Troutbitten

This season is a skills series about fishing for trout after the sun goes down. And for the next six episodes, we’ll break down the night game into an outline that roughly follows the topics of a series that I published on Troutbitten, titled, Night Fishing for Trout.

My night fishing friends are joining me for this episode -- Josh, Trevor and Austin. These are the only night fishing companions I’ve ever had. Because the truth is, most anglers simply will not fish in the dark very often. But these guys do. And it takes a certain kind of angler to pursue trout into the night.

What kind of angler fishes after dark? What are their motivations and rewards? That's our first topic in this episode.

Where does night fishing for trout happen? Where are the best places to catch trout after dark? That's our second topic in this episode.

And lastly, what kind of gear and tactics will we cover in this series? What are some of the odd things about night fishing we might encounter?

This season, the six-part Night Fishing for Trout Skills skills series from Troutbitten, is an in depth look into the game of fishing for trout after dark. We hope you enjoy it.

Resources

READ: Troutbitten | Category | Night Fishing
READ: Troutbitten | Night Fishing for Trout -- Fight or Flight
PODCAST: Troutbitten | An Introduction to Night Fishing for Trout -- S3, Ep14
PODCAST: Troutbitten | Night Fishing and the Mouse Emerger Concept -- S1, Ep3


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We’re in between podcast season, and it's time for an update about what’s going on with Troutbitten. My wife, Becky, joins me to talk about the past, the present and the near future.

The summer Troutbitten Shop leader sale launches on Monday morning, July 31st. All Troutbitten leaders will be back in stock: Harvey, Standard, Thin and Micro Thin Mono Rigs, Full Kits and Standard Sighters. Also in the shop are new hats and tee shirts in collaboration with New Trail Brewing Company.

My Guide Schedule for fall of '24 has been full for a while now. And my spring season is a little over half booked up. I will open dates for fall '24 on September 20th, next month. Bill and Austin will have available dates for this fall pretty soon. So if you are still looking for a date this fall, be in touch.

The Troutbitten YouTube channel continues to grow fast. I've spent a lot of time learning to film and edit, and I'm working on a Fish and Film series that should be out by the beginning of October. These are first-person-style videos that also mix in other camera angles. These are videos that simply show the fishing and the experience of being on the river, highlighting the decisions made to be versatile and to meet fish on their own terms. Josh Darling and I will continue to publish videos every other week. Those videos are in one of these categories: Troutbitten Tips, Fish and Film, Troutbitten Fly Box, Fishing the Mono Rig.

The Troutbitten Podcast continues with Season 8, beginning on August 20th. This is a six part Skills Series covering Night Fishing for Trout. After that, we’ll take a couple weeks off until Season 9 of the Troutbitten Podcast begins on October 15 and runs until Christmas time.


Resources

SHOP: Troutbitten | The Troutbitten Shop
GUIDE: Troutbitten | Troutbitten Guided Fishing Trips
VIDEOS: Troutbitten | Troutbitten Videos
PODCASTS: Troutbitten | The Troutbitten Podcast

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Every Troutbitten regular knows about Sloop. We’ve referred to our friend on nearly every podcast, especially in the last few seasons, as it’s become a running contest to see how we can sneak in a Sloop John B reference.

So we’re excited to have John here. Because what we all find so rewarding about this life on the water are the friendships. We form deep bonds with people because they are . . . fishermen. Because they too are captivated by the trout, by the places trout take us and by the refinement of tactics required to catch a wild trout.

Our friends are at the heart of it all. And really, that’s what we’re adding in tonight — another friend, and possibly the deepest friend to Troutbitten, if we consider how all this started. Sloop tied it all together from the beginning.

Here are good stories and fun with our friend, John Burgos (Sloop).

Resources

READ: Troutbitten | How It Started
READ: Troutbitten | Fishing With Friends

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We're back for the annual airing of grievances, here to call out what's wrong in the fly fishing industry.

