Frustration on the Little Lehigh

[ian_brown]

My brother and I are both novice fly fishermen. On Monday we fished the Little Lehigh. At about 4:30 I started fishing to a good size trout towards the middle of the creek. Then I noticed a second trout. And a third. More and more trout kept showing up to this spot.

We took turns trying wooly buggers, al's rats, egg patterns, and one or two other patterns, with no luck.

Before we gave up I was able to count 26 trout ignoring our flies.

 

[JJZ]

Funny how certain posts remind you of a familiar situation. The same thing happened to me on big fishing crick in late January 5yrs ago. There was a mini-snow blizzard that happened that day while fishing too. Trout just seemed to gather at a particular spot, some at very close distances. The water was gin-clear, they did'nt even spook.........

 

[jayL]

Happened to me in January on the tulpehocken once.

I think it has something to do with clear cold water. The water was also very low when it happened to me.

I caught a few of them by drifting a zebra midge through the pod. To be completely honest, it reminded me alot of salmon fishing in that I don't think they were eating... I just got a lucky drift. I never saw or felt takes... it was just those creepy reaction hook sets that you get when something fires in your rod arm for no noticable reason.

After I caught a few (they didn't fight too well) I ventured down to a fast riffle. There I caught some highly agressive normal-fighting trout.

I guess the moral is, when they are being wierd, to hell with them... go get some cooperative fish.

 

[Wulff-Man]

They were looking for some hot chocolate. You guys are nuts for fishing when it's that cold. But I respect that, for some reason. :-D

 

[thedude1534]

I've actually had success fishing into large groups of trout like the ones your speaking of (thats where I cought the brown in my avatar). Everytime I've caught something in that situation its been either on a midge or micro-egg (both of which ranged from #20 - #24). I think the most difficult obstacle is finding out what they will eat in the first place. To do this, I'll go through every midge in my flybox, give it about 25 casts, and if nothing takes, move on to the next one. Once I find a midge that works, I use a tandem combo of that midge and a micro egg and can usually get one strike every 30 or so casts. Sometimes it's every 50 (sometimes never), the key is you have to have a lot of patience.

The second big obstacle is knowing when you have a strike. This is where the micro egg, and a good strike indicator come into play. Typically, these big groups of trout are in very slow, and very clear water. An egg can not only serve as a second strike indicator, but you can also see the trout take it. From my expirience, they will only take something if it floats directly infront of their face......about 10 times in a row, and it remains in their mouth for less than 1/2 a second till they spit it out. It's almost like they're saying "ehh, why not...". That being said, the trout get a long time to look at the midge/egg, so I use 7X.

If they take the midge, and you still have your eye on the egg, if you see it twitch, you got about 1/4 of a second to tighten the line, or the trout will have spit out your tiny fly.

Occasionally, you loose sight of the egg, and in that case, I have a foam wire strike indicator that I can wrap around my line. This indicator not only dips like other ones, but you can also see sudden changes in line direction which you would not otherwise be able to see using a bouey or other sort of floating indicator. Any time I see either the egg or the indicator twitch the slightest bit, I pull up, and 99.99999% of the time, it ends up being nothing, haha

I wouldn't call this a very efficient method of fishing, but you can catch them. If I spend the whole day doing this, I average about 2-3.......it requires very good reaction time and heaps of patience.

 

[Heritage-Angler]

Ian - This is going to sound strange, but you may want to take a pair of binoculars with you, and if you see this type of behavior again, get a good look at those fish. While it isn't unusual to see large groups of trout behaving like that, you may find that they were actually suckers. That is a very common occurance there this time of year for them. You'll probably see this occur often in the next few weeks. The good news is that they may be showing spawning behavior. Try drifting a sucker spawn right through the group and well past it as well. When the suckers actually do spawn, the trout really key in on the "new" food source.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying those fish were definately suckers, but this is the time to start looking for those pods...................Ed