The slow-sinking fly

With another week of extremely limited river fishing opportunities, you better think "lakes" if you want to catch trout.

To some anglers, fly fishing lakes means dragging a fly while kicking backwards in a personal pontoon or float tube. And sometimes that's all it takes to catch some nice trout, especially on trout-stocked waters like on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation.

Catching trout consistently, however, demands dealing with several factors, including fly pattern and size, controlled depth fishing and "feeling" the bite. We'll deal with patterns and sizes in a future story.

Putting the fly in front of the fish most often means presenting the fly at nearly the same depth in the water as the fish are feeding. For most area lakes, a sink-tip or slow-sinking fly line is warranted. Both sink a fly up to approximately 5-6 feet deep, depending on how fast the fly is retrieved.

My long-time favorite slow-sinking fly line is the Scientific Anglers Stillwater, a nearly invisible sub-surface line. Be sure to match the fly line weight to the recommended line weight on your fly rod.

Presenting the right fly in the right size at the right depth doesn't bend your rod if you can't feel the bite. And this, I believe, is one of the biggest reasons some fly fishers catch more trout than other anglers in lakes.

Trout swim with a fly then bite so quickly that only fishermen who maintain tight line control can "feel" the almost imperceptible tug. If the rod tip isn't lifted as quickly, the trout opens its jaws and, in most cases, the fly fisher didn't even know he had a bite.

The key is to keep the fly line straight to the fly. The rod can be pointed off-center, but slack curves in the line do not allow the "bite" to pull line at the rod tip or line hand of the angler.

One trick to keeping the line straight while float-tubing is to place the rod tip in the water. Try keeping the rod tip in the water while kicking on your next float-tubing trip and, hopefully, you'll catch more fish.