Some of our grievances are lighthearted silliness that doesn't really matter, but it’s fun to roast or to call out. But there’s another kind of grievance too. Because a lot of the stuff going on in the fly fishing industry isn’t really good for anyone — or maybe it’s only good for a few. Because the industry — and by that I mean you, me, the fly fishing companies, and all the media around it — picks up trends. Then it pushes and pulls anglers in that direction. And sometimes, what is served up doesn’t benefit the average angler. It’s not helpful.

So there are problems. And this episode is for highlighting some of the worst. Because it's fair to call balls and strikes, and because it helps to acknowledge that things could be better and try to make a change.

Resources

PODCAST: Troutbitten | The Airing of Grievances, S3, Ep13

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This episode is about big trout -- what they mean to us, why we chase them, and how catching a top tier wild trout often leaves a bookmark in the story of our fishing lives.

We love big trout because they give us the shakes. Because they elude us. Because they are rare. And because fooling a top tier trout serves as an accomplishment that we know comes from persistence and from knowledge gained over seasons of fishing.

Time. That’s what it always comes down to. Because big trout don’t show up every day. The rarity of the occasion often puts the capstone on a special trip, and these fish serve as icons in our history. They’re something to look back on, to share with trusted friends, or divide part of our life into what occurred before a big fish and what happened after.

Because pursuing legendary fish takes us on a journey like none other, leading us into places unimagined and providing moments that bring a vibrancy to our daily life.

READ: Troutbitten | The Shakes, and Why We Love Big Trout
READ: Troutbitten | What Does It Take to Catch a Big Trout?
READ: Troutbitten | Some Days Are Diamonds, Some Days Are Rocks
READ: Troutbitten | Wild vs Stocked -- The Hierarchy of Trout in Pennsylvania

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“That’s Not Fly Fishing.” How many times have you heard this at the bar or seen someone write it on social media? When the way you are fishing isn’t up to someone’s standards, when it doesn’t align with their own preferences, it seems that this frequent argument comes out easily — That’s not fly fishing!

Of course, there is no single definition for what fly fishing is. The fly rod is a tool. Flies are the bait. And how anglers choose to use them is where personal creativity comes in. It’s that inventiveness and room for imagination that makes fly fishing so attractive to us in the first place.

How can we do things better? How can we use these tools to catch more trout?

Every angler draws their own lines for what fly fishing is. And this episode is not just for talking through what fly fishing might be and where each of us might draw the lines. Instead, we’d like to acknowledge the absurdity of the lines themselves — the decisions we make about what is fly fishing and what is not.

How can someone be so adamantly against tight line tactics, but gladly fish a bobber and split shot all day? This makes no sense.

How can you be all in on tungsten beads but claim that adding split shot makes it not fly fishing?

Likewise, how can you be against a ball jighead on a streamer but have a full box of dumbell eyes? Is it because Bob Clouser told everyone it’s okay?

These absurdities, and these questions are what we’re here to talk about tonight. There’s a lot to this one, and we have plenty of conversations with a full house.

Resources

READ: Troutbitten | Where the Lines Are Drawn
READ: Troutbitten | Fly Fishing the Mono Rig Q&A -- Lines, Rigging and the Skeptics
READ: Troutbitten | No Limits -- Use Every Type of Weight Available

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This episode is a brief pause in season seven of the podcast to share something that I published to Troutbitten in the early years.

The last two weeks have been a whirlwind of emotion and activity. The days were filled with energy and adrenaline, as my youngest son's Little League baseball team won the league championship. They battled through two weeks of playoffs and took the title in the last series, where every game was decided in the final inning.

I've coached Little League for nine years, and this was my last. My youngest son is twelve, and this was his senior year of Little League.

To see it all end in such dramatic fashion was a gift. But the biggest emotions, from caring about something so deeply, are always a gift, whether that's in victory or defeat, love or loss.

When the Knights were on the edge of winning or losing the championship series, the day before the final game, I kept thinking about an experience I had with one of the largest trout I've ever lost. Years ago, I wrote that into a story on Troutbitten.

