| McKenzie River fishing guide and Rogue River steelhead fishing guides specialist, fly fishing Oregon McKenzie River trout and Rogue River steelhead |
 |
   
|
|
|
Michael Gorman, Oregon Fishing Guide |
|
|
|
|
| |||||||
|
|
The Art of
Effective Trolling Just as you can never have too many friends or too much money, a successful lake angler can never have too many effective fly fishing methods. Even with a large compliment of methods, there are days when it will seem that I am one short in having all the answers, turning a fair lake fishing day into a stellar day. For determined fly fishermen, the silver lining of average fishing days, of course, is continuing to seek out or create another inventive way to present a fly in such a way that fish will be overcome by temptation to eat the artificial. If you subscribe to the idea that, more times than not, fish can be induced to eat even when we think the “bite is off”, you will eventually add to your fish-catching skills. Personally, I am a subscriber to this thinking. I am always in search of one more method. Maybe I will create one. If I do, I suspect it will be a lucky accident, which leads me to my first story to illustrate this point.
My friends and I were spending a long May weekend in eastern Washington state. It was an annual pilgrimage to lakes that entered their Prime Time before many of our lakes in Oregon where we all lived. We had all come to associate the long drive into the scablands, cheap motels, and greasy diner food with great stillwater fishing memories. In three days, we would launch our float tubes and pontoon boats into three or four different lakes. This story is set on Lake Lenice on the final day of one such trip. As we had done many years previous, we dragged or carried our watercraft over the sandy soil and through the sagebrush to reach the water by mid morning. We always wanted to arrive long before the afternoon wind kicked up to thwart our casting and blow us off our fishing targets. If you wore a broad brimmed hat, you had better crank down the chinstrap, or you will kick hard to catch it before it sank out of sight.
Using past successful ventures at Lenice as our guides, we
anticipated trolling leech patterns paired with a Prince or a Hare’s Ear
variation as The rainbow trout of Lenice Lake were being no one’s fools today. Even the dependable channel we patrolled on the backside of island gave up only an occasional timid strike. It was time to tie on a tan Comparadun dry fly and chironomid pupa, one of our go-to Washington lakes set-ups. Everyone spread out to explore different parts of the lake, all looking for locations along the shoreline reeds where we might discover rising trout. The fish we sought were the bank cruisers who were looking for hatching midges and callibeatis mayflies who showed up, typically, late morning. A choice was made available to the prowling fish: an adult mayfly sitting enticingly on the surface or a suspended midge pupa (chironomid) hanging helplessly directly below the dry fly. The Comparadun doubled as an effective fly and a float / indicator to keep the chironomid from sinking. If the dry fly suddenly disappeared, you had a split second to respond to a fish had just intercepted the pupa. Great fun. And, now and then, a head would appear to suck in the “indicator”. Invariably, members of our group would cross fishing paths with each other. Information was exchanged about fish landed and flies to try. Overall, fishing was slow for us. Everyone had caught a few fish, but no one in our circle had cracked the code to consistent action, nor had anyone else on the lake. Into late afternoon, the reports exchanged were always the same: the action was occasional and sporadic. So, to mix up my routine, I parked my pontoon boat in the reeds of the island, extracted myself, and waded to the edge of the adjacent channel to cast from a standing station. My spot was well chosen. The angle of the afternoon sun allowed to watch cruising rainbows patrolling the channel not two rod lengths in front of me. When the trout are being difficult, such sight can be both exciting and frustrating as the fishing begins. Since I had been trolling a Bugger and a prince nymph on my favorite clear, slow sinking fly line, I continued to use the same as I stood and cast. Using this system, I could experiment with a variety of depths and retrieves as the fish passed in front of me. As I watched their reactions, or lack thereof, to my presentations, I would know what was interesting to them, or not. Anticipating their cruising paths, I would time the retrieve of my flies to swim them right in front of the passing rainbows. Above them, below them, fast, slow, and in between, nothing interested the fish.
