Fly Fishing Techniques

[Traditionalist]

You're right. It is now starting to sound like pish Do we really need to know all this just to go fishing?

Definitely not, but it might help, it can't hurt, and it's interesting.  One reason I more or less gave up trying to look at things from the trout side, with regard to vision etc etc. and concentrated instead on prey behaviour, was the complexity and unknowns regarding trout perception.  Even if one actually discovered how they perceive things, would it help?  I doubt it. What is important is what they actually do. Trying to make my flies look and behave more like the prey they imitate has most certainly improved my fishing.  I have caught a lot more fish as a result of it, and it has also made some things much more interesting.  The concept is readily understandable, it is not too difficult to observe prey and trout behaviour, and it works!

TL
MC

[Traditionalist]

some time ago i read a US article on wild rainbow trout behaviour, one of the bits that struck me was how fish feel/hear/sense holistically through tiny receptors all along either side of their lateral line, they can apparently feel, sense and react to the eqivalent of a football being dropped at the other end of a football pitch, they have of course to then decide if this means danger amongst a massive amount of sensory input but it makes you think, most times they must know your there long before they see you,

that stuff transformed my fishing pretty dramatically, i'd put it way beyond fly choice or other disconnected human musings on technique, maybe because techniques work best when you understand why they work.

Agreed, with some reservations.  I would assume that the trout sensory apparatus filters the input and the fish only really reacts to certain things, it can not react to everything because underwater in a river there is a constant cacophony of sound. Water transmits sound much better than air. You can hear/sense it yourself if you go underwater, and doubtless with far less precision than the trout.

A lot of people think they are being stealthy when they are not. Keeping out of sight is only part of it.

I do agree that it is far more important than many seem to realise.  As to being "more important" than fly-choice, I don't agree with that, but the best fly-choice is not going to do you any good if you spook the fish.  You need a lot of things to come together if you want to improve your fishing.

TL
MC

[haresear]

i think stealth is working away knowing they know you are there, but appearing benign, a gamekeeper told me that, he suggested wading gently amongst fish then waiting 10/15 mins, i tried it, smoked 2 fags and waited and they did, they came so close i couldnt cover them Laughing

That can work in my experience.

Obviously it is better and quicker to ambush the fish and take it by surprise rather than get the fish to accept you, but I can think of many occasions when the fish and I could see each other. Usually the fish wins that game but occasionally I do.

Alex

[Malcolm]

I would agree that the best way is for the fish not to associate you with danger. I have seen fish disappear with great speed when an angler walks past on an exposed bank more than 40 yards away. At the same time I have had them feeding within a few feet of me. Spending as much time photographing wild things, including trout, as actually fishing here are a few things I've noticed.

Standing beside or in front of a tree or other vegetation the trout will continue to feed quite happily. You can even move slowly and they won't usually bother.
Flat oily pools are really tricky. The trout seem to be hyper sensitive to nearly everything.
Wind on the surface makes a great difference. We may moan at the early season steady 20mph downstream wind on the Clyde but I helps us catch fish we wouldn't otherwise. Popply water has the same effect.

[haresear]

Standing beside or in front of a tree or other vegetation the trout will continue to feed quite happily. You can even move slowly and they won't usually bother.
Flat oily pools are really tricky. The trout seem to be hyper sensitive to nearly everything.

Very true. I find fish are very wary of any movement high up  and have seen fish spook when i've been looking over a reasonably high bridge.I try to stay low and move slow when fishing.

On the approach, I like to circle around any cover and peer from behind. That's how I got my biggest Scottish trout this year, which was lying in shallow water a yard off the bank. I saw it from behind a bush, got in front of the bush as Malcolm mentions and slid down to water level. Cast a dry - ignored. Next cast with a nymph and I saw the jaws open and close.

I'll actually sit in the water and cast to fish at times. Not for wee fish obviously, but for fair sized fish. Sometimes I worry about my sanity

Back to Alan's last post. Several times this summer I came across big fish that initially spooked when I started fishing, but grew to accept my presence. I don't remember actually landing any of those :?, but I certainly saw the fish start feeding again and had fish follow the nymph a few times but without taking.

Alex

[Traditionalist]

more interesting to me is the difference in behaviour between immature and mature fish, bandies are bold, my theory, partially but inconsistantly supported by snippets of research is that more mature fish, not necessarily bigger but they usually are, have more and more sophistocated receptors which allows them a greater degree of safety, it appears to us like intelligence but its just more safety equipment built in.

The main reason for that is that mature fish are warier simply by virtue of being mature.  Natural selection, ( and anglers), weed out the fish that make mistakes. It's not intelligence.  Also, the fish which are best equipped to survive do survive.  There can be various reasons for this of course, specialised feeding habits, fairly impregnable bolt-holes, perhaps even better sensory equipment in some cases.

TL
MC

[Traditionalist]

Once fish have seen you, they are invariably in a heightened state of awareness, and far more likely to reject things than if they didn't know you were there. If fish are accustomed to seeing anglers, they do tend to more or less ignore them after a while, but they will usually ignore anything you throw at them as well.

TL
MC

[haresear]

Once fish have seen you, they are invariably in a heightened state of awareness, and far more likely to reject things than if they didn't know you were there. If fish are accustomed to seeing anglers, they do tend to more or less ignore them after a while, but they will usually ignore anything you throw at them as well.

