I think the reading of a river, according to the conditions, must determine yourself to choose the best method.
Let me explain myself.

1. the easiest case: you see any surface with rising on it, like here, a massive lenok trout is rising on yellow sedges in a secret river in Mongolia: your choice, without a doubt, dry fly!


yes, it was one of the best moment of my life...




2. There’s a well defined straight stream that is at 90% the place where grayling and trouts are waiting for some bugs to drift: logical choice, Czech nymph from downstream to upstream.




And the reward is often grateful…




3. More difficult case, the stream isn’t straight and deep enough for Czech nymph, without rising. Czech nymph wouldn’t be discreet enough. You need something smoother.



Solution, the double jeopardy weapon, called the clink and ding. prospecting the surface with a visible and quick drying fly (parachute, big CDC), and a light nymph (or two!!!)



5.The spot is really calm, and it’s the possible lair of a massive trout.


Patience will be your best weapon, and you’ll be practicing “sight fishing”, with more realistic nymphs like gammarus.



This is my point of view, but I think any fyfisher have is own vision, so feel free to comment on!

Thank-you Frenchflies, and welcome to this thread. You obviously know your rivers, and how to read them. That is what I have set out to do in my analysis of the features of a river, so that people may learn how to recognise them, and to know how the fish regard them and utilise them. There are about 10 or 12 more articles to be added to this series, so it is far from being complete.
I am sure all who read your post will learn from it, and that they will appreciate the images, especially at this time of year, when so many are waiting for the trout season to start again. I am sure they will all envy you.
A picture paints a thousand words!!. Merci beaucoup. TerryC

Thanx;

I wish I had seen thread like yours when I began flyfishing!!

But it's still useful now, because flyfishing is an endless evolution.

keep on the good work terry!

The Mysterious Pools

Of the four terms used by American angling writers to describe the main features of rivers, pools and flats are the two with which British anglers are probably most familiar. ( I will take the opportunity, here, to apologise for
the ommision of our Irish brothers of the angle from the original text. )
In the previous article in this thread, I suggested that runs are more full of mystery than riffles; now I will go further and suggest that pools are the most mysterious of all the rivers' features, particularly the deeper, darker and more heavily-shaded pools of the larger rivers. Even our fell becks have their pools and runs, scaled down versions of some of those already described and portrayed. In my own fishing of these little becks, over forty years ago, most of the challenging dry fly work was focused upon pools, some of which were no bigger than a weed pocket in a riffle on the Eamont or the Eden. I can say for certain, however, that the commonest link between pools on the larger and smaller waters was the fact that they almost invariably held the bigger trout.

On the Eden, I know of four pools which are at least 16ft in depth, three of them I have measured with float tackle and one, the Cottage Pool at Eden Brows, registered that depth on a test run in 1997 of my, then, new fish-finder. One pool on the lower Eamont had a depth of 18ft when plumbed
while chub fishing about thirty years ago, and all four mentioned could have deeper troughs or gulleys, undetected during my fishing. Only occasionally, during spells of very low, clear water, coupled with periods of bright sunshine, do we see the massive boulders, ledges and ridges which the most interesting of Eden's very large pools contain.

Depth And Flow

Fortunately, the majority of the pools on the Eden and the Eamont, our largest local rivers, have a depth and flow which permit fly fishing on parts of them, at least. At Eden Brows, as a break from salmon fishing in the 'dog days' of high summer, my old mentor and I would fish the Cottage Pool from the boat, at anchor. There is something a trifle eerie about fishing for river trout in so large an expanse of water, with such depth, and being able to approach a small pod of trout picking tit-bits from the surface amid a large raft of foam. Having one come up through the raft and engulf the dry fly was an exciting experience; but I digress in this addition to the original text, so, back to business.