My first reaction to this fluky event was that it couldn’t possibly happen again. Nevertheless, it did; I landed several more good trout that fell for the prince with SLH (strip like hell) retrieve. I had never retrieved a fly this fast in my career with the results I was now getting. I was baffled as to what these fish viewed and ate in the real world that I was mimicking. Frankly, at the moment, I did not care. Once the action died at my position, I hopped into my pontoon boat to seek greener pastures. I kicked out of the end of the channel into the main lake. It was soon obvious that I could not troll the flies as fast as I could strip them. My solution to make the flies swim REALLY fast through the water was to kick my fins and strip like a banshee simultaneously. It worked! Always ignoring the big leech, the #12 Prince Nymph accounted for more landed trout. By the time I caught up with several of my companions I had brought to hand no less than eleven rainbows on my new SLHWT (strip like hell while trolling) retrieve. Though I was never accused of lying by my friends that afternoon, I will always wonder. As soon as I shared my angling insights, the fishing died. As my friends joined me this laughable, frantic retrieve of their flies, no one was able to duplicate the results I had just experienced. Nor could I give them a demonstration. I did not get another strike on this technique the rest of our stay. In fact, I have never caught another fish anywhere in my travels using a frantic stripping retrieve with the troll as I did that afternoon on Lake Lenice. However, I did have it once. I hold onto the hope that one day when the fish refuse to bite for me, I will resort in desperation to my SLHWT method and crack the code again.
The easiest of all lake fishing methods is trolling. For the novice, unskilled beginner to get started in fly fishing lakes, trolling is great, both simple and, often, effective. The fly fisherman merely strips a length of line from his fly reel, letting it drift behind his watercraft. If the craft is a float tube or pontoon boat, the angler is propelled by fins he wears over his shoes. The flies are pulled through the water at the same velocity as the boat or float tube. Adjustments for depth can be controlled by adjusting the length of the line, the type of line used, and the velocity of the boat. It is always important for the astute angler to make note of the exact length of line and velocity of the successful troll. Once the right combination of line length and speed are noted when fish are being caught, these can be duplicated in order to continue the success until the bite fades.
Even though I am familiar with a broad variety of stillwater
methods, it is a rare fishing day that I launch my float tube or pontoon boat
and don’t troll flies at least part of the time. As I have noted, trolling
allows you to fish and observe your surroundings at the same time. Because your
fly line is tight as you move along, the angler will feel the strike. He
does not need to watch the rod or the line to know a fish has struck the fly.
The eyes are free to wander, looking for to discover where fish might be
cruising or rising, what insects or other fish food organisms might be active,
and what success other anglers on the water are experiencing.
Every fly angler comes to have his favorite, go-to flies. Over time, these favorites can change. This is only natural, particularly for those always searching to increase their success rate. Instead of being locked into the same known universe of fly possibilities, the adventuresome will experiment. As they do, new favorites are bound to be discovered. For those who might need some suggestions, I have earlier in this work offered up a couple of patterns that I currently like as my first choice exploratory trolling flies: a #8 Bead Head Midnight Wooly Bugger and a #12 Bead Head prince. Unless I have good reason to use something else, I fish these flies on a slow sinking, “transparent” fly line. The amount of line I strip from my reel to begin depends on the water depth, water clarity, and the wind conditions. If the water is clear and there is no wind, I must let out a long length of fly line to have the fly far from me as I fish. I assume my presence and activity will disturb the fish, so I may initially pull twenty strips of fly line from my reel. For me, and the sake of precision, a “strip” of line is the distance from my reel to the first guide on my rod. Though this exact distance will vary slightly from rod to rod, it is not significant. What is important is that this length is a fixed constant. It takes the guesswork out of estimating how much line is in the water when you find a particular line length that works to entice the fish into biting. If 16 strips of line --- reel to the first rod guide --- works, continue to use sixteen strips until the action drops off. Then, try twenty strips, or twenty-three, or whatever.
