SOME WATER that is easily fished during a hatch is tough to blind-fish with consistent success. Stream reading is a vital skill for prospecting, but you should approach a day of fishing with the philosophy that not all places in a stream hold trout, and others that may hold trout cannot be blind-fished easily.

When you cast to rising fish, you know exactly where each fish is, you have a good idea what they're eating, and you stalk one fish at a time. You know the fish are willing to feed, and if your casting is accurate you know they can see your fly. On the other hand, when blind-fishing, you must constantly keep two questions in mind: Can he see my fly, and can he see me? If he sees you before he sees your fly, the fish will be spooked, and even if he doesn't bolt for cover he won't be interested in eating. You must have confidence in your ability to locate unseen fish, and you must be able to make a decent presentation to the narrow range where a suspected fish can see your fly.

In general slow water is the hardest water to fish blind, for a number of reasons. Slow water is more difficult to read, because in big pools you don't have the benefit of differing currents to narrow the possibilities of where you may find a trout. In a riffle or run much of the water is too fast for a trout holding in place, and some of the water is also too shallow. Trout will be found in narrow, easily recognizable bands where fast water meets slow, deep water meets shallow, or rocks or shelves offer relief from the current. It is difficult to cover slow water without spooking the fish, because fish in slower currents get a much better look at the outside world and the food they're eating. In a riffle you can drop your line right on top of a trout without spooking him, so a thirty-foot drift will effectively cover thirty feet of water. In slow water, though, a thirty-foot drift will cover a maximum of fifteen feet, the length of the longest leader most of us can handle, and the trout lying under the fifteen feet of fly line will probably be spooked. Frankly most of us lack the patience to blind-fish slow water. The fly drifts so slowly that we lose interest and confidence in what we are doing.

You've seen fish rising in your favorite pool on another day when there was a good Sulphur hatch, so you know exactly where they are lying, right? Sorry. Those fish may be lying below the same spot you saw them rising, but in slow water, especially during a heavy hatch or spinner fall, trout often move from their normal lies into places where they can capture floating food with greater ease.

There are ways of finding trout in slow water, which we'll explore a little later in this chapter, and there are methods of fishing that work in slow water, which I'll talk about in later chapters. Vermont's Battenkill has miles of slow, deep water that I have tried to blind-fish with a nymph or dry during every month of the season, but I find myself spooking an entire pool before I can get a fish to look at my fly. Where a riffle punctuates the slow water, I'll do fine, but between the infrequent fast water I find myself relying on streamers, which can be fished independent of the current and for which trout will move from ten or even twenty feet away. On the other hand, when conditions are right in faster water, I can take trout on dries, wets, nymphs, or streamers.

So prospecting for trout relies heavily on riffles, runs, and pocket water, which is fine because in a heavily fished stream this is the water most fishermen ignore. When there are no hatches, I always start fishing at the head of a pool or run, in pocket water, or in a riffle, and then I graduate to the slower water if I can figure out what is going on. Fish in rough water are less easily disturbed, and they're also less wise to the dangers of artificial bugs. Trout fishing is supposed to be challenging, but I am quite content with the dumbest, least neurotic trout available if there is no hatch to even the odds.

Why Trout Need Special Places

When Thomas Jenkins built his artificial channel in Convict Creek, he found that different trout introduced into the channel separately used virtually the same feeding positions, even if a whole new group of trout replaced a previous group. The positions used didn't offer more food than the unused sites, but Jenkins thought the sites used offered better energetics — in other words, the fish could obtain their food without wasting more energy than they were gaining. Energetics is the basis of learning to read a stream. Trout need enough food passing by their position to have an almost constant supply, yet they need to lie in areas where the current velocity is nearly zero.

Bob Bachman has determined that brown trout prefer to lie in water with a speed from one-quarter to one-half foot per second and feed in water running about two feet per second. Rainbows generally feed in faster water, up to about six feet per second, while brook trout and cutthroats like about the same current speeds as browns. In a stream that offers all four species you'll often find the rainbows at the head of a pool and the other species in the middle and the tail of the pool, or in places where a large object slows the current. The current at the surface of a tumbling mountain stream might be ten feet per second, the fastest water in an average riffle­and-pool lowland stream six feet per second, and the middle of a slow pool at low water approaching that magic half a foot per second. This is why you'll see trout hanging just below the surface in the middle or tail of a pool during a good hatch or spinner fall at low water — the current is slow enough that the fish can comfortably lie and feed in the same place.

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