(The Shokuryoshi Experiment)
Throughout the first of these articles I have mentioned the abnormally snowy winter that we had early in 2023. I’m sure I’ll mention it again at some point. Part of the reason it’s been mentioned is that it really set a different tone for fishing throughout the year. The added challenge of high flows thrown into a year where I was already planning to experiment a bit more helped me to be a bit more flexible as an angler.
One of the things that brought success in the spring of 2023 was fishing larger, brightly-colored kebari. With the high flows and low water clarity, I found a yellow Oni-style kebari to be the fly that outperformed all of my go-to patterns from previous years.
I imagine a big part of this success is due to the fly’s easy to spot presence in the water. To capitalize on that, I spent quite a bit of my sessions fishing it subsurface in order to put it within a closer range of hungry trout.
I noticed that the trout didn’t fill out the creeks as much as they had in the past, and were holding in more protected areas where the flows weren’t so high. I was getting more bites closer to the banks, and in tail-outs of smaller pools. I was using more downstream presentations to put the large profile of this kebari into those tail-outs, and using more of a “tuck cast" to set up a similar presentation when casting to the near banks upstream. On the rare occasion I was able to find fish holding in a spot across the flows that I could keep my fly anchored for a moment, I was often using my casting stroke to put the line up-current of the fly as well.
Surface takes were rare early in the season, and I didn’t really start employing too many of my normal kebari patterns or presentations that I use in the spring until closer to summer.Â
The high flows carried on beyond spring. As the seasons changed I felt that the problem solving I was doing to try to increase my catch rates in the conditions I was faced with was opening up my eyes to a lot of aspects in my angling practices that were in need of further inspection. It’s not to say that they were bad, but looking at them from a more critical standpoint really helped me to dial in some habits and drop some of the ones that were slowing me down.
With the season and my recording for this year just starting, it will be interesting to see how this year goes in comparison to last year’s spring. We have a lot less snowpack this year, and I assume we won’t be dealing with as high of flows, and if we do, I imagine they won’t persist as long as last year. I will be sure to include updates as to how this year is going mixed in with the other articles that detail my experiences of 2023.