A great deal of the best trout water in America is a tunnel.
Rhododendron closing overhead in the southern Appalachians. Alder so thick on a western creek that you crawl. Undercut banks with willows leaning out over them. Water you can step across, holding fish that have never seen an artificial fly, in a corridor that gives you about four feet of airspace in any direction.
None of the casting you learned on a lawn works there, and that is why most people walk past it.
The casts are the smaller half
Before any technique, the thing that actually solves tight water is position.
In a small stream you can usually get much closer than you think. The water is broken and noisy, the fish are looking upstream, and a careful angler moving slowly can often work within fifteen or twenty feet of a fish that would flush at sixty on a spring creek. At that range the casting problem shrinks enormously, and casts that were impossible at forty feet become trivial.
So the sequence in tight water is approach first, cast second. Move slowly, stay low, keep off the skyline, fish upstream so the fish are facing away, and use the sound of the riffle to cover you. Wade rather than walk the bank where you can, because a bank-walking angler puts vibration into the ground and a wading one does not.
Anglers who are good at small streams look like they have magical casting. Mostly they are just close.
Twelve Small Stream Fly Casting TipsThe bow and arrow cast
The signature small-stream delivery, and the one that looks like a party trick until you need it.
Hold the fly, draw it back toward you so the rod bends into a deep curve, aim, and release. The rod straightens and shoots the fly forward. There is no back cast at all, no line in the air, and it works in a space barely longer than the rod.
Range is roughly a rod length to perhaps twenty feet, and accuracy inside that is genuinely excellent, because you are aiming a loaded spring rather than timing a moving line.
Before the technique, the safety, because this cast puts a hook under tension a foot from your face.
Hold the fly by the bend of the hook, between thumb and forefinger, with the point facing away from you. Never hold it by the point, and never let the point sit against your skin while you load the rod. If the fly slips early it travels fast and it travels toward whatever you were aiming at, which is why you aim before you load rather than after.
Pinch the barbs down on flies you intend to bow and arrow. This is not primarily about the fish. A barbless hook that finds a finger comes out; a barbed one requires a conversation with somebody who has pliers.
The mechanics, once that is settled: extend a length of line roughly equal to the rod, or slightly more. Point the rod at the target. Grip the fly, draw it back and slightly to the side so the rod loads into a smooth bend rather than a sharp angle. Hold the aim. Release cleanly, letting the fly go rather than throwing it.
The common failure is releasing while still drawing back, which sends the fly somewhere unintended. Load, settle, aim, then open the fingers.
ORVIS Fly Casting Lessons: The Bow And Arrow CastThe steeple cast
For when there is brush behind you but open sky above.
Instead of a back cast that travels horizontally behind you, you throw it almost vertically, lifting the rod hard and high so the line goes up rather than back. Then you come forward from that high position.
It is not an elegant cast. The line does not straighten fully, the forward delivery is limited, and it costs distance. But when you are standing against a wall of alder with clear air overhead, it is the difference between a cast and no cast.
The trick is to make the lift decisive and to accept a shorter delivery. People try to steeple cast and then apply a normal forward stroke, which drops the line into the bushes anyway.
Casting sideways, under things
Most tight-water problems are vertical rather than horizontal. There is a branch at head height and open water beneath it.
A sidearm cast, made with the rod tilted right over so the whole cast happens in a horizontal plane a foot or two above the surface, gets under obstructions that would eat an overhead cast. Everything from the basic stroke applies; you have simply rotated the plane.
Two things change. Tracking becomes much more obvious, because a horizontal cast that wanders is immediately visible. And you can slide a cast under a branch and still put the fly upstream of it, which is exactly the shot that holds the best fish in a small stream.
Fishing off your non-dominant side, backhanded, is worth practicing for the same reason. Half the good lies on a small stream are on the wrong side of you, and an angler who can only cast from one shoulder is fishing half the water.
The one you use most
The roll cast, by a distance.
Nothing goes behind you, it works with a short line, and it repositions a fly quickly between drifts without lifting everything into the trees. In small water it is not a specialty cast, it is the default, and the overhead cast is what you use in the occasional open pool.
Dapping, which is not cheating
At the extreme end, when you are within a rod length of the fish, you can simply extend the rod and lower the fly onto the water.
No cast at all. Just a long reach, a leader hanging from the tip, and a fly touching down where you want it. Then lift and drop it again a foot away.
This is an ancient and completely legitimate way to fish tight pockets, it is deadly with a bushy dry fly, and it catches a great many fish in water where nothing else can be delivered accurately. The only reason people resist it is that it does not look like fly casting.
Rig it for the space
The rig matters as much as the delivery, and most people bring the wrong one.
