(This fat 18 inch "nerve-racking" surface feeding brownie gave me selectivity presentation fits for two consecutive days- CASE SOLVED AND CLOSED:yesterday afternoon 5:37 PM- who's next!)
In my last birthday Facebook post I told you about the two frustrating hours I had in a place on the Muskegon last Friday called "the House of Pain". It's a "love/hate " relationship place I named and talk about in both my Selectivity and Nexus books. Its a mile long broad/spring creek-like section of flats on the river with lots of vegetation and shallow runs just like a giant Henry's Fork. Here the trout have plenty of mileage to be ultra-selective/reflective like they can be on the flats of the Delaware in the Catskills or Missouri .
Since the early 90's when I first moved to Michigan, these flats have been a source of much anguish that have resulted in more perfect fly designs and improved tail water dry fly techniques. ( my late friend Carl Richards spent almost every evening during the super complicated caddis hatches here of July through September stalking, photographing and scrolling notes and sketches on caddis hatches , which resulted into his master work " Super Caddis Hatches"- Amato Books. During that processs, I once found him asleep in his car one morning totally covered in caddis sketches as I started my guide trip and banged on the window to see if he was still alive!-such was his passion-God bless his soul!)
( The first of two nice brownies yesterday-a 14 incher that reconfirmed text book presentation templates)
So to say I am one that will relish and love the frustrating refusals and conundrum of trout flipping you the bird!,, as they scoff at your dry fly is an understatement and demented confessional for the underlying reason why I wrote Selectivity!- if it was easy like bass fishing I probably would take up golf and wouldn't go to the ends of the earth to chase the last trutta swimming .
So back to last Friday, the two hours of the hatch was heavy with hundreds of early black stone fly females ova-positing on the surface and swarms of bazillion clusters of black midges . The half dozen or so nice browns I scouted and stalked totally refused ( some of the refusals were slashing surface bursts at the last minute when I lifted to set the hook and nothing was there!)the hundred plus presentation of my CDC stone I threw at them ( all perfect drag free/long drifts and the same pattern that caught the 20 incher there a few days earlier. I also noticed midge clusters being gulped ( occasionally but far less frequently than the desired big stonefly meaty) between larger stone fly confirmed " eats" while I sat and observed.
The water I was fishing was at least 5 feet deep, moving fast past a large fallen tree sweeper which created a 15 yard long calm back eddy where the browns would take up their daily afternoon feeding stations- each was fish was spatial niche separated in perfect trutta dominance fashion ( niches are discussed in detail in my Nexus book) I anchored my jet as close as possible, since the faster water swept my fly line quickly from the placid water that the fish fed in. So to say I was kneeling in my jet/drift boat was accurate- no standing casting!, and long 10 minute pauses between casting sessions to give the fish a chance to feed in regular intervals
So!...Deja Vu crept in yesterday reminding me of Friday and quickly set in after a half hour of refusals as I watched stonefly after stone get gulped by the browns...something is really wrong here. I have a 18 foot leader, with 4 feet of 4x, the same deadly CDC stone I had that caught the 20 inch brown there- same set up!-wtf! My casts were perfect puddle casts with upstream mending giving my dry a long drag free float - as I'm pulling my gray hair out in frustration as I watched one adult after another get gulped and mine refused. THAT'S IT!..I'm going to change something.
One of the biggest obstacles to " thinking outside the box" is being older and confident in what you are throwing and being a little advanced in the old " knows enough to be dangerous" category- knowledge is not always liberating my friends, especially if a 20 inch brown loved the same set up I was throwing. In my stodgy author stubbornness I saw nothing wrong with my flies or presentation until I took a serious look at them, with a pragmatic " Selectivity-step-by-step" unbiased approach.
First thing was to look at conditions. It was pure blue sky sunshine like the day the big brown took the fly, but the water has dropped considerably with less CFS flow and cleared up substantially -check 1!. There were just as many naturals on the surface so hatch intensity was the same -check 2. Since I was using 4x in the heavier flows, I did the customary thing to do, drop down in size and went to 5x -check 3. And to triple insure that what I was doing had no 'unseen drag", I lengthened tippet from 4 feet to 7 feet-check 4. But checkpoint 5-that!, was the age old template that never changes- fly size-check 5 was as the ultimate " THAT'S A BINGO", as Col. Hans Landa ( Christoph Waltz in Inglorious Bastards) proclaimed enthusiastically.
( The one on the right was the new lethal killer, the left was the old one one I clung to, and rightfully so by the brown I caught on it)
Looking at both flies , to the untrained eye they look pretty much the same. But obviously they weren't to the eye of these extremely selective Muskegon browns that were were refusing the one on the left for hours.In my Selectivity book I talk about the "4 SYSTEMS GO" approach to a selective/reflective view of a dry from below the surface. The laws of refraction enter into the first law, as the trout saw the bulky wings triangular and horizontal, rather than the true look of vertical drumming wings on the right. The left stone was on a true #12 wide-gap dry fly hook, with a very thick clump of dark dun CDC that were stiff and tent-like in from below silhouette ( what the browns were seeing). So I changed to the one on the right ( go smaller fly template of traditional selectivity laws) It was on a Daiichi 1270 curved hook -#16, and used light dun "spiked and sparser" CDC. The thought was that the light dun would transmit the vertical wing fluttering better that a a flat darker splayed v-shaped wing profile like a caddis for instance . Using Lochsa ( Loon) CDC fly floatant to spike the wings up even more, the rest ladies and gentlemen is now a glorious selectivity history and lesson learned.
3RD CAST! ...a nice fat 14 incher slammed it !...( one of the ones that was giving me the finger for over 3 hours. Landed it!...5 th cast later, the fat 18 incher slammed it and went ballistic in the frozen waters.
(This!, is the PERFECT TIE)
Day over. I won. Life is good. Victory is sweet. Never give up. "always expand your mind". Ignorance = same as too much knowledge and being stodgy can be your biggest detriments
CASE CLOSED
Matt Supinski
9:20 AM
Matthew Supinski's Gray Drake/Selectivity/Nexus Blog
Posted in:
