Flat Refusals

This isn’t about fishing saltwater flats, or stillwater flats, but about catching trout on flat running water. Really flat water. The kind you want to walk on by with no more than a glance as you hustle on up to that inviting riffle at the top of the run, where you have a decent chance of a fish. Sure, you might chuck a fly at that widening circle of rings over there by the bank as you go, but it’s a half-hearted gesture at best.

It’s a confidence thing. As in, none. That trout is probably sipping spent spinners from among the dead leaves drifting gently down the placid surface. Maybe the most difficult situation in trout fishing. You know you won’t catch that fish, and you also know it could be the best fish in the pool. But hey, what the hell, get it over with. Have a go and get up to that nice joggly water upstream, you know, where everyone fishes. It’s so easy up there you can even use your trusty weighted nymph and indicator rig.

This is often the deal near the end of the season. The water levels are low and slow. The lively runs of springtime are a memory, as are all those ‘dumb’ trout that make you feel like an expert and will even take a downstream swung wet fly. A good technique to handle this kind of water is to let your buddy have a go. Then you can stand back and snigger safely at his hilarious splashdowns and jet-ski drag problems. Be sure to make all sorts of wheezing and groaning noises throughout this humiliating ordeal.

But if you are fishing alone—definitely the best way to be when faced with flat water—you can take your time, get yourself squared away and face that trout like a man. You might screw up, but that’s okay, nobody’s watching. Sure it’s hard, but it’s the real deal. You nail that trout and you can bark with the big dogs.

The trout rising in a mirror surface is where you get all those ‘refusals’ we read about. It gave rise to the myth of the ‘educated’ trout and the cross-indexed fly box. Selective trout. Ernest Schwiebert stuff. Serious. So serious that some far-gone selectivists carry a set of pantone pens to tune the colour of their exquisitely tied goose biot abdomens. To some this is the attraction of fly fishing—an opportunity to get seriously geeky. It’s also a way to transfer the blame onto the fish rather than yourself.

But really, most of this flat-water dry-fly business is not about pattern at all, but about hunting, presentation and avoiding drag.

A hatch makes things a lot easier. When the emergers are bursting through the surface film, the trout are in the riffles and usually going hard. Broken water presentations are pretty straightforward. The drag you have to deal with is pronounced and instantly apparent in the fast water, so your standard repertoire of mends and slack line casts will handle it. Things change when you are working on trout that are mopping up spent spinners in the smooth slicks and backwaters, later or early in the day.

SPINNERS AT DAWN

Daybreak is a wonderful time on the river, if you can drag yourself onto the water in time to catch the spinner fall. The trout are often very visible in the early hours, relaxed and feeding in pods, hanging ‘on the fin’ just below the surface. They will be found in spots normally empty of trout during the day. The tail-outs of pools and gravel bar edges, places we often approach carelessly, are prime locations for spinner feeders.

Approach these often-shallow spots slowly and with eyes wide open. The water may be only deep enough to cover the trout’s back. I’ve caught plenty of fish that were noticed only by a dorsal or tail fin moving along a shingle shore. As long as you don’t step on the fish, or do something clumsy with your line and leader, the trout’s reduced angle of vision in the shallow water makes them relatively easy.

The spinners are invisible on the surface but you will have made a note of what’s hatching and have some flies to match it. By ‘match’ I mean size, shape and posture. A simple hackle dry of a suitable size will usually do the trick. Just trim the hackle from below the hook shank so the fly rides flat in the surface. No need for those tricky spent wing jobs. The deal here is presentation, first and last.

It’s not that I think flies are unimportant. I just think presentation is more important. Get that right and a good generalist fly will usually do the job. Generalist as opposed to selectivist is the way I think of it. A generalist fly is one that says to the trout, ‘here’s a bug more or less like the one you’ve been eating.’ I try to keep in mind that a feeding trout is actively looking for things that resemble food, not cataloguing the differences.

But being a generalist still has rules: three of them.

