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Where the Trout Are

Sometimes the trick on the forks is to stay in your game, to stay sharp, and not let the endless parade of smaller fish lull you to complacency

By Rob Breeding

On some rivers, it’s obvious where trout hold. The old fish-finding mantra goes something like this:

Foam is home … wood is good … rocks rock … made in the shade.

I heard that years ago on a podcast by fly fishing guru Tom Rosenbauer. I don’t know if he came up with that phrase, or was just repeating this essential wisdom every fly fisher knows. The mnemonic device is clever, but if you need to be told to fish foam lines you’re either a newbie or a basket case who has little business on the water.

On most trout streams, this axiom holds up. Fly fishers are drawn to the foam lines in the seams where currents collide, whether it be an eddy rubbing up against the main flow of the river, or where structure like rocks or woody debris breaks up the homogenous surface.

And shade, well, any midsummer trout angler gets that. Fish are light sensitive. They know they’re exposed in bright, overhead light. The fish cast hard shadows against the stream bottom this time of year. This makes them an easy mark for predators in the sky, such as osprey.

So trout stay out of the sun. Drifting the Middle Fork the other day that was made clear not far downstream from Moccasin Creek. The first nice shady spot on the run along the railroad track bank and boom, fish No. 1. It was a 10-inch cutthroat, big as far as trout on the forks go.

That’s not to say there aren’t bigger fish to be caught. But things are anything but ordinary on both the Middle and North forks. The larger cutthroats here are migratory, generally moving up from the lower river in the valley. Sometimes they’ve moved all the way up from the lake. The fish seek good spawning habitat, or, this time of year, are recovering from the spawn and working their way downstream.

On a “normal” trout stream, you know where the big fish are. When you float, you bounce from one trout-holding spot to another, from boulders to logs, fishing the foam lines trailing off the structure. If there’s shade falling on the water, all the better.

You still fish structure on the forks. It’s just that most of the fish you pull out of the likely spots are little guys. In some holes, you can post up and catch fish after fish, for as long as you linger. Occasionally you’ll catch a bigger cutthroat from one of these spots. By the way, by bigger I mean trout in the 15- to 20-inch class. The only trout bigger than this on the forks are bulls. If bigger Mackinaw are running around up the forks, I haven’t hooked one.

The best place to catch the bigger cutties seems to be the place you least expect them. The kid hooked a nice fish on the North Fork the other day, about 16 inches, in a run I’d long ago given up fishing because it was so unproductive. The cutthroat was in one of those spots where the river cuts down to bedrock, habitat that’s entirely unsuited to trout. It’s pretty barren, actually, but there was a pocket of holding water. The fish was probably resting up when the fly drifted right over its head.

Sometimes the trick on the forks is to stay in your game, to stay sharp, and not let the endless parade of smaller fish lull you to complacency. There are bigger fish here.

When they make a surprise appearance, you need to be ready.