Surely everyone has experienced the heartbreak of a big fish swimming off, spooked by your approach. Often this happens in the most dramatic way possible, with water splashing everywhere, spooking other fish in the vicinity, and most frustratingly, rubbing salt in the wound — a slap in the face reminding you of everything you did wrong.
Luckily, such experiences are teachable moments. If you’re aware of what you’re doing as you approach each spot, you should be able to pinpoint exactly what you did wrong and how to avoid doing the same thing the next time you get near a fish. I’ve witnessed fish swimming as fast as they can away from me countless times, not to mention the more offensive “I’m not scared of you, I’m just bothered” slow cruise away. I hope that in this article, my many failures and the lessons learned from those failures will help you avoid heartbreak of your own — or at least help you dissect what went wrong.
Lessons and Priorities
As a kid, I grew up fishing on one of the most technical fisheries in Iceland, a small spring creek that harbored resident and lake-run brown trout, some of which could reach well over 25 inches in length. But I didn’t know that during the f irst few years I fished it, because all I would see and catch were small fish. The bigger browns would spook before I got close to spotting them, and even when I finally became careful enough to see these fish, I was still too clumsy, too near, to get them to take my fly.
From repeated trial and error, though, I eventually realized a few things. My bright blue jacket wasn’t doing me any favors, and I was walking too fast along the bank, when instead, I needed to crawl along it. Eventually, I started crawling three pools down from the one I intended to fish, going slower than the slugs in the grass, and I ditched the bright blue jacket for an ancient brown coat that had been sitting in my closet for years. Magically, at some point, I got my act together well enough that I was able to hook my first big fish in that creek.
Once I put all of these factors together, my adolescent brain finally figured out that I had been prioritizing the wrong things in my fishing. Approach and presentation have so much more to do with success than the f ly that’s tied to your tippet. Of course it’s helpful to have the right pattern, but in the end, the difference between a successful day and an unsuccessful day is in how you approach the fish and how you present your fly to them. When it comes to spooky f ish, it’s helpful to think about how they hold in the current or how they behave in a lake. Knowing how to read water is essential to knowing where they’ll be. If you have a general idea of the places fish hold or cruise, you’ll know where to walk, where to approach from, and how to present a fly to them.
Approaching Fish in Rivers
Let’s start with this basic rule: you do not want the fish to become aware of your presence. When water is in sight, start moving slowly and walking softly. Use trees, shrubs, boulders, and shadows (really, anything that’ll work) to obscure your visibility during your approach. Be aware of the angle of the sun and how it might highlight you or cast your shadow onto the water. Before you make your first cast, stay well back from the water and study it for a few minutes, looking for rise forms and identifying places where fish are likely to station themselves. Use what you see to plan your attack, always with the objective of revealing your presence as little as possible. By the way, if you can see fish, then they can see you, too. The higher you are above the water, the more your visibility will increase. Try to stay low.
Most fish in rivers face upstream in the current, so to approach a fish without it seeing you, come up from behind. If conditions allow, it’s entirely possible for a stealthy angler to pick off fish one by one even when working upstream through a placid pool. Often, though, few if any fish will be visible, so you’ll need to focus on casting to the spots where you believe fish are likely to hold.
To take this even further, if I know I’ll be fishing a stream again and again over a period of time, I walk down the bank aggressively and purposefully spook the fish just to get a sense of where they hold. This is obviously useful intelligence.
Although an understanding of where fish hold will improve your ability to approach them stealthily, keep in mind that river systems and fish populations can have their quirks. Fish in one river might have a tendency to hold in slightly different places than fish in other, similar rivers, and clueing in on these patterns can make or break your day.
Different species of fish use rivers and their habitats in different ways. A brown trout might prefer to hold in a slower, deeper part of a river, waiting to ambush a small baitfish, while a rainbow might focus on a fast riffle, picking off flies floating by. A carp will often cruise through a slower section of a pool, eating scuds and worms along a weedy edge, while a bass might hide in an undercut bank, so as to hammer a mouse or frog that happens to fall in. Know which species you are chasing and how they utilize their habitat, and plan your approach to a piece of water accordingly. Take your time to visualize where the fish are holding and how they are feeding and think about how you can approach them before getting into position to make your first cast.
