Field Notes
Fishing Techniques
How the methods actually work — trolling, jigging, rigs, and presentation, one at a time.
Fishing Techniques
Mooching for Salmon: The Bite Is a Rod Going Straight
The oldest sport method in Puget Sound and still the most enjoyable. Drift with the tide, roll a cut-plug herring, and learn to recognize a bite that looks exactly like nothing happening.
Fishing Techniques
Single Hand Spey: The Casts Trout Anglers Skip
Spey casting does not require a two-handed rod or a steelhead river. Every one of these casts works on an ordinary five weight, and they solve the most common problem in American trout fishing: something behind you.
Fishing Techniques
Skagit and Scandi Heads: The Number on Your Rod
The most confusing purchase in fly fishing, and getting it wrong does not mean casting badly, it means not casting at all. Two systems, one number that decides everything, and it is printed on your rod.
Fishing Techniques
Spey Casts Explained: Why There Are Four of Them
A spey cast is a roll cast that changes direction. The confusing part is why there appear to be a dozen named casts, and the answer fits in one sentence: the anchor has to end up on your downwind side.
Fishing Techniques
Fly Casting Faults and Fixes: Read the Symptom
Organized by what you can actually see rather than by mechanics. Wind knots are not from wind, a cracking line is a short pause, and the most common fault of all is one you cannot feel at all.
Fishing Techniques
Saltwater Casting: The Shot Is Lost Before the Cast
A fish appears and you have five seconds and sixty feet. The limiting skill is almost never distance. It is being ready, keeping line free, and knowing that lifting the rod on the take costs you the fish.
Fishing Techniques
Fly Casting in Wind: Four Problems, Four Answers
Wind is not an exception, it is the condition. It is also four different problems rather than one, and the answers invert between them. One of the four can put a hook in your face, so that is where we start.
Fishing Techniques
Tight Quarters Casts: Fishing Inside a Green Tunnel
A great deal of the best trout water in America is a tunnel, and most people walk past it. Bow and arrow, steeple and sidearm casts, plus the approach that matters more than any of them.
Fishing Techniques
The Tuck Cast: Depth Without More Lead
Most nymph fishing fails because the fly was not deep enough soon enough. The tuck cast kicks the fly down and under the leader so it enters the water already sinking, and it buys that depth with geometry rather than lead.
Fishing Techniques
Slack Line Casts: Buying Drift, Paying in Contact
Pile, S and stop-and-drop casts put deliberate slack in the line so the current cannot reach your fly. Every foot of it extends the drift and every foot of it is a foot between you and the hook.
Fishing Techniques
Reach and Curve Casts: Beating Drag Before It Starts
A trout does not care how far you can cast. It cares whether the fly moves like a real insect. Presentation casts decide where the line lands relative to the fly while everything is still in the air.
Fishing Techniques
The Roll Cast: When There Is a Tree Behind You
Most of the best trout water in America has a tree behind it. The roll cast loads the rod against the water instead of against a back cast, and it is the foundation every spey cast is built on.
Fishing Techniques
The Double Haul: Line Speed Without More Effort
The cast that beats wind, reaches eighty feet and turns over a big fly. It is also the most oversold technique in fly fishing, because it multiplies line speed and does nothing at all for loop control.
Fishing Techniques
Fly Casting Basics: The Loop Is a Picture of the Rod Tip
In every other kind of fishing the lure carries the line. In fly fishing it is the reverse, and everything strange about the cast follows from that. The rod is a spring, the stop makes the loop, and ten-and-two is training wheels.
Fishing Techniques
Reading a Trolling Spread: Six Rods, One Shape
Riggers, divers, boards and flat lines all work. Getting them to work at the same time is a different skill. Give every rod an address, set from the middle out, and steer the spread rather than the boat.
Fishing Techniques
Trolling Speed: The Variable Nobody Measures
Depth decides whether the lure is in front of a fish. Speed decides whether it is worth eating. Why your GPS is measuring the wrong thing, and the fifteen-second test that beats most electronics.
Fishing Techniques
Flatlining and Longlining: Trolling With Nothing Added
A lure on a bare line behind the boat, with depth coming from the lure, the line and the throttle. The quietest presentation in trolling, the fastest to change, and the one every beginner should learn first.
Fishing Techniques
Trolling With Planer Boards: Fishing Wide, Not Deep
Every other trolling tool answers how deep. Boards answer how wide, putting a shallow lure a hundred feet off your track in water the hull never touched. Inline versus mast, flags, and the retrieval order that saves your morning.
Fishing Techniques
Trolling With Lead Core: The Line Is the Weight
Lead core puts the sinking power in the line itself, so there is nothing in the water but lure. How colors work as a depth unit, why five feet a color is only a start, and what the method is genuinely bad at.
Fishing Techniques
Trolling With Divers: Getting the Lure Out to the Side
A diver drives your lure down and sideways at once, into water your hull never disturbed. How the directional ring works, why the trip matters, and why we will not print you a dive chart.
Fishing Techniques
Trolling With Downriggers: Depth You Can Actually Choose
A downrigger puts your lure at a depth you pick and keeps it there, on a line with no weight on it. Here is how the tool works, why the counter is lying to you, and how to set a release so the fish trips it.