Some trout strikes are textbook. Other times, you have to get a little creative (or lucky) with your presentation.
SHORTER!” I pull in another handful of fly line, bite my lip, and make the cast. The small black caddisfly lands 25 feet upstream, bobbles in a riffle, and streams past my wader boots untouched.
“No,” Randy Rice calls out again. My guide is watching from his drift boat, beached on a grassy bar downstream. He’s checked me twice now. “Shorter. It’s like fishing by braille. Little short casts, pop-pop-pop, feeling out the pockets and cutbanks. Cast and creep. Pull in some line. Shorter.”
Rice has guided on the Deschutes River for 33 years, but I’m still not sure about this. I pull in another few strips until there’s barely 3 feet of fly line hanging out of the guides. This is wide open water—a famed, iconic river—and I arrived ready to give it all I’ve got. Now I’m plopping flies 12 feet away. Might as well be using a cane pole.
Right now, Rice figures these fish want to be spoon-fed. So I shovel them caddis flies like I used to stuff Cheerios in my kids’ cheeks—one at a time, short range, as quickly as I can and as many as it takes to make them happy. In the next 20 feet of grassy bank, I hook five of the Deschutes’s famous redside rainbows. The fish blow up in my face, crashing the flies close, and with so little line to absorb the fight’s shock, it’s all I can do to get them to hand. That short-range, fast-draw cast is nailing it. It never occurs to me to miss a double-haul, river-crossing distance cast.
WATCH AND LEARN
Denne historien er fra April 2017-utgaven av Field & Stream.
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Denne historien er fra April 2017-utgaven av Field & Stream.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
Allerede abonnent? Logg på
LIVING THE DREAM
After the author arrives in Maine’s fabled North Woods with a moose tag in his pocket, an adventure he’s been wanting to take his entire hunting life, reality sets in, and he learns a valuable lesson: Be careful what you wish for
Get the Drift
How to make an accurate windage call under pressure
First Sit
An icebreaker outing in a pristine spot produces the rut hunt of a lifetime
A Local Haunt
The author finds a sense of place in an overlooked creek, close to home
A Hop and a Pump
Jump-shooting rabbits with classic upland guns is about as good a time as you can have in the outdoors
Welcome TO camp
Is there any place better than a good hunting camp? It has everything: great food, games and pranks, and of course, hunting. Shoot, we don’t even mind going to camp for grueling work days in the summer. Here, our contributors share their favorite stories, traditions, and lessons learned from camps they’ve shared. So come on in and join us. The door’s open.
THE DEERSLAYERS
Before you even claim a bunk, you need to eyeball the hardware your buddies have brought. In the process, you’ll see that the guns at deer camp are changing. What was walnut and blued steel may now be Kevlar and carbon fiber. The 10 rifles featured here aren’t your father’s deer guns. They’re today’s new camp classics
THE JOURNEY TO PIKE'S PEAK
Last summer, the author and three friends ventured off the grid to a remote fish camp in Canada. They hoped for great fishing, but what they experienced was truly something else
Stage Directions
When early-season whitetails vanish from open feeding areas, follow this woods-edge ambush plan
Rookie Season
A pup’s first year, from preseason training to fall’s big show
