Description:
The Fork. A Holy Grail for fly-fishers, the place to make short, delicate casts to large finicky trout. Also a place of incomparable frustration: monster rainbows sipping everything in sight except for your fly. Author Mike Lawson, the former owner and operator of the Henry's Fork Anglers fly shop, has fished the entire 100-mile stretch for four decades. His guidebook, as a result, is much more than the standard breakdown of where and what to fish; it's a detailed and systematic approach to learning the strategies that work on this diverse and difficult piece of water. Explaining tactics for the challenging spring creek-like Railroad Ranch section of the river at Harriman State Park, Lawson writes: In all seriousness, when the tiniest of the tiny flies are out, the Royal Wulff can be quite effective.... You need to get in a rhythm to coincide with the feeding rhythm of the trout. Take time to observe the trout's feeding pattern before you lay a bunch of casts over him and alert him to your presence. Then, if you have a little size-18 Royal Wulff on your tippet, you can time your cast so the fly arrives at the trout about when he is going to rise. It gives the fish an opportunity to see something a little different, and the trout will sometimes take the odd fly. In a chapter on mayflies, Lawson offers a piece of sensible advice for fishing the river's most famous hatch, the pale morning dun: Early in the season when the weather is cool, the fish key on the duns, and you want a No-Hackle or a Thorax pattern. But in late summer, when the weather gets hot, things really change. Few of the duns stay on the water very long, so the fish focus on patterns in the surface film and just below. He goes on to forecast a daily hatch cycle to the half-hour, adjusted for weather conditions. While some strategies will be familiar to fly-fishers, much of the material here is geared specifically to the Fork. Appendices include a monthly hatch chart, popular fly patterns, photos and tying basics for 12 key patterns, and other suggested reading.
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