I’ve always had this problem trying to decide whether to focus on more artsy fartsy essay type posts or more “how-to” type posts and I’ve never really come to a conclusion (the blog is called Casting Around so I guess the indecision is in the name). So lucky you – you’ll be getting both … at the same time.
Autumn Panic … it’s a thing I get. In spring the whole year’s ahead of you and your head is full of new streams to fish and new things to try—you’re full of that feathered kind of hope that full fly boxes and new beginnings bring. Then spring and the salad days of early summer go by so quickly that only a fraction of these dreams have a chance to bloom into reality and you’re left staring down the barrel of late summer and low creeks and perhaps even dangerously warm waters. So there’s that lull in trout fishing while you wait for fall and the cooler weather and reinvigorated, active fish.
Autumn is more emotionally complicated than spring for me. In the fall you can have great fishing and beautiful weather, some of the best of the year really —but there is that whispering in the cool breezes mixing in with the crickets and katydids that reminds you that each fish you catch is one fish closer to the last fish of the season before winter settles in like a real bastard. So fall fishing can be bittersweet. It gets me thinking of things and people that have passed. I get a bit maudlin and, I have to admit, I get a bit panicked that I haven’t gotten out enough.
On this late summer day (but it really felt like fall) I took a chance with that precious commodity, time on the water, to do some exploration. This particular stream has a beautiful fly fishing only section that I usually visit – but it can get crowded so I figured to try a different stretch. Luckily, on this day it panned out and we were rewarded with some beautiful water and some beautiful fish.
Nymphing …
Lately I’ve been more and more interested in contact-nymphing techniques with long rods and long light leaders – what you might refer to as European-Nymphing or Euro-Nymphing – though I feel a little uncomfortable with using that term to describe what I’ve been doing simply because I’m not any kind of expert on it and don’t want to mis-state or misrepresent anything. I’ve flirted with this style of fishing for a few years now, but have never gone all in. Tenkara has held sway. But for whatever reason lately the rod and reel and modern nymphing techniques have been calling me.
But First Here’s My Clean Tone ….
I am a bad guitarist and as such I watch lots of guitar videos on YouTube. When a guitar YouTuber is demo-ing an effects pedal they do this thing (and it’s kind of an inside joke these days) where they play the guitar “clean” – that is they play just the guitar into the amp without the pedal activated and they usually say something like “But first here’s my clean tone”. So before I get into my rigging I figured I’d just mention my “clean tone” that is what rod am I using. the Douglas Outdoors DXF 3114. (Link to Douglas DXF 3114)
DXF 3114 Specs:
LENGTH: 11′
LINE: #3
WEIGHT: 3.2 oz
I don’t do gear reviews any longer, but I’ll share things that I’m using or have heard about. So no review of the DXF 3114 but I’ll mention a few things. I’m really liking it for casting euro-style nymphing leaders (see below for what I was using this day). It protects light tippets like you wouldn’t believe. It is almost impossible to break a 6X tippet with the rod in a curve – you really have to pull straight in line to do it. And I haven’t gotten into any fish that even begin to challenge it as far as landing power goes. Biggest fish so far with it has probably been around 18-inches – so no monsters yet to really test that. The thing that some folks may not know about the rods designed for euro-nymphing is that though it is rated as a 3 wt or 2wt or whatever – it’s designed to have a tip that can throw light lines and long leaders but a butt that can handle bigger fish – and handle them on light tippets. So don’t think of a 2 or 3 wt euro-nymphing rod in the same way as you would a short 2 or 3 wt small stream dry fly rod. They are different beasts when it comes to landing fish.
I’ve been using a Cheeky Tyro 350 reel (reel weight = 5.3 oz) spooled with a level mono-core nymphng line on the DXF 3114. This reel and line combo doesn’t balance it as well as I would like. I’m looking for a heavier reel – but first I need to do some testing with added weight to see how heavy I need to go.
Rigging …
Above you can see the leader that I used on this trip. For casting the 2.5mm and 2.8mm tungsten bead head flies that I was mainly using it worked quite well. For tippet length was using about 5 ft. Even though the majority of runs that I was fishing were much shallower than 5ft – the long tippet helps to create the proper tension in the water with the small bead heads to fish the rig at a distance and keep the leader mostly off of the water.
Flies …
I always like to share a fly pattern when possible if I’ve had success on a trip. On this occasion I caught dozens of fish – which for me I’d count as a success. The fly that I was using mostly on this trip was very simple – just a Sexy Walt’s worm – sized 14 with a 2.5mm or a 2.8mm tungsten bead.
Recipe:
Dubbing = blend of hare’s mask and white antron
Ribbing = fine pearlescent tinsel
Some other thoughts …
Sometime not long before we fished this section of stream it must have been stocked with small rainbows. Because I caught about 50 of them. Which was kind of fun, but personally I’d rather not see them stocked over wild fish.
Both my father and I witnessed a very interesting phenomena. In each run we’d start off by catching 10 or 15 of those little rainbows and then once we managed to stick a bunch of them the browns would start to show up. I cannot be absolutely sure but what I suspect was going on was that the quick little rainbows would intercept the fly before the browns got a chance. Then once you caught all the ‘bows and they stopped biting then the browns had a chance. This is perhaps a good thing to know if you ever encounter it – be persistent through the little stockers and know that the browns may just be waiting their turn. The darker side of this is, of course, that if those little rainbows are intercepting the artificial flies then they are doing the same with the natural food items – I can’t imagine that’s the best thing for wild fish to have to compete with hundreds of small stocked fish.
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