Fish on Every Cast

"I must have got a fish on every cast!" A statement that almost every fisherman has used at one time or another to describe a good day of fishing. A fisherman's honesty can be dubious at best when it comes to the subject of fish size and numbers, but a statement suggesting that every cast resulted in fish, seriously? To quote my favorite line from Super Troopers, "I'll believe that when me shit turns purple and smells like rainbow sherbet."

Now let me tell you how I had my day where I nearly caught a fish on every cast. First off, this was on public waters not private so I wasn't fishing in a private puddle of water over-loaded with big-dumb fish (not that I am against big-dumb fish). I was fishing on a 400 acre lake during a strong chironomid (midge) hatch.

Midges have 3 stages of life-cycle that trout care about: larval, pupal, and adult stages. When they are hatching the emerging midges are in the pupal stage. In the pupal stage the midges suspend just off the mud bottom of the lake gathering air bubbles for their vertical ascent. They remain suspended for an appreciable amount of time, which is a behavior that trout key into because the trout can leisurely swim along the bottom slipping in midges by the thousands. (The photo to the right is a few midge pupa retrieved with the use of a throat pump from a trout's mouth.  Notice the silvery luminescence of the body due to trapped air bubbles.)  I have caught fish during an intense midge hatch that spewed black clouds of midge pupa from their mouth as they fought to be netted. Chironomids individually might be diminutive, but by en mass they present a good protein rich meal for the fish. Think about a kernel of popcorn; not much by when eaten by itself, but if you eat the entire jumbo bucket at the movies you will be full!

Midge pupa don't move very fast so presenting them with a fly can be challenging using traditional tactics. Tradition would suggest using a steady sinking line with a weighted fly and retrieving the fly horizontally with any number of retrieves. Just in the past few years fishing with a strike indicator has become popular in this situation (or at least in North America; the Brits apparently have been doing it for a while). The key setup includes a strike indicator with a weighted midge pupa pattern (or two) suspended at the depth of the water minus a few inches (to raise the fly off the bottom). The indicator is for all intents and purposes a bobber and any movement of it indicates an encounter of the piscatorial variety. (The photo to the up/left shows how fun indicator fishing can be when the fishing is good.)  The thing to fishing with an indicator is that a single cast and retrieve can take up to 5 minutes. It is slow fishing requiring spades of patience. However, when you are in the right place at the right time with the right rig then you can almost hook a fish on every cast. See where I am going with this?

So back to my little 400 acre lake. Once the midge hatch got going around 10am until the time it finished around 2:30pm I nearly hooked a fish on every cast. I certainly did not land a fish on every cast, but over this time interval I did almost get a bite on every cast. So maybe my fish-on-every-cast claim had to be qualified with a few other factors (time interval and slow cast rate). I am a fisherman after all and as we established earlier am not to be trusted on matters of the fish unless...is that rainbow sherbet I smell?