Tips & Tutorials
The tailwater looks quiet in November. No rises, no bugs in the air, and trout swaying in the weed beds anyway. They're eating crustaceans, and scuds and sowbugs are on the menu every day of the year. Here's how to tell them apart, where to find them, how to rig and fish them, and the eight patterns we'd carry.
By October most of the fly box has gone small. Then a big orange caddis comes fluttering up the bank. How the October Caddis hatch works, where and when to look for it on western rivers, why to start with a pupa near the bank, and three ways to fish the dry — dead-drifted, skated and waked.
A standard leech hangs nose-down under an indicator. A balanced leech hangs level — the posture a cruising trout actually recognizes as food. Learn how the pin-and-bead system works, how to fish it under an indicator, and which of seven black, brown, and olive patterns to tie on.
There's a sound every warmwater angler knows — the smack of a bass popper getting inhaled, or the quiet slurp of a bluegill sipping a foam beetle off the surface. It's the whole reason topwater exists: you see the take. That takeover isn't limited to one species, either. The same handful of pattern families that fool a smallmouth off a rocky point will pull a bluegill off a dock edge, and at the right time of day, the same mouse pattern that works on a bass will get eaten by something with a lot more teeth.
By July, trout stop rewarding the perfect match and start rewarding confidence. A big foam attractor does three things a precise imitation can't — you can see it, it floats a dropper, and it triggers an opportunistic eat from a fish that's done inspecting tiny mayflies. Here are the twelve foam patterns that earn their place in a summer box, organized by exactly what they do on the water.
