I hadn’t been on the water for a few weeks, which is rare in the summer. Half the reason I moved to this forgotten corner of Wyoming is for the proximity of great fishing. So, when the float last week started out slow and I didn’t catch anything in the first few miles, I chalked it up to being rusty. I know some anglers who take the winters off, and when they head out for the first time in spring, they like to do so alone, so no one sees how clunky their casting is after a few months of disuse.
The conditions weren’t easy, either. The river was loaded with moss that attached itself to my flies, ruining almost every other drift. The water was low, too, even for this late in the year. A small midge and trico hatch had sputtered earlier, but it never amounted to much, and none of the bigger fish in the river paid those dry flies any mind.
So, I stuck with a hopper-dropper rig and hoped the fish would find my zirdle bug enticing. My friend Kyle hooked and landed one fish early on, but we both had a long dry spell through the next three miles of water.
I couldn’t pin down why, exactly, I hadn’t even moved a fish yet. I had the same rig on as Kyle, was fishing at a similar depth, and he’d even given me the front of the boat. As my mind usually does when the fishing slows down, I started thinking about fishing-related topics, if not exclusively focusing on my current drift.
What I kept going back to was the topic of a recent podcast I did about why beginning fly anglers tend to struggle on the water. It’s often not a lack of information or skill that gets in their way, but forgetting to focus on the fundamentals. If you put a fly in front of a fish, and make it look real, oftentimes, you’ll catch something. When you’re not catching fish, it’s usually because your presentation isn’t quite right, or in extreme cases, you’ve made a poor fly choice.
I knew my casts were okay, even if I’d thrown a few tailing loops. And I had my flies drifting through the right kind of water, too. The fish we spooked with the boat were in the shallower riffles, where there’s plenty of oxygen and food, which gets important this late in the summer.
That meant something was wrong with either where my fly was in the water column, or the fly itself. And since Kyle had caught his fish on a zirdle, and everyone else on the river was using zirdle bugs, I knew it wasn’t the fly.
It was about then that a fish came up and slurped my hopper. The eat surprised me, so I naturally bungled the hook set, but not before a nice rainbow jumped and spat my foam bug back at me.
So, even with the risk of doing so adding more moss to my rig, I put on a small split shot to get my zirdle bug down quicker. I also started jigging and moving my hopper, hoping to give my zirdle a bit of action as it tumbled through the riffles.
Not long after I made those small changes, I hooked and landed my first fish of the day, a stout 17-inch rainbow that took me for a ride before giving up. That ended up being the only fish of the day, although I hooked and lost a few more before we got to the take out.
Often, we make fly fishing out to be this complex game that’s only ever won, and not mastered. It isn’t easy, but it’s simple, a distinction that’s lost on some folks. And more often than not, so is the reason why we’re not catching fish.