Patience is NOT a virtue

I recently had a conversation with a bait fisherman who commented to me that fly fishing must require a lot of patience. I simply smiled and nodded but what I wanted to say was "What?! You mean compared to parking your lazy arse in a lawn chair staring idly at the water while your fishing pole rests on a Y-shaped stick? Now *that's* patience, pal!" Seriously, fly fishing is the perfect sport for impatient people: you're moving constantly and even when you're not catching anything you're always working.

In fact, my advice to novice fly fishermen everywhere is: be less patient! If you're fishing your way up a small mountain stream and come to a nice pool, make a few drag-free drifts and then MOVE ON TO THE NEXT POOL. Fish don't get more and more attracted to your fly the more times they see it. You'll catch more fish if you take your best shot and move on to the next pool.

Unless you're fishing in crowded conditions or where wading is dangerous, I'm convinced this principal holds true even on bigger streams and tailwaters that hold lots of fish. Sure, if the stream is 20-feet it will take you longer to cover the water but there's no point sending your fly down the same riffle thirty times if you're not catching fish.

In my experience, the Green River is an excellent example. During the summer there are fish that hold along the edges of the river waiting for terrestrials to get blown into the water. If you walk cautiously along the bank, you can see these fish before they see you. If you can cast far enough and with accuracy, you have a pretty good chance of hooking these fish. My approach is to give each of these fish a few casts and then move on up to the next fish. Yeah, I might walk have to walk 50 or 100 yards until I see the next fish holding along the river's edge but who cares? There are miles and miles of stream to work with.

You might argue that since the Green River holds as many as 7000-10000 trout per mile by some estimates I'm just wasting time and energy covering so much distance between casts. Maybe so, but when I come upon one of those bank-feeders I have a pretty darn good idea that it's looking for a meal and I can sight-cast to it with a whopping dry fly. Call me crazy, but that's a whole lot more fun than watching a strike indicator come to a stop somewhere above a size 22 nymph hidden deep under the water.