csoult wrote:
Pretty sure
this is who you want to talk to.
Ugh.. Talk about pressure. I think you might have the wrong user id.
I'll relay two fishing stories that might help get you started.
The first is how I became converted to nightfishing for browns. I've made an annual pilgrimage to the northern tier of PA for about ten years now. The first five years, I caught mainly brookies, with the occasional brown up to 12" thrown in. In 2007, I had a large brown saunter out from under a large rock, carefully inspect my offering, and then nonchalantly saunter back to his lair. I could not entice him again, but I did think about that fish for the rest of the year. Somewhere along the line, I got the idea to try for the fish after dark, so when I went on my trip the next year, I packed a little Coleman lantern as well as my usual trusty Redington Wayfayer7 6.5' 3wt rod, some rubber crayfish, and the only larger fly I had at the time that would float high, a hopper. At about dusk, I assumed a position opposite the rock, lit my little Coleman lantern and began the waiting game. There was still enough light to see to the bottom of the area by the rock and I thought I saw a shadow move at one point. I looked closer and beyond all wildest beliefs, a large trout had come out and was just cruising in a small circle. I put on the crayfish and tossed it a number of times, but this fish wasn't interested in it. After about half an hour, I gave up and crossed the stream to the other side, to let the darkness grow a bit more. It did and my buddy I was with went to bed. I decided to try the hopper, so about 10PM, there I was with my dinky little brookie rod, tossing this little hopper in the complete dark. I don't remember how many times I cast but I remember that euphoric feeling of a solid strike, a hookset, and instant, massive resistance to my pull of the line. I flipped on the headlight immediately and somehow managed to horse in a 21" leviathan on that little rod, without breaking rod or tippet. I had to awaken my buddy from his hammock, he snapped one of only three pictures that got taken that trip, because the batteries died in my camera after he took the shot.
Lessons:
1) It's extremely helpful to locate big fish in the daytime. Some streams have a lot of water to cover but if you know that you are in the vicinity of a larger fish, you greatly improve your chances of catching it. Plus it gives you hope of actually catching something.
2) Big fish feed predominantly at night. And while I'm sure they would gladly target larger prey, something as small as size 10 hopper can draw their interest.
3) An 6-8wt rod is probably a bit more appropriate than a brookie rod
Forget about light tippets. You have no reason to hide your tippet at night. I fished with 12# monofilament last year but probably won't go much bigger because I am concerned about getting a tight enough knot with a larger diameter line.
The next year, I came back with an 8wt 9' rod, and I also unearthed the only big deer hair bug that I had tied, a deer hair mouse that I tied up while taking one of Ed Kraft's fly tying classes. That would be my goto fly for the next three years or so. I managed to retrieve it somehow from numerous snags and trees and bushes that I hooked up with at night, but decided somewhere along the line that I better have some backup flies for when the inevitable day would come. Last year, the deer hair mouse went to be with the Great Tree in the Sky and I had been experimenting with Polk's Dirty Rat, Lynch's White bellied Mouse, and Mighty Mouse patterns. However, I stumbled on an article online about a pattern called the Blair Mouse Project, that an angler had used successfully on a lake in New Zealand. And fortune smiled upon me, as one of my sources for cheap flies, Sierra Trading Post, started unloading them about a year ago.
I like this pattern for a number of reasons - it floats fairly well, composed of deer hair and foam, it has realistic leg and tail action with the rubber legs hanging out the back, and it gurgles and pops. If you're familiar with the Gurgler fly, it incorporate a lot of the elements of the foam piece of that fly into its designed. You want a fly that will push water and draw attention to itself.
I vary fishing technique a bit. Sometimes, I cast and wait a bit; then I strip the fly a number of times, sometimes just once, then three times, then twice, then wait, etc. Other times, I do a fast retrieve, hopefully to attract attention to the fact that something food like has entered the water. As an interesting aside, I was out one night spotlighting a stream, looking for fish, and a large rodent (small rat size) came swimming up the stream. Talk about realistic action and pushing the water. I would have loved to seen a brown smack that rodentia while we were watching but didn't even have the presence of mind to record the thing, even though I had my phone with me.