Some pools, particularly those confined by rocky banks, have quite strong flows; but for the purpose of this discourse, our pools will have relatively little flow in the main body, which will be deeper than the run which
enters it. Such pools have less aeration than riffles and runs, little or no weed, except in the shallows of the margins or the tails, and they will probably have silt deposits in the slackest water. The foregoing suggests that they will contain the least supplies of the larvae of up-winged flies, stoneflies and caddis; but because of the silt which many contain, they may well hold greater concentrations of midge larvae and pupae than we would find in riffles and runs. We might also find that the beneficial ranunculus of the shallower features is replaced by Canadian pondweed. The latter is not so popular with anglers, and the fallen leaves of autumn, which often form large drifts in the eddies, are undesirable because the process of their decaying removes oxygen from the water.

Besides the feeding upon midge pupae during a hatch, there will be opportunities for any resident trout to feed when up-winged duns float down the pool prior to take-off; when spent spinners litter the water's surface; during a hatch or a fall of caddis flies or during a fall of terrestrial insects, for example. But, just as we may regard riffles as being, mainly, the restaurants of the trout, we may look upon pools as being, mainly, their dormitories. It has been said that more than 80per cent of the food intake of river trout is obtained sub-surface. That suggests that the ascending nymphs, the emergers and the fully emerged duns of an up-wing hatch, for example, will have had a thorough pasting in the riffles and the cheeks of runs before any escapees reach the slacker water of the pools. Minnows, leeches, crayfish etc, and the fry of coarse fish species, where present, must offer greater opportunities for bulk feeding for the larger residents of pools, generally, unless they roam and forage -- and the observant angler may affirm that he has seen such activity.

( I digress here to illustrate a point. Many years ago, I saw, quite by chance, a large brown trout swimming up the shallow margin of a heavily screened flat on our club's Winderwath Estate water on the Eden. It was heading for the riffle upstream. I didn't know that at the time, but I saw the same fish, a week later, lying off a willow bush at the head of the deeper water into which the flat merged, and assumed it was a wanderer. Covering the fish from below was not practicable in the trouser waders that I had at the time; but I made a point of pausing occasionally to peer through the bushes while making my way down the wood that flanked the left bank of the river, on subsequent visits, and saw the fish at several points along his route, over several weeks. I never fished deliberately for that fish, but I hooked it on the dry fly one day in a good feeding lie just off the nearer of two runs fed by the riffle upstream, which supplied the Medium Olive duns on which it was feeding. I lost it!! I never tried deliberately to find it, and I never saw it again; but the experience of my brief acquaintance with that trout taught me that they forage, and that they cover a fair distance in so doing -- the fish was hooked and lost about fifty yards from his resting lie under the willow. )

Typical Movement

Many trout will lie up in pools all day, particularly the larger fish, and move out into the head streams or drop back into the tails to take advantage of an early morning, or an evening, hatch of up-wings or caddis, or a fall of spent females of either type of aquatic fly. Alternatively, they may be found, in poor light, minnowing in the marginal waters. Late evening and nocturnal movement is typical of both brown trout and sea trout, particularly in the summer months.

Relatively little fly fishing is practised on deep pools, exceptions being wet-fly fishing at dusk and after dark, or dry-fly fishing at any time when
trout are active at the surface. If more brown trout anglers fished our big, deep pools using the flies, lines and methods employed on still water fisheries, the results could be quite surprising. Our American counterparts, on their rivers, have long been less conservative in their approach to fishing the deeper water of pools than we have here in the UK. Sea trout fishers do use pretty hefty surface lures and sunken lures at times, but this series is about brown trout fishing. So, perhaps, it is better not to encourage others to over-exploit these havens, as they generally do hold the biggest trout, and, at certain times of year, they may hold a fair head of convalescent fish.

thanx t.c for these brill posts please keep them coming

taffy

.....................................................................................................................................................................................This page edited out, as it was out of sequence, my apologies. TC

River Flats

River Flats -- not an address used by tenement dwellers, but the last of the river features to be discussed in detail in this series. Anglers in the UK, both trout and salmon fishing enthusiasts, often talk about streams, and no doubt the reader has wondered why they have not been described so far. Well, they have. The term, stream, is a general reference used to cover a body of water in appreciable motion. The terms, riffle and run are, I hope, more specific and they should mean more now to the reader who is a newcomer to fishing than they did at the start of this series.