When undisturbed, fish often hold in much shallower water than you’ d think. The first thing in the morning and late in the evening, trout and even salmon can be found in ankle-deep water and will stay there until spooked. You never see these fish if you’re hoofing it down the bank and making noise. By the time you would have seen them, you’ve already scared them into deeper water and made things harder for yourself. Before wading into the river, stand back from the bank and make your initial casts to the water along the edge.
Approaching Fish in Lakes
Unlike with rivers, at a lake, you won’t have the obvious clues from the water’s surface to help tell you where fish might be located. Still waters force you to understand the subsurface topography, and understanding how your target species interacts with that topography in its search for food is paramount to knowing how you should approach a lake when in search of fish.
I’ve learned a lot about how to approach spooky fish by chasing carp in still waters. Carp are extremely sensitive fish and use all of their senses to stay aware of their surroundings. Not only are they picky eaters, they’re also some of the spookiest fish around. Luckily, California is filled with reservoirs and lakes that harbor common carp, and many of these waters are close to or within urban areas in other words, there’s likely a carp water near where you live. Start chasing carp, and you’ll get exciting visual demonstrations of the many ways you can spook a fish.
I’ve had days chasing carp when I tilted my head to crack my neck and it scared every fish within what seemed like a mile radius. I’ve also had days when if I got within 100 feet of a fish, it’d just slowly stop feeding and cruise away. I swear I’ve seen fish stop feeding, tilt up, look me in the eye, chuckle, then slowly mosey off. Carp will force you to be on top of your game in terms of how to approach and present a fly to a fish, and learning these lessons has helped me immensely in pursuing trout, bass, and other species of fish.
The walk I do when chasing carp is basically a slow-motion bipedal version of a snail crawl. I slowly lift up each foot, check what is underneath my feet, and slowly put my foot down. It is a painfully slow approach, but it works, and by now, I’ve done it enough times that my body just goes on autopilot — moving super slowly and making sure each step is planted on soft or stable ground that won’t make noise. Even so, every now and then you encounter something under the sand, like an ancient beer can, that crunches loudly and sends fish fleeing.
Chasing fish that feed on other fish is another matter, however. Predatory fish can generally be split into two groups fish that cruise around and chase their prey down, such as trout, and fish that hide and ambush their prey, such as largemouth bass. Cruising trout often use open water more than bass do, gliding along steep drop-offs, reefs, and old riverbed channels. If you find areas that are likely to be used as feeding lanes for trout cruising by, try to position yourself to keep any trout from detecting your presence.
But it’s not just trout that use open water to cruise and eat baitfish. Spotted bass, striped bass, white bass, and during certain times of the year, largemouth bass will cruise along these deeper river channels, chasing schools of baitfish. Often, you’ ll get a visual indication of where they’re feeding by seeing baitfish being corralled toward the surface and jumping out of the water, sometimes onto the bank, to avoid being eaten. Usually the f ish chasing them are so engrossed in eating these abundant prey items that stealth is not a huge factor, but it’s always good to be aware of where they might be headed. Find a place far enough away from the school of fish so that you’re not right on top of them, but still close enough that you can efficiently make casts to the chaos. And if you see that they are moving in a certain direction, perhaps stay on the other side of the school of bait so you can hide your presence.
Ambush predators such as largemouth bass often hold in or near defined structures, where they can expend the least amount of energy in the consumption of their food. Locating likely holding structures for bass is essential to your success, especially for the larger fish that don’t give you endless chances to catch them. Often the first few casts are the most important. Consequently, if you want to be successful when chasing bass, you should start by picking out a likely area for a big fish to hide while they wait to ambush their prey. A big sunken tree next to a big drop-off provides fantastic cover and an easy spot to surprise a school of shad swimming by. A pile of big rocks in deeper water can serve as good cover for a big bass looking to eat a cruising trout holding in the colder sections of the lake. An overhanging tree provides shade for a bass holding in shallow water and waiting to crush an unfortunate frog.