Outing number two that I will describe was not successful, in the sense that I caught no fish and didn't even have a strike. But the important lesson again is to find the big fish. This past Saturday, I was fishing a small freestone stream, that has wild browns. The biggest fish I've caught (before Saturday) was about 13". However, small browns have to come from big browns getting together somewhere, so in the back of my mind, I'm always waiting to find a larger fish. There is a bit of slack water at one spot, with some nice undercut roots and downed trees in the water and I usually cast there mostly out of obligation, because I've never caught anything there, nor seen anything other than massive quantity of baitfish. On the second cast, really just getting warmed up mentally to fish, I snapped to attention pretty quickly when at least an 18" brown showed up three feet from the end of my rod. I snagged on a rock, he stopped, looked warily, I wiggled loose, he started up, I snagged again, and then with me flailing around trying to get loose again, he turned tail and slunk away. I cast again, hoping to entice a strike, but did not see him. I was actually planning to goto another stream about twenty minutes away to finish out my night by night fishing for browns, but my plans changed pretty quickly after that encounter, because I had met the first criteria for where to fish - find the large fish. So after doing the small stream thing, I walked back to the car, got my big streamer rod and then walked back to a spot a little upstream from where I had the brown encounter. I was using a mouse and started casting downstream, basically trying to draw the fish out from wherever it was holding. A big obligatory caution is in order for nightfishing, as the area I was fishing in was on a very steep bank, that continued right into the stream. Someplaces, it was only three feet deep (but deep enough to go over my hip waders, as I found out earlier that evening, when I crossed to try a new approach on the brown). But other places, it was clearly much deeper. And where the bank wasn't as steep, it was mud and muck, the kind where cartoon characters spin their feet and are able to run in place on; also the same kind that in real life can cause you to loose your footing and put you in some deep drink quickly, with extreme difficultly in getting out because you're trying to climb out on the same mud that just threw you in.
Anyway, all of my casting elicited no strikes. Eventually I threw on the torch I was carrying and illuminated the water column. I was fully expecting to see a number of larger fish but I did not see a single thing except baitfish. There was about a hundred yards of deeper water from where I started, so its entirely possible that after my initial encounter with the fish, he decided to cruise on downstream.
Lessons:
1) Locate big fish.
2) I am on a hunt to try and catch a brown on a mouse each month of the year. But a mouse may not be the best fly to use. Going subsurface with a large streamer may have been a much better choice.
3) Don't rule any stream out. If there are little fish there, there has to be a source of those little fish somewhere.
A few other thoughts - it seems that some folks favor the new moon and I saw one post in this thread suggesting that already. I've caught fish during all moon phases, from bright full moon nights, where I could see the strikes ten feet in front of me, to cold starlit new moon nights where I was fishing by sound and feeling only. Additional wisdom will suggest that lights will spook browns. I wouldn't suggest it as a means to attract browns, but last year, I had two nights with multiple fish caught. One evening, I caught three fish, including one that went spastic when I threw the light on him after catching my first fish. He stopped right in front of me, I killed the light and two minutes later, I hooked him. So, I'm not suggesting going in with headlamp blazing, but I operated for a long time under the assumption that once I turned my light on (i.e. when I caught my first fish), the fishing was done. I fish a lot longer and stay up later knowing that may not be the case.
I like streams that have decent sized pools; these are beneficial for a number of reasons. They have the space to hold larger trout, they often have some slack water that you can cast to announcing that food is present, and you often get a better chance to cast without fouling your line on the backcast or forward cast. It takes a bit of getting used to casting in the dark, but its a knack you pick up and I hook grass, trees, bushes or weeds far less often than I think I should.
I suggest reading Jim Bashline's book, Night Fishing for Trout: The Final Frontier. There is also a book by Lawrence Koller called Taking Larger Trout, that has a chapter about nightfishing.
One final word - nightfishing is not something you cross off your list. You may cross off certain things, but nightfishing stays on the list
