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August 1954; Windsor, Connecticut


My problem was that I would get locked into certain methods. Days would become dry fly days or wet fly days or nymph days. This was all right on Mill Brook, where I knew the water so well. I could skip to the best dry fly pools or the best nymph riffles. Knowing the water and the hatches meant everything.

On streams where I didn't know the water so well getting caught in a rut with one type of fly cost me trout. This never seemed truer than when I started fishing the Farmington River. No stream baffled me like this one. I'd have ten bad days for every good one. The good ones kept me coming back. My fifth year of fly fishing -- at the age of 14 years old -- was the year I really had to learn how to master new waters.

What's the greatest secret of all in fly fishing? Is it knowing how to present the fly? Is it knowing how to pick the right fly? No to all of those. The greatest secret for catching fish is knowing your water. As an angler you can develop successful habits on a home stream just by fishing it day after day and season after season. That's what happened on Mill Brook. I didn't know why I was catching fish, but from past experience I knew what was supposed to work.

To catch fish on strange rivers you have to know the why. You have to puzzle out a situation and pick the right fly and the right presentation. The more techniques you have in your bag of tricks the better the chance you have of catching trout. You just had to know when to use them.

I was lucky in one way. I did have a lot of techniques in my repertoire. By the time I was fourteen I knew how to fish wet flies, dry flies, and nymphs. I even knew how to fish nymphs both deep and shallow. My problem was that I did tend to get in those ruts, and I would fish one method all day long.



It was a splendid May day on the Satan's Kingdom stretch of the Farmington River. I got to the river at 7 o'clock in the morning. Nothing was happening and I started fishing nymphs deep in the riffles. For two hours the fishing was spectacular. I caught six trout. Then suddenly the nymph fishing went dead. A hatch started and fish started rising. Even I was smart enough to switch to dry flies when trout were rising. I matched the natural as best as possible and started catching trout again. The hatch lasted most of the morning and I caught seven more trout. After the hatch nothing worked through the afternoon -- not nymphs, not wet flies, not dry flies. But then early in the evening I put on my classic wet flies and started catching fish again. I finished off the day with four more trout. It had been my greatest day ever on the Farmington River.

I went home and felt good but I didn't feel totally great. I kept thinking about those blank hours in the afternoon. Would anything have worked? I hadn't tried terrestrial dry flies. I hadn't tried streamers, a type of fly I had never caught a trout on in all my fishing. I hadn't experimented enough with different sizes and colors of nymphs. It had been a good day, even a great day, but not a perfect day.

I still had bad days on the Farmington River, but I was fishing it more and more and building up that wealth of experience. It was becoming a home river. Slowly but surely I was becoming more consistent on it. It was a big river with a lot of moods, much more difficult to puzzle out than Mill Brook, and it was making me a better, all-around fly fisherman.

I developed fishing patterns on the Farmington based on the "moods" of the trout. If they were not actively feeding, I used a deep nymph. If they weren't actively feeding but willing to move for the fly, I used the classic active wet fly. If they were rising, I used the dry fly. The question for me was if what worked on the Farmington would work on other rivers.

Did I ever use a streamer? Not for trout, but I did use streamers for bass. So I knew how to fish them. The problem was that most of the trout I was catching weren't all that large. Very few were over 12 inches. Very few were big enough to take streamers. At least not the streamers I was using for bass. And the way I was fishing for bass with streamers was the wrong way to fish for trout with streamers.

It was on a trip to the Beaverkill River in New York that I became a streamer fisherman. It was here that I caught my first trout on a streamer. It was here that I learned how to fish streamers for trout. It was a beautiful day in late June. The stream baffled me completely until I tried a small Muddler Minnow. Then I started getting slashing strikes on this fly fished near the surface. Unfortunately, the trout seemed to miss the fly on every strike. I was fishing the Muddler exactly the way I would for bass -- a lot of action with the rod to make the fly zig and zag through the water. That worked for bass, but bass can maneuver quickly. They're compact, and can turn and chase down a zig zagging fly. A trout is a more streamlined fish. It didn't take me long to realize that they were missing the fly because I was putting too much action on it.

