Some say that if you do not learn something
new every day, you should pinch your self because you could be
dead.
I reckon this adage has got to be very true in the
field of trout fishing. If ever you think you have got it sussed
trout will soon show you how wrong you are.
In my case I am constantly made aware of the vast
extent of my fishing ignorance. Often a couple of minutes fishing
with good fishermen, guides, or just another angler on the bank
will take a mere a couple of minutes to show me something new
that has eluded me for over fifty years.
A case in point.
A couple of weeks ago I was fishing the Hatepe rip (where the river enters
the lake) down at Lake Taupo as the sun began its last hour’s rush
towards the horizon. I was in the company of three other anglers.
I fished the left-hand side of the rip using a Booby fly off a
fast sinking shooting head. Two blokes were in the middle of the
rip fishing sinking lines to traditional type flies, Rabbits and
Red Setters.
But it was the bloke fishing the right hand side
of the rip that caught my interest. He was using two Glo-Bugs
on a 3-metre trace, fished below an indicator, with a floating
line.
My first thought – patronising old fart that
I can be – was that he was a duffer who did not know what
he was doing. He would roll cast out his nymphs, only 5 or six
metres in front of him, puddling his line in a series of curves
between him and the indicator. Then as the slight current out
there at the side of the rip picked up his line he regularly flicked
more line into the water in front of him.
The indicator revealed the slow progress of the
Glo-Bugs as they meandered out in the swirling current. Once all
the fly line was out in the current he manouvered his line to the very edge of the rip
and very slowly twitched the line back towards him.
For about a half-hour all four of us engaged in
the usual rip ritual of casting and retrieving, each silently
saying to ourselves that the fish would come on as dusk descended.
For my part I was very confident that if my Booby was not getting
hit then the fish were not about – such is my faith in the
fly.
I was idly watching the indicator of the man on
the right as it drifted away, when I saw it dip below the surface.
The angler immediately – and this is important – swung
the rod tip in an arc across and just above the surface of the
water, at the same time using his line hand to pull on the line.
The fish boiled on the surface and then raced off
across the bottom away from the rip. Once the angler got the loose
coils of line on the reel he began the walk back to the beach
where he landed a lovely six-pound hen.
The two in the middle of the rip declared this feat
to be ‘beginners luck’, but I was by now less sure that
was the case. My doubt was reinforced over the next hour.
This fish signalled the pre-dark activity and over
the hour I caught a couple of fish, the guys in the middle of
the rip caught one between them, and the ‘duffer’ on
the right caught another two.
"There’s a lesson in here somewhere methinks,"
I thought as I wandered back towards the beach heading for a bite
to eat before I made another foray that night.
Later that night I wandered back down to the rip.
A three-quarter moon mostly screened by a thin cloud cover made
it dark enough to fish but not too dark to see what was going
on around me.
As I wandered down the road to the river mouth the
nymph fisherman joined me. He was still rigged up with a floating
line and an indicator. But he had changed flies. Now he had on
at the top a size twelve gold-bead nymph with a couple of turns
of lumo as a body and a little tuft of black marabou as a tail.
Below this was a size twelve hook, no bead, two turns of lumo
as a body and again a tuft of black marabou as a tail.
I had on a black-eyed Booby, size ten hook with
a couple of turns of lumo as a body and a small tuft of black
marabou as a tail. At night I would normally back this fly against
all others. It was going to be interesting to see what happened.
We were the only two out that night – me to
the left of the rip – fishing the current edge, he to the
right of the rip fishing just off the edge of the current.
This time the nymph angler changed tactics. Instead
of the short cast followed by the outward drift he cast way out
– and I mean way out. For a ‘duffer’ he cast a
mean line, he must have been giving close to the whole fly line
an airing. He gave the nymphs a good time to sink and then began
a very slow two or three-inch twitching retrieve. Every now and
then he would pause the retrieve to give the nymphs time to re-sink.
I noticed that this time he maintained a tight line to the nymphs.
Over the next hour and a half or so hours we both
caught and released four fish, and driven away by the cold we
both walked and talked out together.
Seemed the nymph fishermen had not seen his technique
used somewhere else, it was just something he decided to give
a go. He reasoned that if during the day Glo-Bugs were used in
rivers and successfully caught fish surely they would work in
the ‘extension’ of the river as it flowed into the lake.
His logic on the evidence of earlier in the day was hard to beat.
But night fishing, that was a different thing entirely.
Both of us had used small luminescent flies when
fishing at night, regardless of the line we were using. Mostly
we had used floating lines off the main rip, with something dark
to sink the leader, and small (ten or twelve) fly made of just
a few turns of lumo as a body. I had taken this small fly theme
and used it on the black Booby described earlier.
He had taken his daytime Glo-Bug theme and adapted
it to night fishing.
Both of us agreed that in essence, at night our
techniques achieved much the same thing. The slow twitching retrieve
of the Booby caused the fly to sink to the bottom, and then bob
up. His twitching retrieve using the indicator as a float caused
his flies to dart up during the pull, and fall back down during
the pause. Because he could not see the indicator at night he
fished with a tight line as the hook needed to be set by touch
not sight.
It is the daytime technique that intrigues me most.
But with the caveat that unless the hook set is done properly
it is hard to get fish to stick. Because the line is drifting
away from you, and you must put slack in the system to achieve
a good drift of the Glo-Bugs, there is a lot of slack in the system
when it come to set the hook.
This is why it is so important to set the hook by
sweeping the rod in an arc with the rod tip close to the water.
This tends to pull the line against the ‘grip’ of the
water, thus moving the end of the line where the hook is. If you
strike by lifting the rod tip into the air all will achieve is
to lift some slack off the water, and not move the end of the
line, and hence the hook.
I believe this technique has a lot to offer, and
I will be giving it a solid testing over the coming months.
Postscript:
I can now report than in the 3 or 4 years since I wrote this story, I have
‘nymphed the rip’ on many occasions, and each time with success. But there are a couple
of caveats:
It is best used when the lake is calm, any wind will blow the line around
and it becomes very difficult to see the indicator, especially if you are looking into
the setting sun.
I have found the best retreive to be a good 40 – 50cm (2′) slow pull, then
let the line go slack and drop back half the pulled line. If I get a touch but no hook-up
I lift the rod tip up to vertical, then drop the tip to water level allowing the nymph
to sink again. I get hits on the lift and the drop.
The hits on the lift are quite easy to pick up, but hits on the drop are
are virtually impossible to feel – you really need to concentrate very hard on the indicator.