Dan
So what you're saying is maybe a 3 wt with a 9x tippet, small streams so you can see it, maybe some of those alpine streams up in the Cascades that are full of smaller westslope cutthroat. Keep the loop tight and make sure the line is straight out before it settles on the water. Don't fish any fast water, just keep to the pools and eddies and make sure you get a good, clean, drag-free drift.
Just wanted to make sure I was following your answer.
Hi Dan,
My discourse was more obscure than I'd thought. What I meant by
"act of faith" was only that since my 73-year-old eyes
often provide only the vaguest notion of precisely where my midge
might be drifting at any given moment, and since that stage of the
process describes an activity that can occur only after the end of my
7x leader has somehow after eight tries finally found its own
miraculous way through the eye of the fly, why in the world should
fishing a #32 be all that different from a #20? The key word
here is "precisely." I know of course where I meant to
cast, and I persist in having faith that that's about where it is at
a given moment, after factoring in wind and stream vectors. But most
fish are caught on relatively short casts, and when fishing midges
one is usually casting to rising fish, so all that's really required
is to watch for the bulge/sip in a likely area. The good news is that
once a fish is on the odds of landing him are in fact better than if
he's on a #14, maybe because -- in my experience, at least -- it
often takes a seriously heavy fish a few seconds before he seems to
recognize he's actually been hooked by so insignificant a threat, so
there's much less chance either of a break-off on the strike or of
the near-instantaneous ejection of a mouthful of feathers.
As for "smaller cutthroats," let's face it, they are
members of the lowest of the vertebrates, just a beat or so brighter
than brookies on the duh! scale. I've had both come back from under a
rock and hit a caddis nymph a third or fourth time, all of which
would seem to indicate that the state of denial is not limited to us
superior humans. One of Don's midges would be wasted on them,
even if the tree behind me didn't eat it first. As for the
"state of Grace" part, anyone who's watched a beached brown
trout of twenty inches or so swim off after having had that
(barbless!) midge gently removed from its jaw will know what that
means. (All together now: Amen.)
DanW
