One of the biggest challenges you’ll face in trout fishing is chasing these fish during early spring. On its face, that statement feels counterintuitive. After all, spring is when the bugs start hatching again, the fish wake up, and you can catch trout on more than worms, scuds, and egg patterns.
When spring is fully underway—say by mid-April—it does feel like the game gets a bit easier. The fish and anglers are both happy to see bugs that aren’t size 22 midges, and the trout tend to lose a bit of their inhibition. But this time of year, early spring trout are tough for a number of reasons.
Still Sluggish
I was on the water most of last week, fishing one of my favorite tailwaters. We couldn’t have asked for better weather—temps in the 50s, and none of the usual Wyoming wind. A few midges came off in clusters, but the water was still in the low 40s.
That’s warm enough for browns and rainbows to be active, but they weren’t “on the chew,” as a guide friend of mine used to say. The takes we got were sluggish, and I missed quite a few fish because I thought my nymphs were stuck in the moss instead of a trout’s mouth.
In fact, I caught two mountain whitefish back-to-back that both felt exactly like I’d hooked into a big pile of weeds. They didn’t start to fight until they broke the water’s surface, almost like the warm air kicked a bit of life into them.
Sluggish fish themselves aren’t all that tough. Using heavier flies instead of split shot, and smaller bobbers, is a great way to detect these softer takes. But it’s the lazy behavior paired with great spring weather that’s the challenge. It makes you long for the fishing of late spring when trout have moved back into the riffles, and you’re casting dry-dropper rigs instead of clunky nymph setups. There’s nothing wrong with nymphing, but after a winter of tossing bobbers, it feels odd to do it when the weather is telling you that you should be fishing dry flies.
Tough Spots
The other challenge we ran into last week was finding the fish. They weren’t stacked in the deep, slow holes like they had been all winter. They weren’t in the riffles, either.
No, these fish were congregated in water about 3-5 feet deep, moving slightly slower than walking speed, ideally right behind a big shelf. Water that looked like it should hold fish didn’t, which made me start second-guessing every choice. When I start overthinking everything, I usually make mistakes.
We’d fished one run for almost an hour without anything to show for it. This spot looked the part, except that it was a tad too fast and shallow. Still, it was close enough that we reckoned the fish would be there.
After so many fruitless casts, though, we made the choice to leave. As we walked back to the truck, my buddy Alex threw one cast into a piece of the run we hadn’t fished yet. It was a subtle seam in the middle of the faster riffles, no more than two feet wide. This was the sort of seam that’s not obvious unless you stare at the water for a while, and I don’t know if Alex saw it intentionally or just got lucky.
Either way, a throwaway cast on our walk back to the truck turned into Alex’s personal-best brown trout. This fish stretched the tape at 24.5 inches long, and ate a size 12 Walt’s Worm.
If I’d just worked the water thoroughly instead of forcing the issue in parts of the run that looked fishy, I might have caught that fish instead of Alex. Now, Alex completely deserved that fish, but I don’t know any angler who’d look at a nice brown trout like that and not wish they’d caught it themselves.
Once we dialed in the right water type, the fishing picked up, and the rest of the trip went well. But I worked harder for these early-spring trout than I did any of the fish I caught this winter. There’s probably a lesson in there somewhere.