In defining a flat, it is fair to say that it is a distribution of water over a relatively wide area, while a stream is a concentration of that water into a riffle or a run, depending upon the contours of the river bed. Of course, a flat can be followed by a riffle that is every bit as wide as the flat itself, but the riffle into which the flat is transformed will be running at a faster pace, and it will be shallower.

Referring back to the text and the images describing and depicting the riffle near the mouth of the Crowdundle Beck, the riffle starts at the foot of a long flat, which is wadable for all of its area, it picks up pace as it shallows on the slope, and it is transformed into a strong run down the far bank, with an area of flat water from the cheek of the run to the marginal water at the near side of the river.

As with rivers and runs, the flows through flats can vary considerably in speed; but the ideal flat for the angler is a relatively broad expanse of water, moving at a moderate pace, and providing bank to bank access for anglers in thigh waders for much of its area. I did say the ideal flat! The relatively shallow nature of this feature, when it is unshaded, permits excellent light penetration which encourages the growth of aquatic plants. In what I would call a good year, the ideal flat would have a thirty to fifty per cent coverage of ranunculus, for the more weed, the more grazing and, hopefully, the more larvae of the olives and similar plant-loving insects, upon which fly fishing depends.

Gentle Flow

Because flats have a more gentle flow than riffles, they provide less aeration and turbulence than the latter, so they may be less likely to hold permanent, prime lies, depending upon the other features with which they may be endowed. They may not produce as many invertebrates as riffles, but they are certainly a good second best to riffles as far as the general provision of trout food is concerned. They offer some advantages over riffles, but they do have their disadvantages. Trout are far more easily observed in flats than in riffles, but the gentler flow of flats demands a more stealthy approach by the angler.

Flats become more fishable as the plants of the water and the river bank develop, providing pockets and channels in the flow, and screening the trout and their prey in the margins. The ranunculus channels of the ideal flat will attract and hold a fair head of resident trout for much of the season, as will the odd sheltering boulder or depression in the gravel bed; while the burgeoning of the leaves on overhanging bushes and trees will encourage trout to take up summer lies, in which nature provides both overhead cover and a supply of falling terrestrial insects. Trout will enjoy such lies until and unless predation or water conditions dictate otherwise.

Often, a pool tail is a flat, where the river's full width does not change, but where the water shallows and increases in speed in order to maintain the overall flow. Likewise, we see riffles run into flats, where they deepen or widen and lose pace as, again, the overall flow of the water is maintained.

In shallow rivers, in which riffles, runs and flats are the more dominant features, with few pools of significant depth, fly fishing should be at its best, but not necessarily at its most interesting. For the latter requirement to be met, the river must have pools also, and glides -- a sort of cross between a run and a flat, those gently surging stretches which look slick and glassy, for want of a better description. It is the study of all these features, knowing the part they play, knowing what each contributes in the way of food provision, shelter, comfort and protection, which enables the angler to 'read the water.' Then, having learned something about the habits of the trout and those of its prey, the angler can claim to have acquired some river-craft.

Superb. Terry thank you

Brian

fantastic terry, great reading!

Locating In-Season Trout

When trout are feeding freely at the surface, taking emerging, or fully dry, aquatic insects ( duns of the ephemeroptera species, midge 'buzzers' or adults, reed smuts, sedges or stoneflies etc ) or when they are taking various egg-laying females, spent flies or hapless, windblown terrestrials, spotting them is relatively easy,