1. GISS. Choose a fly that presents the General Impression, Shape and Size of the most common trout food available at the time. It doesn’t hurt to have a little realism built in, but it’s not as necessary as we’ve been led to believe. That’s just fly tying voodoo.

2. Present the fly in a way that the natural food is encountered by the fish. This requires accurate casting and nothing that will distract the trout from eating the fly, like a dragging fly or leader.

3. Don’t scare the fish.

Working backwards through those three rules, the first thing we have to do is approach the trout slowly and circumspectly. Everyone knows this, in theory at any rate, but most of us blunder onto a lot of trout because we move too fast up the stream, rushing to the next best spot. A bow wave rolling up a smooth slick is the trout’s parting salute to our clumsiness and impatience. That trout is safe.

If we just mosey up the stream watching everything, rather than charge up it fixed on what we reckon is the sweet spot, we will often spot the subtle rise of a feeding fish in a place we might not expect it. The first place to look is the tail-out of a long smooth glide. Just at the brink of where the current turns into the next riffle. Trout, and big ones, love this position. The reason is they have an unobstructed view of any food coming down the stream on that glassy surface, and a near 360° view of the surrounds. They are always ready to bolt. Even the tip of your rod intruding into this visual field is enough to get that bow wave thing happening.

It’s a hard place to fish because, as the smooth surface spills into the rapid, the accelerating current presents very tricky drag problems for an upstream cast. Sneak along to get a shot from the side or even slightly upstream, where you have a chance with a reach mend and some slack in the leader. This is where the camo jumpsuit and face paint isn’t just a load of macho bollocks. Maybe just leave the Day-Glo ball cap at home, remember that slow and low is the go, and you’ll manage just fine in your civilian attire.

The next biggest fish-spooker, maybe even the first and best fish-spooker, is the dreaded false cast. This is something for which we just have to build a bridge and get over it. All those hours of lawn casting to get those admirable narrow loops will habituate you to making two maybe three false cast to a feeding trout. This habit will ruin more otherwise perfect presentations than anything I know, trust me. Learn to do a single pick up and go, a water haul, a simple roll pickup, anything to get that rod loaded and the line out there without all that arm waving, water spraying, rod and line flashing, fish spooking, overhead false casting.

Every dry fly angler knows about drag, in theory, but few bother to actually do anything about it. So, two things: 1. Get broadside to the fish if possible. 2. Reach mend. After your basic overhead throw, the reach mend is the single most important cast you need in your stream fishing repertoire. Learn this cast. Learn to reach and shoot line with accuracy. Just do it.

The reason for getting square to the fish, rather than casting from behind, is probably obvious but worth stating. The fish don’t see the leader. No rocket propelled grenade style shadow, no flash, no splash. Know this and you discover that your old Red Tag does surprisingly well in a fall of size 16 spinners. Not that I recommend a Red Tag in a mayfly spinner fall, but I’m just saying.

WATCH & LEARN

A case in point. Near the end of last season, Chris Dore, Ronan Creane and I were working a big glassy slick to some spinner feeders. The day was bright and sunny. The classic hard thing. We got a few fish surrounded—Chris and I fishing from mid-stream toward shore, while Ronan worked from the bank. By the way, both these guys are gun anglers. It’s always a good idea to fish with people who are better anglers than you are. Put aside your natural competitiveness for a while. Watch and learn.

Anyway, the trout were going well, with good aggressive rises. They would work up the current and then turn and race back downstream, sometimes making long gliding furrows with their noses out as they hoovered spinners from the surface. I put my fly in front of several fish as they ranged around, but after a few ‘refusals’ began to think about my fly. I was using my go-to, a very sparse #16 SHE (Snowshoe Hare Emerger) which usually does fine in these situations. Chris used his CDC Emerger, which usually works too (note that we were both using emergers rather than spinner patterns and fully expecting to catch spinner feeding fish). We both hooked a few of these fish but Ronan hooked twice as many.

