By Brandon Barber
On my last fishing outing, I found myself fishing a familiar stretch of river in North Carolina that I have been fortunate to have lots of previous success on. I would not necessarily say that I had fished the area a ton, but I had fished it about 8 or 10 times over the last 5 years. My past experience with this river had helped me to learn that there seemed to always be a fair number of trout holding in this one particular run that was about 30 yards long and anywhere from 2 to 5 feet deep. The very first time I encountered this piece of river was over 5 years ago, and I approached it by throwing a streamer pattern fly in search of some fish. Anytime I am on an unfamiliar stretch of river, I typically will move through rather quickly throwing streamer patterns just to locate where some fish might be holding. I can cover water fast with technique and even if I am not catching the trout I am usually getting some sort of reaction out of them that lets me know they are there. Once I have some fish located, I can switch techniques over to dead drifting flies in the current and usually catch a good number of the trout holding in that area. Dead drifting flies is a time consuming, thorough technique that is a great fish catcher, but does not cover water quickly, so I like to locate my trout first before I settle into a spot. My first time fishing this particular run produced several fish while throwing streamers, so I found out rather quickly that this was a good, fish holding run. Ever since that first day, I have always returned to this spot and found plenty of fish holding in it.
On my recent outing, I started with streamers again, just because I wanted to fish through once and catch some of the more aggressive fish that were willing to chase a meal down before switching over to drifting flies. This time however, I fished the entire run and only got 2 bites on the streamer. Not exactly lighting it up, and had me wondering if, for some reason, the fish were not holding here this time. But my past experience said that the fish were always holding in this run so I switched out my streamer for a double nymph rig and decided to give it a few minutes. Normally, if I was scouting water to spend time in drifting some flies, I might not have stopped on a run of this size if it only produced 2 hits on a streamer. However, within my first few casts drifting the nymphs, I had a hookup. I then proceeded to catch over 10 more trout in that same spot over the next half hour. It was a good thing I relied on what my experience with this run had told me, that the trout were there, even though my first pass with a streamer pattern did not necessarily confirm that. I guess the trout were just in a lazy mood that morning and wanted their meal drifting to them, so it was a good thing I trusted my knowledge of this spot gained by past trips.
Brandon Barber is the owner of RiverBlade Knife & Fly Shop in Spartanburg, South Carolina