If I am not getting strikes, before I change line length or flies as I troll, I experiment with my speed. Most anglers troll too fast. Even Olympian Michael Phelps cannot swim ten body lengths in a second, nor can many aquatic insects. If you swim your half inch-long Prince Nymph one foot in a second as you troll, that’s rippin’! Imagine what a wary fish is thinking. A fish attuned to its environment commonly sees its food swim much slower. Big fish with lots of time and experience behind them are particularly suspicious. So, in my trolling routine, I often slow to a crawl, sometimes stopping completely. Many days, it is then that I have the best chance to get a strike. As I slow or stop my troll, the fly sinks. Following fish can find that very enticing. The same holds true when I have been stopped, and then resume my troll. As movement starts from a stop, the fly rises as the line tightens. Again, this rising of the fly may be a biting trigger for a nearby fish. And, don’t be surprised of a fish picks up your fly even after you have been stopped for a while. The effectiveness of “stationary troll” is often discovered when I stop my craft to watch something of interest. I get focused on someone or something, and as I do so, a fish picks up my fly. Experience has told me that this may be exactly what the fish want --- troll a short distance, stop, and let the fly sink. For impatient anglers this is tough. Consider counting to thirty before you move the fly again; or one hundred, if you can stand it. You will be amazed how your patience will grow if you hook a few fish!
Where to troll? If the water depth allows it, I often troll
parallel to and not too far from the shoreline, especially in deep lakes. It is
along the shore where vegetation grows in shallower water where sunlight can
penetrate. Plants need sunlight for photosynthesis, to grow and thrive.
Submerged vegetation provides habitat, food, and protection for many aquatic
organisms. Since a smart fish goes where the food is, fishing in and around
submerged vegetation makes smart fishing sense. Terrestrial insects such as
ants, beetles, crickets, and grasshoppers may go for unplanned swims near the
bank, too. Discover a reasonable distance from it where your flies are not
grabbing the weeds, and trace the shoreline. If you discover expanses of
elodea, lily pads, cattails, or other water plants far from shore, troll near
them, too.
Keep your rod tip low, almost touching the water, as you troll. Because many strikes, especially at low trolling speeds, are very soft, you need to keep your line straight and tight to sense the interception of your fly. When a fish bites something to eat it doesn’t usually grab its prey and quickly swim away to finish it elsewhere. Like us, it devours it on the spot. Likewise, a fish usually takes a slow moving artificial fly into its mouth, and does not give you much indication that it has done so. An inexperienced fisherman may not even know he has an interested fish. If you fish with tour rod tip elevated more than a few inches off the water as you troll, there is slack line between the rod tip and water. A subtle strike may not impart sufficient resistance to pull this slack tight. The angler may never know. There are enough other challenges fishing lakes. Keep that tip down!
One of the problems with trolling in a straight path is that you may disturb the fish you kick or row over, moving them out of the line over which your flies will swim. This is especially true in shallow, very clear water. One solution is to lengthen your fly line so that, maybe, the fish will have time to settle back into the eventual line of travel of the oncoming flies. This also makes a case for slowing the troll speed to buy this time. However, there is an additional and more significant adjustment you can make: move in a nonlinear route. Zig left. Zig right. Then, carve out a large circle. If you are feeling particularly sassy, track a figure “8” as you troll. I do all of these, and it pays fish-biting dividends. Even as I startle the fish, I travel over, my line and flies do not follow my exact path. Because they do not trail me exactly, the flies have a chance of traveling over and through undisturbed fish. Additionally, depending how I turn and zig, my flies will speed up and rise or slow down and sink. When strikes occur, try to detect a pattern as to exactly where in the turn they happen. Seek clues constantly. There are always clues and lessons to be found if you are alert enough to look for them.
When you locate a particularly productive area, take bearings as best you can with markers --- trees, large rocks, identifiable landmarks --- to make reference points about your exact location on the lake. The fish may be concentrated in this zone. Once you leave the Special Spot the action stops. Strip in your flies, do a 180-degree turn, start kicking or rowing, let line out, and return to run your flies through the area again. Keep trolling through the Magic Spot in all directions until the party is over. Return to this area later in the day; the magic may happen again.
