Fly Fishing Tips

Sight

Oh yes, trout can see.  As has already been mentioned, fish can detect you without seeing you, yet most fisherman just concentrate on making sure the fish can't see them.  Sight is important to the trout.  Before it takes food into it's mouth, it must see it.  However, the water really limits a trouts vision.  In fact, although trout can detect movement from far away, they cannot distinguish or identify the movement.  At close range is where a trouts vision is pretty amazing.  Within fractions of an inch the trout can see quite well and it is within this distance that it's judgement, based on color and profile, leads to many refusals.

Trout also have a visual window.  It is in this window that a trout perceives all of it's food in the water or on the surface.  This window is conical, extending from the eye of the trout to the surface and beyond.  The cone gets larger the farther from the trout it is.  Therefore, the deeper the trout is holding, the greater its visual window.  Only when something enters this visual cone can a fish actually distinguish and inspect it.  For this reason a drag free drift and fly placement are critical.   It would be a mistake to cast directly to the spot where you might expect or know a fish to be holding.  This innocent action with the best of intentions will often alert the trout of your presence, or at least make it wary.  The idea is to have your fly enter that visual window like the natural.  In other words, when fly fishing, cast the fly upstream and outside the window of the trout so that it enters the window like any other natural.    

Keep in mind, that window is greater above the surface of the water due to refraction, therefore keeping a low profile is often imperative.  Often times casting from the knees is required to keep you out of the fish's line of sight.

Touch and Taste

There is much less research on these senses, but keep in mind trout will spit out our flies.  I don't know if they taste bad or if they feel bad, but they certainly are wrong.  I also believe that taste and feel contribute to how long it takes for the fish to spit them out.  Unfortunately, there isn't much control on our end.  If we figured out what tasted right at the expense of what looked right, I don't think that would help at all.  Like most things in life, timing is everything, so try and set the hook before the fly gets spat out.  How?  Practice. 

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