This episode is a l reading of a story that I first published on July 15, 2015, titled, This Is The End.

It's also a little about baseball.

Resources

READ: Troutbitten | This Is The End
READ: Troutbitten | Some Days Are Diamonds, Some Days Are Rocks
READ: Troutbitten | Category | Stories

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What’s the best way to carry your gear? Should you use a vest, a chest pack, hip pack, sling pack or something else?

How you choose to carry gear is a personal and situational choice. It has everything to do with what you need to carry, and how far you like to walk. Do you need to carry extra layers and a raincoat, and how many tactics do you want to be ready for? Streamers, nymphs, dry flies and wets . . . or just dries?

We have more choices than ever before, but it pays to think about efficiency when selecting a carrying system. Because a big part of being versatile on the water is having easy access to whatever you need, right when you need it.

We Cover the Following

• Best to have one system or many?
• Carrying a net, water, and other heavy items
• Minimalist setups
• The disaster of a sling pack
• The benefit of everything up front
• Storage and convenience
• Large pockets or many pockets
• What about getting wet?
• . . .  and much more

Resources

READ: Troutbitten | Pack or Vest? Why I'm a Vest Guy
READ: Troutbitten | 100 Day Gear Review -- Simms G3 Guide Vest
LISTEN: Troutbitten | PODCAST -- The Efficiencies that Waste Your Fishing Time
LISTEN: Troutbitten | PODCAST -- The Versatile Angler

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The leader might be the most important piece of gear that we have -- more consequential than the rod, the fly line, or even the fly itself. And of course, at the tail end of the leader is the tippet.

All anglers must make decisions about tippet every day. What size and strength? What type of tippet? And how long should the tippet section be? Because, what might seem like a small decision, can have a big impact on the presentation of the fly, leading to failure or success.

Some of these decisions are almost right and wrong. Meaning, there’s a way to do it that works and a way that just does not work. However, there’s a lot more room for personal preference, style and situations in these tippet decisions than there is right or wrong.

In this episode, the Troutbitten crew talks through these tippet decisions around the scenarios of fishing streamers, fishing dry flies and fishing nymphs.


We Cover the Following

• Fluorocarbon vs nylon
• Fly size and tippet selection
• The importance of flexibility in tippet
• The importance of turnover in tippet
• Dry fly leader tapers in the tippet section
• Durability and abrasion resistance
• Do you really need 8X?
• Are trout leader shy?
• Tippet selection for improved sink rate
• . . . and more

Resources

READ: Troutbitten | The George Harvey Leader Design
READ: Troutbitten | Why You Might Not Need of the Crutch of 6X and Smaller Tippets
READ: Troutbitten | Fly Shop  Fluorocarbon to Expensive? Try Invizx
READ: Troutbitten | You Need Turnover

 

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This podcast is about small stream fishing — specifically, what we love about the places, the fish, the tactics and the experience of fishing smaller trout waters.

These are trout streams that are no wider than the dirt road that you drove in on. And for every blue ribbon trout river, for every destination water that is raved about in the guidebooks and makes every angler’s bucket list, there are numerous tributaries to these main rivers that are mostly overlooked. We see this everywhere we go — small streams get no respect. They’re mostly an afterthought.

We fish small streams for the adventure, for the exploration and the experience. We fish smalls streams in search of wild trout in wild places. And we fish small streams because the challenges of fly fishing these waters teaches us everything we ever need to know about fishing bigger rivers.

We Cover the Following

• Finding solitude
• Reaching back into our own history
• Wild and native fish
• Leader tips for small waters
• Rod lengths for small waters
• The purity of experience
• Cooler temps, with more shade
• Willing trout in smaller waters
• Scenery
• . . . and more

Resources

READ: Troutbitten | Right Here
READ: Troutbitten | Where it All Started
READ: Troutbitten | Hardbody
READ: Troutbitten | VIDEO - The River Doesn't Owe You Anything

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