If I Had Only One Cast.. I’m standing below a beautiful pool in a mountain trout stream and there is no hatch and no rising trout. Studying the pool carefully for ten minutes I can’t even see a trout on his feeding station. The stream level is low and the trout have been wary all day. I’m reluctant to cast blindly into the pool. A misplaced cast will cause my fly to drag unnaturally over the trout. So where do I place my one cast?
In Eugene Connett’s wonderful book My Friend The Trout published in 1961, he suggests you put yourself in the trouts’ place and learn to think like a trout. Learning to think like a trout may be easier than one assumes. After many years of fishing mountain trout streams, I believe they select feeding stations that enable them to capture the greatest amount of food with the least amount of effort.
One day my fishing partner, William Downey, and I were fishing a stream in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I decided to test to see how accurately we could determine the feeding stations in the pools. We chose six consecutive pools to fish with the stipulation that there could be only one cast made into each pool. In the six pools with one cast into each pool, we caught five trout.
Certainly experience goes a long way in accurately reading the water. However, we have found in our mountain trout schools, the beginning anglers can quickly master the skill of identifying the feeding stations.