Rather than just a uniform “swimming” of the trolled flies, it can
be effective to add some additional movement to them. This is accomplished by
twitching or stripping the line with the fingers of the hand not holding the
rod. Twitching or popping the line does not shorten the amount of line being
fished; it is not retrieving any line without giving it back. While holding the
line with my thumb and forefinger, I pop the line three or four inches with my
bottom three fingers to make the flies dart the same three or four inches. When
the fly line is stripped, the amount stripped is retained, not released back
into the water; the line gets shorter with each strip. Again, I dart the flies
only a few quick inches with each strip, gathering the retrieved line on the
apron of my float tube or the side compartment of my pontoon boat. Twitching or
stripping the trolled flies adds a quick darting movement on top of the
horizontal velocity imparted to the flies by the watercraft pulling them. While
the darting movement is short and quick, the component of the movement created
by my float tube or pontoon is usually slow. There are times when popping the
line or using a short-strip retrieve while trolling is exactly what the fish
want.
There are times I will stop my troll and strip my flies back to me, experimenting with the length and speed of the strip. There are many combinations. Additionally, I may intersperse pauses here and there, allowing the fly to sink. For instance, I might make three short strips, and then pause for a count of three. If this produces strikes, I look for a consistent pattern as to when in my stripping routine the strike comes. Do they occur when I stop stripping and the flies sink? Do they occur when I start stripping and the flies ascend? Do the strikes come in the middle of my stripping routine? Stripping or popping the fly are the only times that I actually hold the fly line when trolling. This can be dangerous. When holding the line, I risk a break off by a big fish administering a hard strike. The response by the angler may be to hold the line tight against the strike on a light leader, with little or no “give” to the fish’s hard pull. Even if my rod tip is soft enough to cushion most strikes, I want the fly line to be simultaneously pulled from the reel by the fish. This added absorption of the strike shock by not holding the line can be crucial to saving your fly and the fish. Unless you are stripping or popping the line, keep your hands off the fly line. Set the drag on your reel so that there is enough resistance to the strike that it buries the hook point in the fish’s jaw, but not so much tension that line is not also pulled from the reel simultaneously to cushion the impact. No stripping, no popping, then no hands on the line! If I have stopped my troll temporarily to strip-retrieve my fly line, instead of re-casting the line to extend them a considerable distance from my watercraft, I may instead wiggle my rod tip back and forth, as I kick my tube or pontoon away from the line. So, once my retrieved fly line gets, perhaps, three rod lengths from me, I hold the grip of my rod high and the tip low, and “shake out” the line through the rod tip, releasing the line coils I had stripped in, back into the water. I have re-established my long length of line trolled behind me without having cast the line. For beginners who are not yet comfortable with fly casting --- especially the necessary gyrations and repeated false casts necessary to cast a sinking fly line --- extending the trolled line again without casting can be convenient and effective. However, it will be important to all fly anglers who aspire to be consistently effective at stillwater fishing to learn how to cast, and cast reasonably far. Rising lake fish, especially in clear, shallow water, may dictate that long casts are necessary to catch them.
From my fly fishing shop retail days, I remember a man new to fly fishing who was introduced to lake fishing by a mentor who had specialized in stillwaters for years. To protect the innocent, let’s call the newbie Biff. Biff would occasionally bring me a photo of large fish with him holding the prize. He, obviously, had become skilled at seeking out big fish in lakes and getting them to bite. One photo I recall displayed a trophy that exceeded twelve pounds. Biff definitely had some clues about effective lake fishing. A friend of mine invited Biff to join him for a day of fishing on a quality river, a guided fishing trip. When the guide set up the pair at their initial fishing spot of the day, Biff was immediately in distress. Try as he might, he could not get the fly anywhere near the fish. Because all he had never done in his years of fishing was troll, Biff had never learned how to fly cast. The only skill he possessed in getting his flies to the fish was to pull line off the reel, extending it behind his pontoon boat as he moved through the water. If lake fish demanded casting to be caught, Biff was out of luck. It was trolling, or nothing. Yes, trolling can be dirty effective, and I employ this technique often, but sometime during the typical fishing day, casting the fly will be the only way to catch fish. Don’t limit your options by being a one trick pony.
