Introduction

I was flattered when a couple of friends suggested I write a book about Spey fishing.  The world has plenty of books on the topic and an uncountable number of people who know more about fly fishing and Spey casting than do I.  It raises the question of what I could contribute to the field if I wrote a book.  It would have to be something few people are writing about for otherwise, there is no contribution I could make.

My recent interest is using a Trout Spey, which are light and short rods, suitable for the trout found in the reservoirs in the NE corner of Nevada where I live.  My fly-fishing specialty, though not so much as Brian Chan, Phile Rowley, or Denny Rickards is fishing stillwater for trout.  The picture above is an 18" trout caught at South Fork Reservoir near Elko Nevada with a Trout Spey.

Trout Spey rods are gaining in popularity but not in common use; stillwater trout fishing is a mystery to many anglers.  Put the two together and it is a space that is not occupied by many anglers.  Therefore, it seems worthwhile to capture my experiences and lessons in a blog on the subject of stillwater fly fishing with trout Spey rods.  The subject of the blog is a bit narrow as I will be talking about using Spey techniques with a one-handed rod but that's OK as the main focus will the trout Spey rod.

Being no expert in the prime subjects of casting and stillwater fishing, the target audience will be

• beginning fishers whose primary opportunities will be ponds, lakes and reservoirs 
• intermediate anglers who want to learn to fish stillwater with two-handed rods
• anglers who want to use a two-handed rod in a stillwater scenario for Spey-casting practice
• anglers who want to have fun with a two-handed rod

What will we cover?
Basic Gear:  Waders, boots, sunglasses, boats, hat, nets, tools, nets, rods, reels and lines
Spey Confusion:  For traditional trout fishers the language of Spey casting, lines, rods, and casting styles are a mystery.
Bugs:  Some ideas about the bugs in stillwater
Stillwater Rhythm:  Talks about seasons, their effect on the water, and the trout's response to it.
Casting:  A key success factor for fly fishing
Finding Trout:
Fishing Techniques:
etc:

How will I do this?  It will be a combination of writing about my learning experiences, my fishing experiences, or the things I find in articles, magazines, other blogs, or in video form.  The goal here is not to reinvent what others know but rather to package what is known into an expanded tutorial for fly fishing stillwater with Spey techniques and two-handed rods.

Credits:
As I neared retirement, I began thinking of what to do with the time, which turned out to solve itself.  In any case, I met Joe Doucette, owner of Elko Fly Shop, at an event in town.  He taught me to tie flies, helped me to select good gear, taught me to use it, and took a picture of one happy angler with his first trout on a fly rod.
Bob Thibault and Joe Gates, are local volunteers who help Joe with his classes, who greatly accelerated my learning curves.
Many guides helped me to improve my skills and freely gave me their knowlege of a lifetime on the water.  Julie Meisner, in particular, helped me catch my first steelhead on a Spey rod, a thrill almost as great as my first trout on a fly rod.  When I was struggling with my casting, she introduced me to one great casting teacher.
Rick Williams, on Julie's recommendation, took me as a student and gave me a firm foundation on which to build my two-handed skills.
Chris Gerono, a wild-man guide, showed me a ton of tricks and helped me to become more fishy.
Thanks to all the Ruby Mountain Fly Fishers who have helped me along this journey.

[P2] A Recipe for a Consistent Trout Spey Cast

Learning a Spey cast is a journey, as anglers try to improve their cast.  After gaining proficiency at the elements of the cast it is time to begin the process of improving the cast, which will require some attention to detail.  In this blog entry, I describe my journey to consistency and my own personal approach to improving consistency.  I do this to provide other anglers with motivation and ideas for how to make their casting more consistent.

Rick Williams, my casting coach, noted that my line wasn't laying out straight, which was something I had noticed but didn't worry about.  Rick explained it meant my rod tip wasn't traveling a straight path.  I wasn't sure why that was nor how it might be fixed, but I began to notice it.

On a fishing trip to the Salmon River near Stanley, ID, a beautiful place to fish, my buddy Joe took a video of my cast.  In the video, you can see I indicate the cast hooked to the left.  The cause is my hands are too far outside my body and then pulled back into my body during the cast.  This results in an odd casting plane and a rod tip that doesn't track straight.  The odd plane causes a loss of power, but my hands were working well enough I had plenty of power for this cast.  My bottom hand is pulling to the left faster than my top hand, causing the rod tip to travel to the right compared with the direction of the line, resulting in a hook.