I agree with most of that, but even if the fish has seen you but the fish is still feeding or starts feeding again, it is definitely catchable.

That is the challenge and I will spend a long time trying to get that fish to take. Sometimes it works.

Alex

[Traditionalist]

I agree with most of that, but even if the fish has seen you but the fish is still feeding or starts feeding again, it is definitely catchable.

That is the challenge and I will spend a long time trying to get that fish to take. Sometimes it works.

Alex

Indeed, can take a  very long time though. Nice of course if you enjoy the challenge and you are successful.  Very difficult to do consistently.  Although it often works pretty well with grayling, it is a lot harder with trout.

TL
MC

[Traditionalist]

there is fairly scientific-ish research on this, done in NZ, they used anglers to fish one remote river and well pestered river over a period of days, then switched to take an average, proper sciency types monitored the fish, what they found was fish came back on the feed quite quickly on the river where they were used to being disturbed, on the remote river they took up to 3 days to return to normal behaviour after being disturbed, the surprise finding was that very wild fish can vanish for days.

Mike, i agree with your summing up but surely the only thing that can make the more mature fish more wary is a greater sensory ability, they dont have a memory in the human sense, a sort of physical intelligence rather than a mental one.

Agreed that spooked wild fish can disappear for a very long time. I have never actually waited days, but have often waited hours, without a sign of a fish returning. On the other hand, I have seen fish come back on the feed fairly quickly after a canoe, ( or even a whole bloody fleet!),  has passed, especially on the stretches where there are a lot of canoes, and also near paths frequented by walkers, some fish will continue to feed. I assume that the fish which are "accustomed" to this disturbance are simply conditioned over time not to react to it as a "danger".  There must be mechanisms which eventually allow fish to ignore certain things, as they would otherwise flee from everything all the time.  I assume that exposure conditioning is one such mechanism. Another example is fish feeding where cows mill around in the water. They must have become accustomed to this, as otherwise they would flee.

Although it is possible, even likely, that a better sensory ability plays a part in extended survival, there are a lot of factors arrayed against a fish. Fish survive because they survive. A mature fish has already beaten huge odds to become mature.  Blind chance plays a part as does genetic preconditioning, and fitness.  All the large browns ( > 3 lbs), I have caught more or less "locally" have been extremely specialised, only feeding at night, and only taking a couple of fish before retiring to their boltholes, where they don't take anything at all, even if the bolthole is known and accessible to the angler. This means the fish manages to get enough large amounts of protein in a short time, which allow it to grow faster, and also reduces its exposure to predators to a very high degree. Perhaps only an hour or so at night when it is actively feeding. Perhaps such fish are genetically programmed to turn cannibal fairly early, and to feed at night, or only the fish which turned cannibal early and fed at night survive to this size, however this may be, this aids their survival very greatly. 

There are always problems when looking for cause and effect in various fish behaviour.  Humans tend to anthropomorphise these things, but in the vast majority of cases there is no single specific reason for various things, large fish are the culmination of many factors and there is no way to even know them all, most especially not in specific cases. As a rule the fish with the best genes will survive to breed, so passing on that genetic programming. Those that don't survive don't breed and so don't pass on their genes. This constantly hones the survival ability of the fish.

I am not at all happy with some statements in regard to fish memory.  If fish can be conditioned to behave in certain ways, and they obviously can, then they must have something which allows them to be conditioned. Remember that what we are talking about here is the "re-programming" of instinctual behaviour.  This alters the "normal" instinctual and involuntary responses!  This is a major adjustment. It is not clear at all how this functions. There is no way for a fish to learn in the sense of stored memories as a higher brain function, ( which according to various authorities it does not have), and even if it could, that would not affect the instinctual and involuntary responses to various things. 

As an example, humans can control a lot of things, but they can not re-program instinctual reflexes as a matter of will. You are unable to stop yourself blinking under certain conditions, although you can blink at will if you wish, there are plenty of other examples.  A fish can not decide not to do something, as it lacks the capacity to make decisions, also such a function would take far too long in the environment in which a fish lives, it must react immediately, instinctively  and CORRECTLY to various stimuli, or it dies. In many cases it will die anyway, because the response was not "optimal", or was useless in that situation, but the general trend will then be that fish which make the "right" instinctual response survive and the others don't. The large fish have not "learned" anything, they were just the only ones who responded "correctly" to the various stimuli.

There are a lot of very complex factors and inter-dependencies involved here and I don't think there is any way to unravel them to the extent that they might be useful to an angler seeking to catch a certain fish, except in the case of observed behaviour, as opposed to knowing the reasons(s) for that behaviour, or being able to extrapolate or predict it.

Panicked flight  is more or less the "final" instinctual survival response, ( in humans as well), but people have different panic threshholds, even in more or less identical situations, and it is reasonable to assume that all other animals do as well. Panic can be "contagious" as well to a degree, with one animal panicking a whole herd.  Extrapolating this to fish, it is reasonable to assume that a single fish can panic a whole shoal, simply by being the first to panic, even in cases where there is no apparent cause for panic.  Instinctual reactions also depend on the degree of awareness.

As far as angling goes, I generally assume that anything I do which the fish can perceive is likely to result in my not catching that fish.  This works pretty well when I actually succeed in doing it.  In cases where the fish are aware of "something", it may still be possible to catch some, where in other cases it wont, or the fish will simply flee.

TL
MC