By Ethan Hollifield
Everything in fly fishing is 100% right, and 100% wrong, 100% of the time.” I normally tell this to my clients and get met with a puzzled look as to what on earth I am talking about, but it’s true. Fly-fishing is a very fickle game in that there is always an exception to any given rule, and more often than not, the exception becomes the rule. The wild trout streams of Southern Appalachia are not static environments. The water is always changing the aspects of any given river, and learning how to adapt to different situations is a skill that I believe many anglers tend to put on the back burner.
Fly fishing, in its evolution over the past century, has become the most versatile form of angling on the planet. We’re able to essentially target every game fish species on the planet with the long rod that, just 30 years ago, would’ve been thought impossible. However, I’ve found in my experience as a guide that many anglers will, in a sense, contract tunnel vision when it comes to a particular technique or style of fly fishing, especially when it comes to fly fishing for trout in particular. I’ve met some folks who are complete dry fly purists and will snuff their nose at anything bigger than a size 12 Adams. I’ve also met some anglers who do nothing but tie monstrous streamer patterns and constantly suffer from injured rotator cuffs, casting against the banks while searching for monster brown trout. Of course, there is everyone in between, but my main point is that we often let ourselves become too comfortable fishing in the one style that we have success with, that we forget to become adaptable to different situations we might come across on a river (or wherever we’re fishing). Let’s face it: the two nymphs and an indicator rig was a great place to start on your first guided trip fly fishing, but I can promise you that you’re going to run into situations where that just doesn’t work well at all.
In order to be an accomplished angler, you have to be able to think about a given piece of water and learn the best way to fish it efficiently, depending on the situation at hand. You have to be able to read the water and think about where and what you’re going to cast at the fish, before you even make any other additional movements. Adapting your set up can oftentimes be something as entirely simple as adding weight for depth control, or even adding another fly. Often in our mountain streams, you’ll run into stretches of pocket water that, at the most, might be a foot deep, and then find yourself in a run that could be anywhere from 5-10 feet deep. I normally fish these types of streams with a dry dropper rig, so what do I do to go deeper? Cut everything off and attach a nymph rig to fish just one run? The easiest solution is to just simply add another dropper nymph to the desired depth, and fish the same set up as before but with three flies instead of two.
As I mentioned, adaptability has become a lost art in a sport that is really one of the most versatile ever conceived. If you do your part as the angler by thinking methodically and critically about your presentation, and exercise willingness to change certain aspects of it, then you will become a more, well rounded angler.
Ethan Hollifield is a guide for Southern Appalachian Anglers and works with French Broad Riverkeeper.