Extend Your Drift



Lil man with a Lamoille bow

The fishing on the Lamoille has been fantastic this past week. On all my recent trips I have been able to get clients in front of many rising fish for the duration of the outing.  With that said, my clients have struggled to land large numbers of fish.  Mostly because of the long casts required in some of the areas where the action has been.  I always try to get new clients in a spot to minimize long casts but in the fall all of the fish are on the deep flats (the shallow tail outs being the exception). So, weather it is too long of a cast or no back cast room because it too deep or mucky, I've been teaching clients to extend their drift by dumping line.  Just pull 60 ft of line out onto water while upstream of the fish, cast 30 ft across, and wave your rod tip just above the water to feed line out through the rod tip.  Now raise the rod tip to the sky to pick up all that slack you created. Then just slowly lower the rod tip as the fly passes you.  Booyah, your 30ft cast just became a 60 ft drift.  A very good method of getting to spots that are hard to reach or when trying to extend your drift that extra bit.  

So, yesterday was a real raw fall day but the fish did not mind. It has been lots of fun watching these fish feed heavily in back eddies and lazily sipping on the flats. My client got into 5 or 6 and landed half of them all on #18-20 bwo patterns (mainly compraduns and para-

adams).  That's been about the story for the past couple weeks. Solid surface activity from 12:30 pm to about 5pm. We have up to a half inch of rain coming mid week and then we should dry out.  We will have temps toping out in the 60's until the end of the week when highs will be more seasonal in the 50's. So, looks like another great week of fishing ahead. Enjoy!