Before I started using a trout Spey, there were only a few days a year to work on the kinks, which was not enough time.  After I started using a trout Spey, I was fishing with it several times a week, providing plenty of time to fix my cast.  Now, how do I use that time to make my cast consistent.

I began with trying to straighten out my cast.  If I didn't set up consistently every time then it seemed reasonable that my cast would not be consistent.  Here is how I tackled it.  I was fishing Pyramid Lake on a bluebird day -- no clouds, not a scintilla of breeze, clear water, and lockjaw Lahanton Cutthroat Trout.  Boring.  

The rest of the narrative will be talking from the point of view of casts with the right hand in the top position on the grip.  If I was going to check my cast for straight then it made sense to be certain of the target line.  To be consistent, I decided to explicitly point my right foot at a target on the far bank. I put my left foot a few inches behind that to lock my hips and eliminate rotation.  Now my body and brain know exactly where I am aiming.

After I made the cast, I lined up the butt of the rod with my right foot so that the tip of my rod was pointed at the intended target.  The cast actually went about 20 degrees left of my target line.  Hmmm.  That surprised me.  I tried it again and the same result.  My hands were still coming from the outside and across my body.  This meant my alignment would be poor, my D-loop would not have time to form well, and I was losing power as my fire direction was different than the direction of the loop energy.  OK then.  I had something to work on.

After a couple of hours of working at the consistency of my alignment, my cast began to straighten out.  More remarkably, my loop tightened up, my line speed increased, and I had more distance.  Just like that my casting outcome was much better because my alignment was better.  

Over the next few weeks, I made a number of small changes and my casting continued to improve.  I'll not go through all of those details but rather will describe my current process for cast consistency.

*  Do not hurry.  Many Spey casting problems are caused by going too fast.  All the good casters I've spoken with deliberately slow down when they are starting to struggle.  

*  Consistent Stance: Right foot point at the target to make sure the brain and body are in harmony.  Move left foot slightly behind to prevent turning.  

*  Keeping the hands in the box.  Some wag once said Ed Ward could cast in a phone booth.  This is key to consistency as the more precise the motions, the easier it is to keep them consistent.  I'll discuss anchor set consistency shortly but now the challenge is to sweep consistently while keeping my hands in the box.  At the end of the sweep, my hands need to be in a good firing position -- there are several videos and books to help and a few recommendations can be found here.  Breaking this down into parts:

1. Make sure the rod tip is on the water after the anchor set every single time.  Not on the water one time and a foot above the water next time.  Every single time it is on the water at the end of the anchor set.
2. The top hand should grip the rod handle lightly if at all and the bottom hand should be holding the knob.  As a reminder, this is my checklist and yours may be different.  The rod must be held lightly to allow the hands and rod to work together to make a good cast.  
3. The hands are crossed at the end of the anchor set.  Tom Larimer has a different set of ideas worthy of consideration.  I'll describe my approach but be aware that Larimer has some ideas for fixing the problem of a blown anchor that can hound a caster using these shorter lines.  Whatever your approach make sure to be in the position consistently every time.
4. I focus on starting my sweep with my right hand, the left-hand remains in place until the rod passes the middle of my body.  This is a marker for me.  As my right-hand aligns with my foot -- the point at which my rod has passed my target line -- my left-hand motion of push out and help with the rod tip path begins.  
5. My elbow stays tight to my body but I lift it up as needed for the casting demands.  My elbow does not fly away from my body.  
6. At this point, my left-hand and right-hand are moving smoothly into the firing position.  My left hand will be in the middle of the body and right hand is in the phone booth close to my shoulder.
7. If everything has gone well, an easy pull with the bottom hand will shoot line out at a remarkable speed.  It takes a while to get used to this much line speed with so little effort by the bottom hand.  

*Check the outcome.  Were there problems with the cast?  Was it noisy?  Did you blow the anchor?  Was it straight?  Was it low energy?  If there were problems, try to understand what went wrong and work correction into your casting routine.

Videos of your cast will help diagnose and correct faults.  Part of the self-diagnosis is to learn the common problems and their causes in order to find your markers to make consistent casts.  As your consistency increases, your results improve and you will be able to recover from a casting funk more quickly.

I hope this helps.  Good luck out there.  