So that my hands are free to tend my rod and reel, I much prefer trolling from a float tube or small pontoon boat. Using a rowboat or a boat powered by a motor, attention must be paid to steering anything but a straight path, the exception being foot pedals that control the speed and direction of the boat. In my tube or pontoon, I have very precise control over the movement of my flies. I am able sop, start, and turn in a heartbeat. Such control translates into more effective fishing, and more fish caught. From traveling and hassle standpoints, I can easily transport several partially deflated float tubes in the back of my 4Runner. As for my 70” long hard-shell pontoon boats, I can strap two of them on my roof rack. Since no inflation of the pontoons is necessary, I can pull them off, throw them into the lake with minimal preparation and go fishing.
Besides varying the speed, direction and stripping movements of my flies, if the fish refuse to bite, other adjustments are in order. My first change will be my flies. I may change my leech imitation from black to olive, and the size from 8 to 10. As for the smaller fly I have paired with the leech, I may replace the Prince with a Hare’s Ear or a Pheasant Tail Nymph. If I have seen insects in or on the water, this could steer my fly decisions. In addition, I often use my stomach pump on the first few fish I catch, to discover what the fish have found to eat today. If there are a broad variety of organisms in the fish’s stomach, they are not likely focused on just one food item. On the other hand, if one organism in the sample predominates over all others, I will choose to imitate this, and find the closest match I have from my fly box. Even when the fishing is good, the fish may overwhelmingly bite only one of the two flies I present t them. In this case, I replace the nonproductive fly with a different color or pattern. If I have some new experimental patterns to try out, this is an excellent time to tie one on. Because the fish are obviously on the bite, let’s discover if they will eat my new creation. Every now and then, my experimental fly will catch as many fish, or more, than the pattern that has been today’s early winner. Fun. If the lake I am fishing today is “deep” --- let’s say greater than fifteen feet --- I will change to my Type III sinking line. It sinks at least twice as fast as my clear, slow sinking one. I can now get deeper faster. Besides faster sinkability, I need to have a line that is also “density compensated”. In short version, what this means is the fly line sinks in a straight line. This keeps me in direct contact with the fly so I can most easily detect a strike. Additionally, when I set the hook, the power of my lifting rod tip is immediately transferred through the line to the hook, burying the point securely in the fish. Conversely, a sinking fly line that is not density compensated assumes a “J” configuration as it descends, with the fly and leader well above the deepest portion of the fly line. As a result, the strike is not easily detected, nor is the transfer of power through the line as effective when the angler sets the hook. I can vary the depth at which I am fishing in a couple of ways as I troll. First, I can lengthen or shorten the amount of line I am trailing, making sure I always count the number of line strips I take from the reel. Secondly, the speed at which I troll can vary the depth of my flies. The slower I troll, the deeper the flies. Just as before, when the strikes come, note the line length, the trolling speed, how the flies were moving and/or being retrieved. Then, the exact formula can be duplicated, and more fish caught. Copyright © 2010 Michael Gorman Reproduction of the text or photos are allowed only by the expressed permission of the author.
|
|
Contact Information
Telephone
Postal address
EMail
Copyright © 2003
Scarlet Ibis Fly Fishing Tours Inc |
we got our day started. Such a method is a good opportunity to fish and observe
simultaneously. It was always a good strategy to watch other anglers who had
launched before us, to see where they were fishing, and discover if anyone had a
bent rod. There were usually enough anglers for us to surmise some had probably
been fishing here for several days, and, therefore, had figured out where to be
and what to use. So, we slowly trolled across the lake toward a familiar island
of reeds and did our reconnaissance. Not much going on, no whooping, and no
hollering from the anglers settled into their fishing routines. Maybe the scene
would be different once we reached the backside of the island.
Frustrated, it was time to change my flies. Having already made a cast as my
decision was made, I stripped my line as fast as any mortal can. I was in a
hurry to make the needed change, to get on with it. As I yanked my flies
through the water faster than any leech or little insect could possibly move in
the real world, I got a hard grab from one of those naughty rainbows as it
attacked my Prince Nymph. What the ____________ !
