Trouting Equipment

  There was once a time when I thought flyfishing was the only effective way to pursue trout. As I've gotten older, I've been doing it less and less. The truth is that flyfishing is the most effective method during insect hatches, but at other times spinning tackle may be just as effective, if not moreso. When the water is high and muddy, live bait is the ultimate trout-catching weapon, and flies can be useless. When you find the water is the color of chocolate milk, you should switch to a nightcrawler or piece of cut bait if you want to catch fish. In my mind, there's nothing special about the flyrod; it's just a great way to catch fish. If it won't work, stop flailing the water and get serious with your spinning tackle.

Rods, reels, and line
Spinning: Spinning tackle for trout should be lightweight, subtle, and flexible. A 4-6 foot, light or ultralight spinning reel spooled with 4 pound test monofilament is best. A smooth drag helps when fighting big trout on light line. Artificial lures include small spinners, crankbaits, jigs, and small spoons. Natural baits include insects, minnows, crustaceans, fish eggs, worms, leeches, and frogs. The most commonly used natural bait for trout is the nightcrawler. A few small weights, usually in the form of split shot or slinkies, combined with a few small circle hooks, should be all you need to spinfish for trout.

Flyfishing: To get started in flyfishing for trout, a 4 or 5 weight rod, 7 to 9 feet in length, should be used. Action is a matter of personal preference, but slower action rods may have a slight advantage when dry-fly fishing and can be easier for beginners to cast. The reel is mostly a place to store the line; you don't need much of a reel for trouting. A simple click-an-pawl reel with enough backing to fill up the spool is sufficient. As for line, any floating line that matches the weight of the rod will do. However, the most popular lines for stream-trouting are the weight-forward line and the double-taper line. Weight-forward lines make longer casts possible, but double-taper lines are more stealthy and roll-cast like a dream. Level lines will work as well, being somewhat halfway between the two listed above. In all cases, you should start out with a floating line. There are certain situations which call for more exotic sinking lines, but for the vast majority of trout fishing a floating line will work just fine, and is much easier to control.

Leaders and Tippets
The leader is what you attach to the end of your flyline. Tapered leaders around 5X are perfect for trout fishing, and once the tippet section is shortened, you can replace it with a section of 5X tippet. Total length of leader and tippet should be about ten feet. This is for average conditions. Now for the tricky part. For nymph fishing, you can get away with less leader, and can go a few sizes heavier if you care to. You're probably better off sticking with the long leader, though, since you most likely will end up switching between nymphing and dry-fly fishing fairly often. Here we find one of the heartbreaking rules of trout fishing: the minute you switch from a dry-fly rig to a nymph rig, the trout will start rising, and the minute you switch from a nymph rig to a dry-fly rig they will stop. In still water, or when the trout are particularly wary, you'll want to switch to a longer and thinner tippet section. As soon as you do this, you'll immediately hook a big trout that will break your thin tippet and get away (another rule of trouting). Fluorocarbon tippet material is thinner, heavier, and more invisible than nylon. There is a lot of controversy about it, but in my opinion it is great for nymphing, and can be good for dry-fly fishing as long as your fly floats well. Be sure to learn your knots well, especially with fluorocarbon - you'll want to test all your knots before fishing with them until you are confident in their holding ability. Once you're confident that your knots are perfect, feel free to stop testing them - you'll lose the next big fish you hook to an unraveled knot (Rule #3).

Floats and weights
This applies only to nymphing, but nymphing is so deadly and so easy that it pays not to ignore it. The most common form of nymphing is the shot-and-indicator rig, where a tiny float is strung on the leader, and a tiny metallic shot is placed above the fly. There are many different types of indicators and everybody has their personal preference. The ones that look like little foam balls work very well. Get a color that stands out and is easy to see. Yellow is hard to see, in my opinion, so it follows that every other color will be sold out whenever you go to the fly shop. Fluorescent pink is a great color for all-around visibility, so it follows that pink indicators are always in short supply. The little floats used by walleye fishermen to hold their leeches off the bottom make excellent indicators and are quite inexpensive. Hold them in place with a piece of toothpick or rubber band. For weight, tiny metallic shot may be used, either lead or non-toxic. I don't see very many dabbling ducks feeding in trout streams, so I don't worry about the lead. I can't think of any other way for lead shot on the bottom of a gravelly trout stream to be ingested, and go through maybe 3 or four shot per day. However, if you're swimming in money and paranoid about it, feel free to shell out $12 for a tiny packet of non-toxic shot. You'll probably kill more ducks with your wicked back-cast, but better safe than sorry.

