By fine tuning your streamer fly fishing skills you will be able to catch more large trout and smallmouth bass even under adverse conditions.
The riffles entering the heads of the pools hold large numbers of sculpin minnows in many rivers. In smallmouth rivers we also find madtoms in these riffles as well as sculpins. Both of these minnows are a very important food source to the fish and they feed heavily in the deep pockets in the riffles and just below the riffles.
My first stop in fishing these riffles with streamers is a technique Charley Waterman taught me to use on the Yellowstone River in Montana for trout many years ago. It has helped me catch many trout in all large western trout rivers as well as smallmouth bass on large eastern rivers. While I’m standing on the dry river bank about five feet back from the stream right where the riffle enters the pool I begin my fishing. My goal is to thoroughly cover the quiet pool corner before me with my streamers. I devote about a dozen casts to each pool-corner starting with a cast 30 feet long tight against the riffle and swimming my streamer slowly along the stream bottom by stripping it 6 inches every 10 seconds. Successive casts are made 5 feet further downstream until I have covered the whole pool-corner.
Next I wade out into the pool to knee-deep water and begin to methodically cover the whole pool with my streamer. The first cast is 40 feet long across the pool. After the fly sinks deeply I strip it 6 inches every 10 seconds until it is within 25 feet of me. Each successive cast is five feet longer until I’m reaching out about 70 feet. After covering this section of the pool with this sequence of gradually longer casts I wade downstream pausing every 20 feet to repeat this method of streamer-play until I’m within 50 feet of the tail of the pool.
The tails of both large trout rivers and smallmouth rivers often hold so many large fish that I slow down in my wading and often overlap the swing of my streamers. I want to be sure every fish there gets a good look at my streamer. I may devote an hour to each pool tail.
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