The Inside Passage

One of the curious things this time of the year is being on the water, pick one - any one, and having the place  to my / ourselves. All fall, wherever Amelia & I fish, we haven't seen a person, nor a sign of anyone having been around recently. The fishing has been ok to pretty good on the streams. One of the reasons for absenteeism on these streams might just be because the lakes have been so good this fall since the weather smartened up. I was at one lake on Sunday. I pulled up to the parking lot to find it completely empty and was on the lake an hour before another fellow pulled in. "Big difference from yesterday," he said. It was cooler, cloudy, and a chinook ridge was building out west, all of which conspired to keep the boatmen hatch away. We need a nice, warm, mid day sun for that to happen. But that's not what he was talking about. Apparently the day prior, on which those exact conditions favourable to boatmen coming off in droves, had been a zoo. The parking lot was full and everyone was catching fish at will. "Just had to cast to a rise and you had a 50 - 50 chance yesterday." Before he arrived I'd landed a doz or so in an hour and had experienced something like that. But as his boat touched the water, the lake, that had seen a few fish rising, when quiet. For 1/2 hr the lake was devoid of rises. The question he and I both faced was whether we each wanted to catch fish badly enough to change tactics. Within an hour, he left. I moved locations and found some more rising fish at the mouth to a back bay. But, true to form of any small lake with a finite number of trout, you could tell that they had been worked over the day before. Watching for rises and cruisers waking the shallows, each fish sighted was cast to. The fish key in on dropping boatmen with their lateral lines, sensing the vibration and turning to go investigate. But most of the fish simply refused at the last second no matter the pattern, size, presentation, nor depth. Then, all went quiet again. Fair enough.
The chinook arch grew thicker and darker out west. The rising fish slowly went away again and I again faced a choice. Go home or change tactics. I wasn't going subsurface as I simply didn't want to watch a leech (or anything, for that matter) hanging from a bobber that day. Sometimes you just want optics.

I keyed on the inside passage, moving my boat into the weeds and pads to focus on the thin strip of very shallow, open water 1 to 10 feet from shore. And I waited. Every 5 minutes a fish would shark into the shallows, its wake a dead give away of its presence. I tied on a caddis and cast to these fish in 10" of water. Even though very few of these fish were surface feeding, they were much easier prey at this game, and the optics were amazing. I stayed right up until dark, moving around from strip to strip of inside passage, moving into position and casting at sighted fish waking through the shallows. I caught quite a few more. The questions I always face is that while more fish can be caught with other tactics, which one do you want to do, how many fish do you need to catch, and what makes me happy - what do I enjoy from a day's fishing? There simply are many days where other tactics would clearly prove better, but maybe catching fewer, sighted fish on dry flies in shallow water would fulfill my day. And it did.  :)