Where a trout wants to be and why
Okay. Last time we talked about seams and riffles and slow spots, the shapes water makes. This time we're putting a fish into that picture, because shapes are nice but you're not out there for the shapes.
Here's the thing about a trout. It is lazy and it is scared, both at once, all the time. Every single spot it picks to hold in has to answer two questions for that fish: how much energy does it cost me to sit here, and how likely am I to get eaten while I do. That's it. That's the whole secret. If you can look at a piece of water and ask those same two questions, you're most of the way to reading it like someone who's done this a while.
Low energy cost
A trout doesn't want to fight the current all day. It's not lifting weights for fun. So it looks for a place where it can hang out in slow or slack water, but close enough to the fast water that food keeps drifting by. That's why we talked about seams last time, the line where fast and slow water meet. A trout will tuck right on the slow side of that seam and just tip out into the fast lane to grab a bug, then tip back. Barely moving. Getting fed for free.
Same idea behind a rock. Not on top of the rock, behind it, or sometimes right in front of it in that little cushion of slack water the current builds up. Either spot, the rock's doing the work of breaking the current and the fish just parks in the calm pocket.
Low risk of getting eaten
This is the part beginners forget. A fish sitting in bright, shallow, flat water is a fish standing in a spotlight for every heron and osprey and fisherman in the canyon. So even a spot with great food isn't going to hold fish if it's totally exposed. Trout want some kind of cover. Depth is cover, a riffle breaking up the surface is cover, a shady bank is cover, a submerged log or a boulder is cover. I feel like people picture trout sitting out in open, pretty water because that's what looks good in photos, and then they wonder why nothing bites.
So put those two questions together and you get the good spots: the edge of the fast water, next to something that breaks the current, with enough depth or shade or broken surface that the fish doesn't feel like it's on display. That's basically the whole map.
A way to practice this without getting in the river
You can do a version of this at home, and I actually want you to, because it's easier to see the pattern when nothing's moving fast and nobody's getting their feet wet.
- Fill your kitchen sink or a big tub with water.
- Set a rock or a coffee mug in the middle of it.
- Turn on the faucet at a steady trickle, off to one side, so you get a little current moving past the object.
- Watch where the water slows down. Right behind the mug there's a calm little pocket. There's usually a thin calm seam along the side too, where the fast water sliding past meets the slower water that got deflected around the object.
Those calm spots are where the trout would be sitting if this were a real river. It's a dumb little exercise and it works. I did it with a spoon in a mixing bowl the first year I taught this class and felt kind of silly, and then went up the Provo the next weekend and started catching fish behind rocks I would've walked right past before.
An opinion, since we're here
I'll say the thing I always say: reading water beats fancy gear every time. I have watched a guy in brand-new waders with a rod that cost more than my first car cast beautifully into water that had nothing in it, over and over, for an hour, while a kid in tennis shoes ten feet upstream pulled two fish out from behind a rock the size of a soccer ball. The kid wasn't casting well. He just knew where to put the fly. That's the whole game.
Which brings me to Pamela. I taught her the clinch knot a few classes back and she picked it up faster than I ever did, which I told her, out loud, in front of everyone, because it was true and she deserved to hear it. Then I spent about a week feeling a little competitive about my own student outfishing my learning curve, which is a ridiculous thing for a grown man to feel and I'm only telling you because it's true. Anyway. Pamela's good with a knot. You will be too. What actually decides whether you catch anything is whether you're putting that knot, and that fly, in a spot a trout would actually choose to be.
Before next time: try the sink or tub thing once, even for two minutes, and next class I want to hear where you saw the calm spots form.