Essential spring creek skills | Hatch Magazine

I guess I should blame my high school buddy Mark. I had stumbled along without a mentor in my early fly fishing adventures, fishing small mountain streams on family camping trips but most of my early fly fishing was spent dragging a Woolly Worm behind a primitive float tube in southern Idaho’s desert reservoirs. When Mark and I discovered our common interest in fly fishing, we started to look for new destinations. “I heard about a stream up by Picabo,” he said one day. “It’s called Silver Creek.”

My first look into a real spring creek was a life changing moment. The clear water, flowing weeds, emerging insects, and the trout rising to feed on them had me immediately mesmerized. For a few seasons, the selective rainbows of Silver Creek paid little attention to my limited angling skills and more than once reduced me to literal tears. But by my college years, my casting and tying skills improved, and in possession of a well-worn copy of Selective Trout and a Volkswagen Beetle that took me to Silver Creek on almost a daily basis, I eventually figured a few things out.

Since those days, my path in life has followed along the courses of many spring creeks in Idaho and Oregon and California. After an aborted academic career taught me that teaching was my real passion, I was lucky to make the transition to director of both the Orvis and the Mel Krieger fishing school programs in California. Almost 40 years ago, I made to the move to Montana and settling in Livingston, near the Paradise Valley spring creeks—Armstrong, Nelson’s and DePuy’s—was not a coincidence. After a number of years as a fly shop manager, I have been a full-time outfitter and guide, with most of my personal guiding for the last 20+ years on the local spring creeks.

I have been honored in the last few seasons to join the crew of instructors teaching for Todd Tanner’s School of Trout program. We just finished a group trip for alums of the School of Trout classes to the Paradise Valley spring creeks, and it gave me an opportunity to quiz students and local guides about what makes spring creek fishing different from other fly fishing experiences. For me, this is most easily viewed through the lens of a guide. If a client is new to the spring creek fishing, what are the skills I hope they have already learned to make the experience more interesting and productive? From a different perspective, what skills do I regularly have to teach to anglers who may have considerable fishing experience but have not fished spring creeks before?

What makes a spring creek different?

The first step is to make sure anglers understand what makes spring creeks different in terms of the physical environment. Since the source of the stream is an underground spring, a spring creek enjoys stable flows and stable temperatures. By contrast, freestone streams fed by rain and snowmelt typically vary widely in flows and temperatures with changing seasons. A spring source also means clear water and slower flows. Because of the lower gradient, slow flows are matched with finer bottom material—the bottom of most spring creeks is made of finer gravels, silt and weedbeds, rather than cobble and boulders. With a few exceptions, this substrate harbors mostly smaller food forms.

Stable flows and stable temperatures, combined with dissolved minerals make spring creeks an ideal environment for aquatic insects and crustaceans and plants. But the narrow temperature regime restricts the types of insects that thrive there—the result is lots of bugs (and a rich food supply for the fish), but a limited range of types. In this environment, fish often feed selectively to the dominant food source.

Spring creek challenges and how to meet them

These environmental factors set up the challenges for the spring creek angler: slow clear water makes for spooky fish and the need for stealth and a good drifts, consistent hatches means the fish can be picky and fly selection is critical, and small artificials can be a pain to see and need to be matched with lighter tippets.

So let’s meet on an imaginary spring creek and I’ll offer some advice as we go. The first thing we need to talk about is how to approach a rising or visible fish or even just a promising stretch of water. I know you are excited to start fishing, but slow down. Before you enter the water or think about making your first cast, take some time to watch and observe. Resist the temptation to charge after the first riseform you see. Watch for subtle or sporadic rises. When moving into position, move slowly and stay as low as possible. If you can fish effectively without getting in the water, that will minimize the chances of alerting the fish to your presence. If you wade, do it very slowly in slower water. If you are pushing a wake or can hear yourself as you wade, you are moving too quickly. Approaching the fish involves more than just getting in casting range—consider what sort of presentation cast will be necessary to achieve a good drift and plan your angle of approach accordingly.

Now let’s talk about presentation. Presentation starts with an accurate cast. For an angler new to spring creeks, you’ll find the difficulty is often with short casts. Getting close to a fish with a careful approach is usually wise—the angler can observe details of the fish’s feeding behavior, see the fish’s reaction to the fly, and being close can help refine the timing of the hook set. But a close approach is useless if the caster can’t get the fly accurately to the fish at short range.

Most casters practice at medium distances on the lawn and can produce a reasonable loop at 30 feet. But unless an instructor has shown you how to adjust your casting stroke for shorter casts, the result is usually an open loop that kills any chance at accuracy. Add in a little breeze, and that “easy” cast at 15-20’ turns into a disaster of open loops, inaccurate presentations, and spooked fish.

Given a solid foundation of casting accuracy, the reach cast is the most useful presentation cast in the spring creek angler’s toolkit. Presenting dry flies and surface emergers down and across with a reach cast allows the angler to position the line and leader butt upstream of the drifting fly, and can eliminate much of the drag that limits success on a spring creek.

Good presentations are dependent on well-designed leaders. Pay attention to the leader—a taper that turns over properly, sufficient tippet length, good knots—will result in far more takes and landed fish. Given lighter tippet sizes, be sure to tie good knots and test them frequently.

If the hatch offers a multitude of rising or visibly feeding fish, pick one target at a time. Flock shooting works no better on trout than on gamebirds.

Don’t lead the fish too far. Anglers thinking about a delicate presentation tend to lead the fish way more than necessary. If the fly is presented too far upstream, accuracy suffers, and the “sweet spot” in the drift is going away by the time the fly reaches the fish.

Wrapping up

A thoughtful approach, accurate casting, and a drag free presentation are skills that will make anyone a more successful spring creek angler. But just as important as those skills are the mindset you take into a day of spring creek fishing. This is not fishing that is rewarded by making the maximum number of casts and covering every inch of water. The fishing is based on the natural rhythms of streamflows, insect emergences and trout activity and feeding behavior. As a young teenager, I became proficient with ultralight spinning tackle, but from my very first attempts at fly fishing, I had an important insight. I loved catching fish, but when I was spinfishing, I felt I was forcing the fish to play my game. When I began to fly fish, I recognized it gave me an opportunity to enter the fish’s world—if I did it right, I could become a part of the natural processes around me. Spring creek fishing offers a scenario where careful observation and awareness and thoughtfulness are rewarded, both in terms of productivity but also a deep enjoyment of my time on the water.