Fall streamers: the season for the slow retrieve

When the day temps drop I don't feel like moving around too fast. My favorite winter sport, if you can call it that, is sitting indoors where it's warm and cozy and tying flies.

So it's easy for me to sympathize with how a trout feels when it gets cold. They get sluggish and don't move around much as the water temps drop.

A trout hanging under the shade of a midsummer foam line will break ranks to chase a minnow several feet in order to eat it.

One such day I watched Chris Rockhold throw a sculpin pattern at the narrow band of water pillowed against a log. We were drifting the raft through the swift riffle beside the log - water that was too swift to hold a trout. He began his retrieve when the fast current grabbed his line. Chris stripped his fly down and across the riffle. I watched a big underwater form close on Chris' fly for several seconds before he felt the jolt.

A brown trout that turned out to be well over 20 inches long chased the sculpin out of his lie for about 12 feet and ate it - or so the fish thought. Chris, from his angle against the sun in the rear boat seat, never saw the trout close the distance on his fly.

That scene would never repeat itself in the weather we're having now. When the water temperature drops, especially after a freezing night or a stormy day that drives water temperature suddenly downward, trout go all-of-a-sudden dormant. They gradually resume some activity, usually not much of it but some, as the water temps stabilize, maybe dropping only in small increments daily. They'll be most active during the warmest parts of the day, and although their whole metabolism gets slowed down as the temperatures drop, they still have to eat.

I've learned over the years, much of it the hard way, to reduce my retrieve speed as the water temperature drops. The colder it gets, the slower the trout move, the slower I move my fly, and they'll travel less distance to chase down a meal. The trout that chased Chris' streamer 12 feet on a warm summer day might only move 12 inches to take it this time of year. And then, the trout wouldn't be likely to move very fast.

When he was Chief of Staff at our local hospital I had the privilege of fishing with Dr. Marshall White on the days he finished a surgery. I'd meet him in the physician's lounge where I was his regular guest, we'd grab his gear from his locker and head for my truck. The best place for him to decompress after a nerve-taxing surgery was the river.

I remember an afternoon when the air and water were both blistering cold. We arrived at the long, slow run we agreed beforehand we would fish. I knew the run held some big trout and I went after them with a streamer. Marshall fished a small nymph on a dead drift.

He caught fish, I didn't. The difference, we figured later, was that Marshall was combing the water, putting his fly where a fish didn't have to do more than open its mouth to eat it.

The biggest trout I've landed in 40-odd years of fishing in Montana came on practically no retrieve at all - just a little jerk on the line every two feet. I sensed where the fish might be holding, put the fly there on a drift that had the line pretty close to straight instead of bellying downstream when I started my pattern of slow jerks.

To do that required what anglers call an aerial mend, which consists of firing the fly toward a target, and painting a pattern with the rod tip of where I wanted the line to land. In this case I wanted the line to form a bow upstream so it would be relatively straight between me and the fly when I anticipated - make that hoped for - the hit.

It came, and about 10 minutes later I landed a brown trout that would have measured over two feet long.

This time of year I'm convinced that a faster, typical Wooly Bugger retrieve wouldn't have worked. It's less about triggering the predator instinct than hitting them in the face with a slow-moving easy meal.