the above. Unlike summer, you don’t have to wake up at an ungodly hour to experience these epic views. A 6:30 a.m. start time is much easier than 4:30 a.m.
I started each day with medium-sized streamers, hunting for migratory brown trout in the low light hours. I was hoping to get lucky with the big, beautiful brown trout that we all dream of this time of year. This technique did not play out either morning exactly as I would’ve liked, but it did result in a quality rainbow that I was more than grateful for at sunrise.
Once the sun came over the mountains, I switched to a euro nymphing leader and tied on a small jig bugger. This technique proved to be much more effective. Fishing the slow deep bends in the river, I picked up multiple trout each morning using this technique. These were solid fish in the 6 to 14-inch range and fun to catch using the jig bugger. Slowly jigging my flies through the deep holes tempted many fish into biting, and proved much more effective than a dead drift.
The problem with this particular river is the amount of snags that are tough to see with the brown tint in which the water flows. When using heavy jig buggers and streamers, I found many of these snags and lost more flies than I could count. In the short session each morning, it was embarrassing the amount of flies I left on the bottom of the river. I’ll be back on the vise-tying jig buggers before my next outing.
Other than the holes in my fly boxes and empty tippet spools, it was a great weekend of fishing. Fishing in the morning and spending time with my fiance in the afternoon worked out perfectly for the both of us, and I look forward to incorporating this more into our schedule. I hope this is a reminder to fish your local waters as there can be some great fishing hiding right under your nose.
My Setup
I fished two different setups this weekend, both on my Echo Shadow 2 10 1/2 foot 4wt. The first is a full mono rig which I used for the medium-sized streamers. This incorporates a long leader that allows for accuracy and mitigates the effects the fly line has on your retrieve. The Troutbitten blog has many articles on the topic if you would like to learn more.
I then switched to my euro nymphing leader for the jig bugger setup. This consists of 15 feet of maxima chameleon (10 pound), to 3 feet of 3x indicator line, ending with a few more feet of 3x fluorocarbon tippet. It ends with a triple surgeon’s knot on a 4x tippet, where the nymph is tied on the remaining tag from the knot and the jig bugger tied as the point fly. Both setups allow the flies to sink quickly and give me contact throughout the entire drift.
Any jig bugger pattern I used seemed to work well, especially when giving the fly a vertical jig. I fish two sizes of jig buggers, a small version usually tied on a size 8 or 10 jig hook. Then a bigger size that incorporates different materials and is tied on a size 2 90-degree jig hook. Olive tends to be my go-to color, though yellow and brown variations have been working well.
What Did I Learn?
Over the years, I have grown accustomed to extravagant fishing trips. My fishing trips usually involve long drives, overnight camping, and full days of fishing. This is for good reason, as I love the full experience these trips offer.
But I learned this weekend that a fishing trip does not have to be a highly anticipated trip to satisfy my craving. The quick outing had very little effort involved, which made for a relaxing day on the water and little expectations. I feel blessed to be so close to many great trout fisheries and need to take advantage of the streams close to home.
A goal of mine is to incorporate fishing more in my day-to-day life. Rather than all my fishing outings being a trip planned weeks in advance, just another day in my life that I fished for a few hours.
I believe trips like these align with my desired lifestyle and are a great strategy to keep fishing throughout all stages of my life. With many other things I value and prioritize, fishing a full day is not always possible. Though some days in the office I may convince myself that’s all I want to do.
Spending time with my loved ones, working in my career, documenting and writing my experiences through this blog, and living a healthy lifestyle are only a few of the other things I value in my life. Short fishing outings allow me to satisfy my craving while also living a fulfilled life off the water. What a great learning experience this weekend.
What Left Me Curious?
What is a more effective way to fish streamers, with a mono rig or a sink-tip fly line? This is a question that I have been going back and forth on over the past few weeks.
Each fall I get the urge to fish streamers as the trout are aggressive and it provides for a change of pace from my summer dry fly fishing. A talented angler turned me onto the mono rig last summer, showing me its great effectiveness. It blew my mind and opened up a new world of streamer fishing. I have since incorporated it into my fishing and it has been my go-to technique for streamer fishing over the past year.
If you are unfamiliar with a mono rig, you are taking the fly line out of the equation. Fishing a very long leader (20 to 40ft) to accurately cast, keep contact with, and use the rod tip to move your flies through the water. The great benefit to this system for me is the accuracy of the cast and limiting the effects the river has in your retrieve. The mono rig allows you to keep contact with your flies with a majority of your line out of the water. You can get your flies deeper, keep them in currents longer, and put great movement in your fly. It’s been a true game-changer in my streamer fishing.
However, it has been causing me some issues lately. It makes me wonder if I could get similar results with a sink-tip fly line. With the mono rig, you are constantly dealing with monofilament rather than a fly line. This line is hard to manage. Whether it be slipping through your hands while fighting a fish or wrapping itself around every piece of grass on the bank, it can make for a long day. It is also very easy to tangle, causing me some major headaches untangling line when I could be fishing. Long mono leaders also have their limits when fishing some of the big watersheds we have out west. Yes, it works great fishing your way up an undercut bank, but what about the long riffle spreading across the river? Lastly, it just makes for an ugly fly cast and is borderline conventional fishing. But is it worth the pain?
Part of me just misses a fly line sometimes. However, when I use a sink tip I feel I am not streamer fishing as effectively as I could with a mono rig. Could I use a sink tip and still get the same movement in my fly, accuracy on my casts, and put as many fish to net as the mono rig has done for me over the past year? I plan to learn how to develop my skills using a sink tip and try to reap some of the benefits the mono rig offers.
But for this weekend’s trip, the mono rig was so darn effective fishing the small water and undercut banks with a streamer. I was able to get drifts I could’ve never gotten with traditional streamer fishing techniques.
I think this dilemma is like so many we come across in fly fishing. The answer to my question is it depends. It depends on the river I’m fishing and my goals for the day. Just like so many techniques I’ve learned over the years, the mono rig proves the point that we can develop new tools to bring to the water, but there is not one set up that does it all.