Shorten the leader. A nine-foot leader needs nine feet of airspace to turn over, and in a casting lane six feet long it simply piles. Six to seven and a half feet is a much better small-stream length, and on the tightest water even shorter.
Fish one fly. Droppers tangle in brush, tangle on a bow and arrow cast, and double your chances of hanging a branch on the back cast you did not quite avoid.
Choose flies you can see and that float well. Small-stream fish are opportunistic rather than selective, so a bushy visible attractor pattern out-fishes an exact imitation in most of this water, and being able to see it in broken current matters more than what it represents.
Bring more flies than you think. You will leave some in trees. That is the cost of fishing where nobody else does, and it is a good trade.
One cast per lie
A discipline rather than a technique, and it is the thing that separates people who catch small-stream fish from people who spook them.
Pockets in a small stream are small. A pocket behind a boulder may be four feet across and hold one good fish. That fish will see your fly, and it will see your line, and if the first delivery is wrong it will usually know something is happening.
So the plan is to make the first cast count and then move. Study the pocket before you cast. Decide where the fly needs to land and which delivery puts it there. Make that cast. If it works, good. If it lands wrong, consider whether a second attempt is worth spooking the lie or whether you should step upstream to the next one.
Small streams are generous with the number of lies and stingy with second chances at each. Anglers who fish them well cover a lot of ground and cast surprisingly little, which looks lazy and is the opposite.
The corollary is worth stating: fish every pocket, not just the pretty ones. A four-inch depression behind a rock in six inches of water will hold a trout in a stream like this, and the fish in the obvious pool has usually been cast to already.
Getting the fly back
Nobody writes about this and everybody spends time on it.
You will hook branches. The reflex is to pull straight back, which drives the hook deeper into the wood and often costs the fly and a length of tippet.
Better: get the rod tip close to the fly and push, rather than pulling. Most hooks in bark come out with a small shove from the opposite direction. If you cannot reach, point the rod straight at the fly and pull with the line rather than bending the rod, so the tippet breaks at the fly rather than at a knot up the leader.
Rods break in small streams mostly from two things: high-sticking a snagged fly, and walking through brush with the rod in front of you. Point the tip behind you when you walk, and never bend a rod at a sharp angle to free anything.
And when the fly is genuinely gone, take the moment to check the tippet before tying on the next one. A leader that has been dragged through a willow has abrasion on it, and the fish you lose to that is always the good one.
The rod length argument
There is a real disagreement here and it is worth presenting as one rather than pretending it is settled.
The short rod case: a six or seven foot rod fits under branches, swings in a tighter arc, and is far easier to carry through brush. On a genuinely enclosed stream it is the obvious tool.
The long rod case: a longer rod lets you reach over obstacles, hold line off conflicting currents, dap into pockets from further back, and keep more line off the water on a short drift. Some very good small-stream anglers fish rods considerably longer than the water seems to justify for exactly these reasons.
The honest answer is that it depends on whether your problem is getting the rod through the brush or getting the line over the current. Streams where you crawl favor short. Streams that are open above and complicated below favor long. Fish both before deciding you belong to a camp.
Where this water is
Almost everywhere, and almost nobody is on it.
Brook trout in the Appalachians and the Northeast are the classic case: small, wild, willing fish in streams that are effectively green tunnels for months of the year. Cutthroat trout in the Rockies occupy the same niche, as do small rainbow trout in headwater streams across the West.
The finding of it is a map problem more than anything else. Small blue lines on a topographic map, gradient read off the contour spacing, and access worked out before you drive, which is what reading a topographic map and how to find public fishing access are for. A steep tight drainage with public land along it and no parking area is very often empty water.
The gear
A short leader, or the willingness to cut a long one down. This is the cheapest and most-ignored small-stream adjustment there is.
Barbless or pinched hooks, for the bow and arrow cast specifically and for the number of trees you are about to hook generally.
Eye protection, worn always, because a cast that loads a hook a foot from your face deserves it.
A landing net with a short handle, or none at all, since a long-handled net snags on everything in brush.
Wading boots rather than waders in summer, because small-stream fishing is mostly walking in and out of the water and through vegetation, and waders in July are miserable.
A rod you do not mind scratching. Brush is hard on finishes, and worrying about the rod will make you fish more timidly than the water requires.
And a compact chest pack or sling rather than a vest with things hanging off it. Anything that dangles will catch on something, usually at the moment a fish rises.
The short version
In tight water, the approach matters more than the cast. Get close, stay low, fish upstream, and the casting problem mostly solves itself.
When you do need a delivery: the roll cast is the workhorse, the bow and arrow covers everything inside twenty feet, a sidearm cast gets under branches, and a steeple cast buys you a back cast when there is only sky. Dapping is legitimate.
Shorten the leader, fish one fly, and bring spares.
And hold the hook by the bend, with the point away from you, every single time.