I started fishing my streamer with no action, letting it cut through the water in a smooth line. Suddenly, I started getting hook-ups. The same fish that refused all other types of flies were willing to chase minnow imitations. I landed four trout on the Muddler, the largest a 16 inch brown. The action on streamers lasted until evening when the caddisflies started bouncing around the river.

Where do streamers fit into the "mood" theory? I started using smaller streamers on my home waters, even on Mill Brook. On the Farmington River I started catching larger trout on streamers. Streamers also worked during those dead times when nothing else would work. They triggered some sort of aggressive instinct, some kill reflex, in trout. A trout would attack a streamer even if he wasn't feeding. The trick was to get the fly at eye level. If the fish were more aggressive, and really after minnows, they would chase a fly higher up in the water column.



There was one trip where all my methods worked to perfection. In Arkansas the White River was dammed up and changed from a bass stream into trout water. Harry Ramsey and I went down there to fish it. Harry started off the first day nymph fishing. Surprisingly, during the morning hours my two-fly rig of classic wet flies, a combination of a Leadwing Coachman and a Scarlet Ibis, outfished Harry's nymphs. Around noon Harry started catching more fish than me on his nymphs, so I switched to a Hare's Ear and fished it dead drift and started catching trout on it. When a small hatch of mayflies started we both switched to dry flies and caught a lot of small fish. Finally, I put on a streamer, a much larger one than usual, and caught my biggest trout, including a 20 inch rainbow.

All week on the White River all my methods worked, but each of them seemed to have their time. Harry Ramsey fished magnificently, and as usual caught many more trout than I did. His skill with a nymph was uncanny, and when we both fished nymphs he outfished me three to one. The only time I did better than Harry was when the trout seemed to prefer the classic, active wet fly.

When was the wet fly moment? Anything could catch some fish during prime wet fly times. Trout just seemed willing to move and feed. They would take a well presented nymph, or even rise to an attractor dry fly, but the wet fly caught more fish. Why? The wet flies covered more water. I would cast them across stream, and mend, mend, mend, letting them swing slowly across the current lanes. When the fish were really active, really ready to attack anything moving in front of them without hesitation, the moving wet fly was an irresistible target.

I was also becoming a very good dry fly fisherman. My casting style was sloppy enough so that there was a lot of slack in my leader. I would use a single haul when I struck to take the slack out to set the hook. All that slack gave me beautiful, drag free floats. When we both fished dry flies, Harry Ramsey caught more trout than I did, but not a lot more.

When we fished streamers on that trip to the White River I just seemed to be lucky. I didn't catch more fish on streamers than Harry, but I always seemed to catch the biggest fish. On the third day I caught a 23 inch rainbow, the biggest fish of the trip, on a #8 Mickey Finn. Overall, a Muddler fished deep was the best streamer on the trip.



After the trip to the White River I came back home to my home stream, Mill Brook. I was past my days of fishing in a rut. No longer could I fish a nymph all day or a dry fly all day. Now I had to experiment and learn the best fly type for each moment. Since I fished Mill Brook at least forty times each season, I would quickly build up a body of experience.

A lot of the water on Mill Brook was fly specific. There was one pool, the Blow Down Pool, where nymphs always seemed to work. Trout hung down among the tree limbs where two logs crossed on this pool, and if I could get a good dead drift with my nymphs under the logs I was pretty much assured of a strike. Another pool, the Meadow Pool, was great for ant patterns fished dry during the summer. Beetles or grasshoppers probably would have worked here too. The deep riffles seemed the best spots for a slow swinging pair of wet flies.

I found out something about streamers on Mill Brook. I had to use micro-streamers, size 12 or smaller patterns. And there was one time when streamers always seemed to work. During the late summer we would occasionally get afternoon thunderstorms. After those thunderstorms those trout would really seem to come alive, hammering any streamer swung through the deeper holes.

I knew I had become an all around fly fisherman -- at least on Mill Brook -- one day when Harry Ramsey was telling everybody at the Windsor Rod & Gun Club meeting, "The reason he's a good fisherman is that he's controlling the stream, the stream isn't controlling him."

Harry was so stingy with compliments that this was something that I cherished forever.