Ten top tips for a successful trout fishing season.

Peter Langlands

1.Many of our rivers have low numbers of trout and are not suited to the beginner angler. Find out locally about a river that has moderate numbers of small to average sized fish and spend some time building up your confidence there. You need to get a good number of strikes to improve this “reflex skill”.

2.Try using black dry flies, or dull coloured dries and avoid using flies with bright colours or white on them, as when the water has been fished through trout, especially browns, shy away from bright colours. The same can also be said of nymphs. Keep them dull and naturally coloured, especially when targeting larger browns.

3.Keep your clothing naturally coloured. In particular avoid white coloured hats and bright coloured clothing. Also avoid using your hands to point out a trout, as the sudden white flash of your hands will scare the fish. For this reason I like to wear a pair of dull green fingerless gloves. Keep movements to the absolute minimum when stream side.

4. Following on, often the most unnecessary movement occurs when people reach towards the leader, to pull the end of the fly line through the rings. This action causes a lot of disturbance and movement, often scaring trout. Therefore it is important to remove loop connections, and instead have a slim-lined knot connection that will slide through the rings of the rod, and allows the leader to be cast out, rather than manually pulled out. The unnecessary movement of your hands, and the rod, when pulling the fly line through will often spook trout on smaller rivers.

5. Make a point of placing a collar of soft-hackle on your flies. The feather will move naturally in the water imitating the legs and wing case (of emerging insects) and is often a trigger causing trout to take the fly.

6. Often when blind fishing on rivers it pays to cover the water and not spend too long in one spot. Often the first few casts give you the best chances of catching a trout. After the initial casts the trout become spooked and are less likely to take a fly. So move on to “fresh” water.

7. Often foam lines are good markers for the feeding lanes that trout have in the river, so concentrate on these locations to both spot trout, and also to blind fish your flies through. Often crippled emergers and other insects, such as willow grubs, will be concentrated in the foam lines.

8. When nymphing many anglers miss catching fish through simply not striking quick enough. My saying is when it comes to nymphing- “is to hesitate, is to be too late”. After a while you will almost strike on instinct. You often don’t have that much to lose by being “trigger happy”, compared to those fish you will miss through a delayed strike response.

9. Also don’t rely on your indicator to register when a trout has taken your nymph. Often trout will swim downstream, with the drifting nymph, so the indicator will not move, when the trout takes. If you see the trout’s white mouth flash, or a sudden turn, then strike.

10.Don’t be hesitant about changing the depths of your nymphs. Often it pays to set the nymphs to drift just above the bottom. An added advantage of constantly retying your line is that the knots stay fresh. It is important to re-tie on your beadhead nymph after each fish, as often the knot will become worn, either through contact with the stones, or the trout’s mouth.