You not only want to be able to approach these areas, but to approach them in a way that doesn’t let the fish know about your presence and lets you make a cast to them without spooking the entire area. Choose an approach that lets you make a cast into the area, but in a way that allows you to place the fly in a vulnerable position. For example, place your line along a ledge, so that when you strip the fly back, it swims along the drop-off, allowing a fish to pin it into the shallows for an easy meal, not out into the open water, as when you’d cast perpendicular to the shelf.
All in all, lakes provide their own set of challenges with regard to spooky fish. You don’t have the noise of the river or, when afloat or wading, the cover of trees on the bank. Most of the time, you have nothing but the sky behind you and a featureless surface in front of you. Still waters force you to make a smart approach and presentation, especially when faced with f ish such as carp or spooky trout, fish that won’t tolerate mistakes.
Clothing and Gear
I’ve noticed throughout years of guiding that some things that should be obvious are not. Simple considerations such as wearing clothing that blends into your environment often gets ignored, even by people you’d think should understand. I’ve guided avid hunters who when hunting will wear camouflage clothing to hide their presence, but when fishing chose a bright lime-green jacket — “It was on sale!” I don’t normally judge the shopping habits of my clients, but at that point, I do question their priorities on the water. Wearing clothing that blends into your environment is a good start to putting the odds in your favor when chasing spooky fish.
One day on the carp f lats, I tested out two different colors of shirts, one a brownish tan and the other a sky-blue color. That’s about as scientific as I get in my research. I would put on the tan shirt and head out onto a flat, trying to sneak up on a carp, and then go back to shore, switch shirts, and do the same thing with another carp. With the blue shirts, I tended to get a few feet closer to the fish than with the tan shirts, which I attribute to the fact that the sky is blue, and I matched it just a little bit better with the blue shirt than with the tan shirt. While I can’t prove this theory, I also haven’t disproven it, either.
Another aspect of stealth that many anglers ignore is their choice of reels and lines. This is yet another lesson I’ve learned from chasing carp in calm, shallow waters where they are extremely spooky. I noticed a marked change in how close I was able to get to them when I switched from a shiny reel to one with a dull matte finish. Fishing with a highly reflective reel will do you no favors when targeting spooky fish.
The importance of lines often gets overlooked when chasing fish that are extra wary about their surroundings. Although though I mostly fish weight-forward-style lines, a line with a short, fat head is of little use when the fish are even remotely spooky — although helpful for achieving distance, aggressively weight-forward lines don’t have great accuracy, and the splash from the head will likely frighten every fish in the area. For spooky fish, I instead prefer a line with a head of at least 40 feet and that has a less abrupt transition to the running line. These characteristics enhance both the delicacy of my presentation and also my ability to place the fly exactly where I want it to go. An alternative is to fish a lighter line, if choice of fly and fish size allows it.
Another aspect of lines that you need to consider is the shadow they cast when in the air or on the water. Thicker heads obviously create a larger shadow than skinnier lines, and I have started using clear lines in situations when I need an extra stealthy presentation. Clear lines still cast a bit of shadow, but considerably less of a one than a solid-color fly line, and it’s something I think can really make a difference on those difficult days with no wind and the fish up shallow, when you need every bit of help you can get.
Walk the Line
As I’ve matured in this weird world of fly fishing, I realize more and more how the selection of f lies and leaders are often overprioritized, when in reality, none of those things matters if you’ve spooked the fish before you get to them. I’ve also learned that if you approach in a stealthier manner, you can sometimes get away with heavier tippets and beefier flies, since the fish are less likely to be aware of your presence than if you’d approached in a noisier way, say in a bass boat traveling 70 miles an hour. I always laugh when I see the “super pro bro” conventional-gear bass anglers roll up on a fishing spot with the motor going full speed, waves crashing all over the place, noise and clunking on the boat — and then they pull out a light spinning rod with 2-pound test mono and a small worm. Maybe if they’d approached the spot a bit more quietly, they’d have gotten away with a heavier line and wouldn’t have broken off that big fish they hooked. It’s the reason why I often outfish conventional-gear anglers in bass boats when I quietly sneak up on the bass from the shore with my fly rod.
The more you control the variables that you can control, the better prepared you’ll be for the many, many variables you cannot control when out on the water. You can always be stealthier, and I still haven’t found a fishery where paying more attention to approach and presentation than to gear hurts my chances for catching a fish. And a theory not proven otherwise is sound science.