Silent Ocelot,
I purposely waited a couple days to respond to you because I thought it would do me good to let the hackles on my neck settle down a little before replying to your admittedly antagonistic comments. A couple days ago my hackles would have been good material for tying dry flies; today I hope they’d be better for tying wet flies.
First of all, when you wrote, “Once you reach a higher level of competency in fly fishing you will learn it is far more effective (and more fun) and ditch the conventional spinners. Not trying to diss spin fishing,” I think just about anyone reading this would assume you were, or at least had been, a spinner fisherman. So when I assumed you had first-hand knowledge about fishing with spinners I don’t think this was a stretch. Now that I know you’ve never fished with spinners it makes your comments even more infuriating, and yes, you are being disingenuous when you claim you aren’t dissing spin fishing. With this said, I’m going to try to be reasonably nice so that I don’t get kicked off of this website. There are a lot of knowledgeable people on here, many more intelligent than me, and despite the fact that we fish with different rods, I’ve learned a lot from being a member here.
The purpose of me asking how many trout you’ve caught with spinners was to find out when you consider a spinner angler to be a “master,” which is how you described yourself. In a follow-up post to my original comment you said that you don’t use spinners but used Rapala’s and trout magnets. You also wrote, “Most days (in 2017) I may have caught 5 or less, so my average would definitely be in the low single digits.” I don’t know anyone who would conclude from this what you have concluded about yourself.
Of course, then I find out from you that catching fish has nothing to do with your definition of “mastery.” You wrote: “When I say mastery I am not thinking in terms of fish caught cyclic rates as there are many other factors outside of an angler’s control that dictate how well an angler will do such as weather conditions and working the appropriate areas of the creek. I am talking about mastering the use of said gear, which I did.”
To me this is a very peculiar definition. Do you think members of the USA Fly Fishing team get measured in their contests by their mastery of their fly fishing gear? I think not. To me, mastery is not only knowing how to use your fishing gear well, but also how well you “perform” with it, which I admit is relative to each individual angler and the importance they place on catching trout in their overall fishing experience for the day.
This brings me to the point of why I’m spending my time replying to you, and hopefully some other beginners and seasoned fly anglers who are reading this. Think of this as Lesson 1 of Trout Fishing 101.
You wrote: “It’s a beautiful thing to witness the spin guys walking off the stream with nothing on their stringers watching me pound a trout on almost every cast (added by FrankTroutAngler: meaning with flies). I may, being antagonistic by nature, let out a chuckle as they walk by.”
You also wrote: “Fly fishing seems to have no plateau, and just when you think you have a stream dialed in, it pulls a 180 on you and you become dumbfounded. That’s the beauty (or insanity), depending on how you look at fly fishing.”
From the first comment above, I’m guessing that you consider yourself to be a master fly angler, particularly when coupled with your other comment when you were lecturing a beginner and stated, “Once you reach a higher level of competency in fly fishing you will learn…”
The second comment above is most telling. Someone who has mastered fly fishing would keep the times when they are dumbfounded, you know, when they think they have a stream dialed in and it pulls a 180, to a minimum. My guess is that if you were fishing, being a master of fly fishing gear without realizing that trout fishing mastery includes mastery of many intangibles, and a stream “pulls a 180” on you, that you would start changing flies and maybe tactics and keep pounding the water unsuccessfully for the next hour or two. You’d walk back to your vehicle thinking, “That’s the beauty of fly fishing!” All likely without learning one thing from the experience -- ever -- because you think you’re a master and what “pulled the 180” is beyond your control.
Here’s what a master fly angler would do. They would have noticed the wet Great Blue Heron tracks on the rocks right at the point where the fishing became lousy, or maybe a wet boot track indicating that someone was ahead of them putting down the trout, or maybe some fresh Common Merganser crap on a rock, or maybe that the water temperature had dropped from 46-degrees when they started to 38-degrees now due to snow melt. Maybe there would no longer be spider webs stretched across the stream. They would then adjust for this, perhaps leaving and going to another stream or going to a different section of the same stream depending on their analysis. A master fly angler would likely be able to adjust when a stream “pulls a 180.”
The master fly angler would also weigh the potential intangibles before choosing a place to go fishing. For example, they wouldn’t arrive at Penns Creek during the Green Drake hatch minutes before the beginning of the hatch because they’d know that the odds are that all of the good pools would already have been taken by other anglers, thus impacting their fishing.
Obviously, I not a fly angler, but the same principles apply to spinner angling, perhaps even more so than with fly fishing since I’m offering trout something they never see while feeding, while a fly angler is fishing with fake bait. For example, during the evening of Tuesday, January 17th, while planning the best place to fish the next day, I focused on water temperatures. Since I’ve been recording water temperatures for over forty years, I can guess very closely what the water temperature will be on a given stream given the current weather without even going to the stream.
I knew that if I went to a local freestone mountain stream that it would be somewhat high and flowing quite chilly, likely at about 36-degrees - not the best conditions, comparatively speaking. I also knew that if went to a local limestoner the water would be much warmer and thus it would be more likely that more trout would be feeding.
The next day at daybreak I began fishing on a limestone stream. The water was 45-degrees, about a degree colder than I had guessed, but still good. The fishing was okay for winter angling but nothing special. I fished 4.00 hours and caught 22 wild brown trout. I quit when I came to the beginning of a half-mile stretch that historically doesn’t fish well. From there I went to another limestone stream and caught 36 wild brown trout in 3.75 hours, including nine that were 13” or longer.
Had I instead gone to the freestone mountain stream I likely would have caught in the single digits for the day.
See how knowing more than just your “gear” is a big part of being a master fly angler? You may want to reevaluate your definition of “mastery.”
