Small Stream Fly Fishing: Blue Lines and Wild Trout ibook

Water no wider than a kitchen door slides under a leaning hemlock, drops eighteen inches over a rock lip, and digs a pool the size of a bathtub. The cast comes from a kneeling position twelve feet below. The fly drifts eleven inches and disappears in a swirl. Brook trout, seven inches, back in the water in under ten seconds. Forty seconds, start to finish, and the next pool is thirty yards upstream through alder.

Small water is the last stronghold of wild trout across a surprising amount of the temperate world, and it is almost always empty of other anglers. This book is about finding it and fishing it well. Locating blue lines on a map and confirming them on the ground, choosing tackle built for close quarters rather than distance, and learning to read pocket water, where a productive lie may be the size of a dinner plate.

The approach matters more here than anywhere else in fly fishing, so it gets a chapter of its own, as does casting in places where a conventional backcast is impossible. Dry flies for opportunistic fish, nymphing water too shallow for an indicator, and the streamers and terrestrials that produce the occasional surprisingly large fish are each covered in working detail.

Closing chapters deal with the native and wild trout of the headwaters and what separates them, with wading and bushwhacking on long backcountry days, with how season, weather and flow change the same stream beyond recognition, and with the access and conservation questions that decide whether this water is still worth walking into in twenty years.