Winter Thoughts on Trout Fishing again in 2010

Someplace in my early 20's I started to fish, at least once a year, for trout. As a kid I joined my dad to pluck sun fish and perch out of lakes and a few streams with bobbers and worms.

In my early 20's shortly after I'd started seminary I picked up a fly rod. A true shame, looking back, is that I lived a few yards from Gilmore Creek on the West End of Winona for 3 years and I wasn't ever smart enough to pick up a fly rod once in those 3 years. A couple years later a buddy invited me along fishing with his dads old hip boots and rod at a place called Pickwick. In one trip I was hooked. I saw more fish than I could count and I wanted to know how to catch them.

Over the past dozen or so years I've lived in trout country and I've lived a couple hours drive away from the cold water spring fed streams of Winona County there in Minnesota's driftless region. I've explored some neat spots and had some luck mostly with beaded nymphs and a couple times with dry-flies. Looking back it's been pretty good, not all that remarkable but pretty good just the same. I have had one regular time to go fishing, Mother's Day Weekend. Year after year, except when my wife was very pregnant, I've kept on fishing with one buddy and a few others who tag along for the campfire and the story telling.

Tonight, living out here on the Prairie where it's just too cold to chase pheasants, it's time to start planning for 2010 and reviewing a few discoveries of the past year.

1. I got out trout fishing 7 days last year. That's a pretty good record for a dad with 3 daughters 6 and under who is still married to the mother of those 3 daughters. My goal for 2010 is to teach the older 2 how to fish (at least with nymphs) so they can join me some of the time.
2. I've had success catching fish on a light weight spinning rod with meps, worms, and rapala's but for some reason I want to catch trout on a fly rod. I think it's the challenge of always learning and always trying to add a new skill or technique for each year that keeps me turning back to the fly rod rather than the spinner.
3. Trout are almost always feeding. I used to think trout were just feeding on the surface or in seams in riffles; but some good reading this winter has convinced me that trout are almost always eating. The key is to figure out what they're actually eating not what's under a rock or floating on the surface.
   
4. For some reason nymphs work best for me. Maybe its my lack patience, maybe its the streams I've been fishing. Maybe it's my inability to match the hatch. I don't know yet and I guess I'll have to keep on fishing for a long time to figure out.
5. I learned a couple things from a wise man who used to be from Michigan this year. He now calls the prairie home just like me, but it's good to have a wise
   

• watch the stream. The trout are there; so before you tie on a fly watch them.
  
• use 2 or 3 nymphs at a time on the same leader, but don't fish with a nymph right on the bottom of the leader. Put a weight on the end and the nymphs end up in the right place and you don't snag one on the bottom.
• be patient; but don't stand in one place for ever. If you've spooked the trout don't flog the water, either wait a while for the trout to start feeding or move on to a new spot.
  

Now I am just waiting for a chance to get a line in the water again and see if I've learned anything at all. Even better than that I am hopeful to see if I can teach anything about fishing to my girls.