There is still time for streamers

I had an invitation from a friend to do one last float before he put his boat up for the season.

The weather was due to turn cloudy and cool. We were looking for a blue-winged olive mayfly hatch to bring some fish o the top, and a day of fry fly fishing to top off our season.

Before our schedules cleared, a midweek chance of rain prediction morphed into four inches of snow and a stretch of chilly – or downright cold – days to go with it. I used to be up for launching and loading a raft in those of conditions. I rejoiced in being up for anything, plunging myself into whatever challenge was at hand, laughing in the face of it and reveling in whatever I might find.

The sight of a gaggle of geese huddled on an island or a moose knocking snow off the willow shoots, stark black and moving in a landscape of still white, would cause me to rejoice at the end of the day. And there might even be a couple of fish, despite the line freezing in the guides.

But that was yesteryear. These days I'm a slave to my own need for some level of creature comfort.

So we'll wait it out. There are some warm 50-ish days in the predictions and who knows – blue-winged olives can hatch at the most oddball times, and if there are enough of them, big trout who should know better will go after them.

If the blue-wings aren't there, there's still time for streamers.

Big brown trout get territorially aggressive when their spawning time nears. They're doing that right now. And any river that has brown trout in it has some big ones, fish that are seldom caught through the middle of the season, but who are prey to their own instincts right now. Simply put, their attitude toward anything that invades their turf is more of a "Me kill!" than a "Hmm, I'll check this out."

The fish that wouldn't give your fly a look or a follow, much less a firm chomp a few weeks ago will attack it now. Not every time, and not on a sloppy cast or an unnatural retrieve, but often enough that they sometimes seem to make fools of themselves. Earlier on it works the other way: too often they make fools of us.

Any trout these days when water temperatures are dropping will seek to get out of the chill factor that holding in swift currents brings them. They'll rest and be less active, sometimes seeming to go comatose, in places that offer more shelter, a conveyer belt of food coming their way where the current will be moving at less than two feet per second.

Focus your casts on these places where the water is just ambling along. That might be toward the edge or tailout of a deep run where mama and papa brown trout are setting up a nursery, or against a log, a rock or grave shelf, a brush pile, a snag, or inside a cut bank.

Current speed and shelter – even shelter that may not be so obvious, just a bathtub-sized depression just about anywhere that would go unnoticed if you weren't really looking, can hold a surprisingly good-sized trout.

And browns aren't the only game in town. Rainbows and cutthroats may be moving slower and moving less, but they're still fattening up for winter too, and if the have enough energy to chase a slow-moving streamer, they'll often attack it.

I remember one day when my sculpin pattern was a new invention and I wanted to try it. I was at the base of a medium-fast deep run bordered by brush on the far side. The current slowed there and brought a steady wash of feed to the several bathtub-sized lies along the bank.

I knew – just knew – that there had to be some big browns toward the middle and head of that run. I didn't want to plunk the top lie first, be wrong in my guess, and spook other fish. I started at the bottom. My first cast brought an eighteen-inch cutthroat. As I worked my way up the run, letting the fly sink before starting a slow, darting retrieve, there were four more fish on the next five casts, each of them progressively bigger than the previous one, and the last one just under twenty-two inches.

All of them were cutthroats – and I was hunting browns.