Because the rise of a trout to a fly is more noticeable on the smoother water of flats, some anglers may look for evidence of trout feeding upon them before concentrating on the rougher water of riffles or cheeks of runs for their sport. On a number of occasions, many years ago, I was privileged to watch fellow club member of Penrith Angling Association, Howard Walton, my former woodwork teacher while I attended Samuel King's School, Alston fishing the wet fly on the Eden. He was probably the finest exponent of upstream wet fly in the club, and he often took up his stance at the top of a flat, fishing in an apparently desultory, leisurely manner, across and down, as he waited for the first duns of a hatch to appear. When the first dun on the flat was still being swallowed, Howard's attitude changed remarkably. First, there was the stealthy move up into the foot of the riffle, then his fly presentation became an energetic, forty-five degrees upstream cast with his 9ft 6in cane rod held high so that, very often, the leader alone carressed the water. The rod lead the flies down the flow, and when a rise to his flies occurred, it was seen and tightened upon before the trout felt any resistance at the hook. Often, as I said to him one day while we shared a pic-nic lunch on the bank, he was virtually fishing a dry fly, as his top dropper received only a token bath now and again, depending upon the trout's behaviour. Now who thought that high-sticking was a relatively modern method of presenting and fishing a fly? Howard died in 2008, in his mid-nineties.

The above describes detection of trout feeding in the daytime, but even in the poor light at the end of a summer day, the sipping rises to spent spinners can be distinguished on flats or in the flat water at the tails of pools; and the splashing of trout rising to scuttling sedges is so audible that we may be guided accurately by sound alone. The latter example, however, is part of a more specialised branch of dry fly fishing -- late evening and nocturnal sedge-fly fishing -- the beginner is more concerned with locating trout by day.

The Conveyor Belt

With a scattering of floating duns coming down the water, the river may be regarded as a living conveyor belt of food. The trout in moving water may be expected to stay 'on station', maintaining their position in the most advantageous feeding lie which their size, and that of the opposition, permits. So long as they are hungry and as long as the hatch continues, the trout will move to the fly, often wth monotonous regularity, but almost invariably with the least expense of energy on their part.

It is important to remember the last point, because the fish can not afford to expend more energy in pursuing its food than that amount which the food will replace when consumed. If food is scarce, and trout have to go looking for it, as is often the case in many infertile hill tarns and streams, the food obtained may do little more than replace the energy expended -- the trout grows slowly. In a fertile river, lying alongside the conveyor belt of a quality feeding-lane, the 'boss' trout occupies the best feeding position. It may feed very well, at the expense of the minimum amount of energy -- it grows quickly.

Below The Surface

So much for the more obvious, surface feeding activity which takes place on our rivers. It may look pretty impressive at times, but it is nowhere near as important as the feeding which takes place below the surface of a clean and fertile river. Even when taking into account the falls of terrestrial insects which land, seasonally, upon the water, the bulk of food taken by trout comprises underwater fare.

Every aquatic fly seen at the surface spent almost its entire life underwater, and although the majority may well have had to fight their way to the surface in order to emerge, many of the adults of the larger stoneflies and the larger stone-clinging, up-winged flies (such as the large green dun ) are not seen by trout as ascending nymphs, because they crawl out of the water in the marginal shallows, very surreptitiously, many of the former choosing emergence under the cover of darkness. So, at the most vulnerable stage of their development, their emergence, they do not have to run the watery gauntlet shared by large dark olives, Mayflies, blue-winged olives and the like. But all have to return to the water in order to lay their eggs. The number of larvae consumed in a season must be colossal, because larvae are available all day and every day; during a heavy emergence, they are just so much easier to find.

When we acknowledge that those flies seen afloat can be only a fraction, of varying size, of the whole underwater population of their particular species, then we must conclude that most feeding is practised, and most food is available, below the surface.

Cannibal Trout

Some experts claim that as much as ninety per cent of the trout's food intake in rivers is in the form of sub-aquatic life. Taken to the limit, the food of the truly fish-eating or cannibal trout is one hundred per cent sub-aquatic. Surface food is extremely important on poor, infertile hill streams and tarns and lakes, where falls of terrestrials may be at the top of the menu, but we can regard it, in part at least, as a sporting bonus on fertile rivers.
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Last edited by Terry Cousin; Yesterday at 08:39 PM.