This week you’re getting a double dose of posts straight from The Little Red Book of Fly Fishing – a new collection of 250 nuggets of fly fishing wisdom from Kirk Deeter and the late, great Charlie Meyers. We’re lucky enough to have gotten permission to post some excerpts from the book – read on!
Our tip for the day is about how to find structure in an even-flowing river.
If you find this kind of this useful, you can pick up your copy of The Little Red Book of Fly Fishing right here.
Depressing Advice
The subject wasn’t really personal hygiene, although it might have been for a wet-behind-the-gills angler grubbing his way along a series of Montana rivers in the early 1970s. Faced with the dual challenge of my first float trip and the mysteries of the lower Madison River, notorious as the “world’s longest riffle” for its lack of distinguishing characteristics, I presented my dilemma to Lee Wulff.
Noted for his economy of speech, the legendary angler answered me with a single word: bathtubs. The wisdom of this odd advice soon became clear, however. In what appears to be an even-flowing river, look for holes in the surface. Cavities in the riverbed that form a resting place out of the main flow are echoed on the surface as slight depressions.
For an angler zipping along in a drift boat, the task lies in spotting these depressions well ahead, in time to prepare a suitable cast. You’ll recognize them as low spots on the surface, a direct reflection of the bathtub effect immediately below.
[…] Depressing Advice […]