Learned a New Trick Today
I was out at Cardiff today and got some action early when the skeeters were hatching but that died when the sun came out. I put a bead head Crystal Bugger on but I haven't really got the hang of nymphing yet so it wasn't working for me.
I noticed that there were quite a few baitfish right by the shore and after watching them for a bit I saw something really cool. There was a little 2 inch fish I'm pretty sure was a rainbow fry who had staked out a hole in a muskrat trough. It was defending it whenever the smaller baitfish got too close, charging and nipping at them. I started dragging my bugger up the trough with varying retrieve rates and motions and found that a certain type of motion would trigger the fish to attack and defend it's hole and others wouldn't. It was a jerky retrieve without any pattern and little direction changes fairly regularly, sort of like the baitfish.
After a while doing that I started casting out to the deeper bits of the water and used the same retrieve. Oh wow was that cool, I couldn't keep the bows off the hook. They were taking hitting the bugger hard, swallowing the thing right off, not just mouthing it like a dry. Then were even biting at the indicator all the time. Didn't catch anything bigger than 9" or so but it was a lot of fun.
I imagine to a more experienced person this seems pretty obvious but I figured I share for the other newbies. It's one thing to read about the technique in a book but if you can find a place you can put your streamer in next to the baitfish you can figure out how to make them dance just right.
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