[P1] Why Use a Trout Spey on Stillwater

"Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after."
- Henry David Thoreau

By nature, people are curious and problem solvers.  Fly fishing provides us with the opportunity to satisfy our curiosity and to solve problems, which is a reason I was drawn to it.  My curiosity led me to a degree in math and physics, which then led me into aerospace where designing things that had never been built before was a way of life.  Then I retired.  What to do with the curiosity and engineering skills I have developed?  Fly fishing was my choice.  I think to one degree or another this describes all fly fishers -- they are curious about their quarry and they enjoy the challenge of catching that quarry with a fly rod.  

Two Ruby Mountain Fly Fishers at Pyramid Lake's Pelican Rock

As an example, I was fishing in Pyramid Lake when a character next to me was catching nearly all the fish.  As I often quip, the best place to fish Pyramid Lake is on either side of me but this was ridiculous.  He was using a typical Pyramid Lake rig -- sinking line, weighted leech on the bottom, and a Pyramid Lake Beetle on a 9" stinger about 18" above the beech.  I was tossing a balanced leech about 8' under an indicator with my 6-wt switch rod.   

My first thought was how can I duplicate that fishing technique with a small Spey.  Well, it is not so easy.  To be honest, I don't have a solution as I write this, but when I work it out there will be a blog entry.  I do know that all the knots common to swinging flies with two-handed rods, for which the gear was designed, does not work well on lakes.  We need something different.  The integrated lines that could work are designed for a single-handed rod and thus don't have the tapers necessary for Spey casting.  So it goes.  What this all provides for me is an opportunity to scratch my creative/engineering urges by finding a suitable solution to this problem.  

For those who might not know, Pyramid Lake is home to trophy-sized Lahontan Cutthroat and in fact is the only place you can catch these magnificent fish that weigh over 20 pounds.  Pyramid Lake, located in the northwest corner of Nevada about 40 miles north of Reno, has a sand and gravel bottom with few snags.  Creative people have invented an entire ecosystem of techniques, flies, and even ladders with chairs on them for fishing this unique lake, illustrating the point.

Spey techniques, which can be used with either single-handed or two-handed rods, can provide the angler with more tools to tackle the various fishing situations we encounter.  Pyramid Lake is one.  Small reservoirs and ponds, with trophy-sized trout, are another. 

I may have buried my lead but that's OK.  Spey casting provides useful capabilities for stillwater situations.  Anglers who use them will be more successful.

• Spey casting keeps everything in front of the angler.  Commonly this is expressed as being able to cast with obstructions behind the angler.  This is true but they may not always be things on a bank.  In smaller ponds when fishing with other anglers, one must check behind them before casting in the traditional way to avoid hooking somebody, which interferes with the joy of fishing.  With a Spey cast, no worries, as all is in front of the angler.  No worries except for somebody else hooking you.  

Two Ruby Mountain Fly Fishers in Small Reservoir

• Change of direction.  Spey casts were designed to swing flies in a river.  With this technique, one casts between 45 and 90 degrees to the bank and then lets the fly drift in the current back to the bank.  Once the fly is at the bank (on the dangle in the jargon) the next cast is made back out into the river.  But changing direction can be useful for the fly fisher in Stillwater.  I was fishing in Wildhorse one spring.  I was using a single-handed rod but I can execute Spey casts with it.  I was fishing a leech under an indicator when a big guy porpoising along caught my eye.  It was off moving along to the right side of my little pontoon boat.  I made a single motion Spey cast to change my direction and put the leech out in front of that fish and began to strip it.  Fortune smiled on me as that bad boy came and got it.  Without the Spey cast, I probably would not have caught that fish.  
• Length.  As I mentioned in the Curses of the Long Cast, casting long can be a curse of Spey casting.  But it is nice to have the distance when you see a trout rising a ways from your boat.  If that distance isn't available, then the fish may move on before you have your boat maneuvered to a place to make the cast.  
• Practice.  The closest salmon/steelhead swinging water for me is a five-hour drive.  Using a trout Spey for fishing my local waters gives me a way to maintain and improve my two-handed casting skills, keeping me ready for that trip to a big river. 
• Fun.  Ed Ward, one of the Skagit masters, talks about fishing goals.  First, you want to catch fish; then you want to catch lots of fish; then you want to catch bit fish; then you want to catch lots of big fish.  After this journey, Ed discovered it wasn't catching the fish he was after.  He now says he wants to be out fishing, as long as it is with a two-handed rod.  That is the deal that makes the challenge of mastering a two-handed rod worthwhile.