I was thinking my fly size was about a perfect match for the naturals, and a very neat, sparsely tied job too. However, the trout’s behaviour had me wondering if maybe these fast cruising fish were not seeing my fly at all in the surface film, which was cluttered with scum, debris and willow leaves. This was borne out when we finally compared flies with Ronan.

Chris’s CDC emerger had a simple grey dubbed body with a dark tuft of CDC tied Shuttlecock style at the eye. There wasn’t much to choose between his fly and mine, pattern wise. My SHE had a very sparse wing of white snowshoe hare fur and a slim dubbed grey abdomen—the tiny #16 barely penetrated the littered surface.

Fishing side by side, Chris rose many more fish than I did. Allowing for his better presentation skills, I put the difference down to the size and posture of his fly. His #16 straight shank hook had a longer shank than my #16 curved emerger hook, and the shuttlecock tying of his fly gives a vertical hang to the body. Overall Chris’s fly was about twice the size of mine. With the dark CDC wing, the sum effect was more presence and more visibility.

Ronan was fishing a well used and rather chunky, modified #14 Deer Hair Sedge variant, with a claret seal’s fur body. Ronan’s version of this great old generalist pattern has a tuft of white poly yarn added to the wing for visibility. He had modified it by lopping off the poly yarn. Not exactly your Ernest Schwiebert approach. I gave his fly a good look and, between you and me, it was a mess.

For starters, the size was wrong, at least three times the size of the natural, and it was all ragged from trout teeth, deer hair sticking out all over the place. Otherwise it bore no relationship to the tiny delicate spent spinners that the fish were eating. The reason it was working so well was that it had presence. I just didn’t have enough fly in the water.

The trout I caught that afternoon were a result of placing the fly smack on their noses. Ronan, who landed about a dozen fish, watched trout zero onto his fly from ten feet away then power toward it in a rush. I watched trout plough right past my tiny sparse fly as if they hadn’t even seen it, which I am convinced was the case. The idea that it was being ‘refused’ was just a backsliding selectivist’s take on it.

Not that Ronan is immune to these impulses. That night back at the cottage he spent a couple of hours trying to match his beat up DHS variant. But then Ronan is a bit of a mystic. Not to mention Irish. He couldn’t quite recreate the scruffy disaster that was catching all the fish that day. The point, as far as I’m concerned, is that the details of that fly weren’t the important thing anyway. It was good presentation, combined with the fly’s visibility and posture, as well as its all-round bugginess that turned the trick.

Ronan was fishing his killer fly on the dropper and said it hung just below the surface. This would be because the sodden seal’s fur body no longer had any floating capabilities. In this fishing posture the trout noticed and locked on to the fly from a considerable distance. Ronan witnessed trout giving a flick of the tail to accelerate toward it for positive takes—no hesitation or fussy ‘selective trout’ scrutiny here. Several times Ronan saw fish move toward the fly only to pass it by, which looked like refusals to the fly but were probably caused by leader flash or drag at a critical point. Or the fly just looked like inedible stream debris, which it imitated perfectly.

Waist deep in mid-river, Chris and I were unable to witness this behaviour but we saw the result in the fewer takes we were getting. The fact that the same fish that ‘refused’ once would take the fly on the next pass makes it pretty clear that ‘selectivity’ wasn’t an issue. Ronan and I agree that squaring off to the fish was vitally important to avoid having the leader cross the trout’s path—the cause of most so-called refusals to the fly on flat water, in my view.

The combined catch was well over thirty trout and no one was using a standard dry ‘spinner’ pattern. That occasion was just one among many over several past seasons where presentation far outweighed pattern in a difficult flat water situation. I made a note to fish a larger, darker fly next time I find myself in that situation (in fact, I did this successfully the next day on another stream).

It’s up to the individual to decide how much effort to put into matching the hatch in terms of close copy realism, but for me the GISS concept and good presentation goes a long way toward simplifying, maybe even solving, fly fishing’s central problem—the smart, educated, selective trout.