Vests and Clothing
Most flyfishermen wear a vest to keep all of their assorted flyfishing stuff in. The vest should be drab in color so as not to spook trout. You should have plenty of pockets no matter which vest you buy. The vest will fill up with everything you don't need, and everything that is essential to fishing will spontaneously fall out of your pockets while you're falling down a muddy bank headfirst into an icy trout stream and screaming at the top of your lungs. For this reason, it is good to have anything essential attached to your vest with a zinger or lanyard. Anything attached to your vest in this manner will become entangled in your slack line the first chance it gets, but there's no way around it. Some people prefer a kind of chest-pack or fanny-pack to put their gear in, but these folks are dangerous deviants and should really go get themselves a vest. Shirts should also be drab; you may need to wear a raincoat in inclement weather as well. Never wear white or red when trout fishing.

Hats
You need a hat to go flyfishing. Otherwise the sun and rain will blind you, and hordes of black flies will attach themselves to your scalp and drain all the blood out of your head. Baseball-type caps in drab colors work fine. White hats should be avoided like the plague. Any hat with a brim will work. Old, beat-up hats are preferable to shiny new hats. Feathers or flies stuck into your hat are for show only. If you get hot, dunk your hat in the cold stream water, and put it back on your head.

Waders
Waders keep you dry when standing in the water. Hip-boots are cheap and comfortable. Neoprene waders are warm and damage-resistent. Breathable waders are cool and comfortable but tend to spontaneously start leaking if not meticulously taken care of. Stocking-foot waders allow you to wear comfortable wading boots with them. In warm weather, you can just wet-wade in a pair of shorts.

Nets
Nets are not essential. You can easily catch and release small trout without a net. Landing a big trout is much easier with a net. Use a shallow, soft-mesh net to avoid damaging the fish, and make sure to wet the meshes before landing a fish with it. Nets can be clipped onto the back of your vest, so that when you have big trout thrashing around in front of you, you can conveniently reach back and unclip your net, sportingly giving the trout the perfect opportunity to escape while you fumble around behind your head with one hand, ruining your day.

Lures and Flies
If you're a flyfisher, you'll need a good selection of flies to trout-fish with. Start out with a few patterns, then add more and more until you have thousands. Put them into a small flybox. Or several boxes for different situations, so that you can leave some of them at home when you are certain you will not need them. This insures that you will, in fact, need them, urgently, on that trip. A lure fisher has a much less complicated array of baits to contend with. A single inline spinner will usually be all you will ever need. A true spinfishing arsenal would be composed of a half-dozen each of tiny crankbaits, small jigs, spoons, and spinners, and all of these will easily fit in a tiny, pocket-sized box. Ah, the purity and simplicity of lure-fishing.

Live Baits
"Oh, you're a BAIT fisherman." How many times have I heard that? I don't know, and I don't care. It doesn't matter that I've been flyfishing for 25 years and know the latin names of all the insects on the stream, tie my own flies, and can roll-cast your hat off with a disco stone at twenty paces. If you're fishing a trout stream with bait, high-falutin' city folks will harass you constantly and criticize the way you choose to fish. It's the rule of the stream. Most of these people will criticize your fishing style no matter what you do, so ignore them. They just want to pretend they're better than everybody else. There are SOME baitfishing styles that you should avoid, especially in areas with slot limits or catch-and-release regulations. Mainly, you should avoid using small live baits combined with tiny hooks. Trout, even very small ones, will swallow these baits, get hooked deep in the gullet, and die. Picking nymphs from under rocks and threading them on a #18 fine-wire dry-fly hook with a 3 pound line is a great way to kill a lot of trout. As long as you don't plan on releasing any of them, regardless of size, go ahead and use this most deadly of all tactics. Quit fishing when you get your limit. Big live baits will rarely kill trout, even if you don't use circle hooks, because the trout will attack your bait savagely and get hooked before the bait is swallowed. Circle hooks are extremely effective on trout, and 99% of the time the fish will be hooked lightly in the mouth and will be releasable if you choose to spare the fish from the frying pan. To fish trout with live bait, all you need are some small circle hooks and some split shot. You don't even need any bait, really, you can usually flip over a log or a rock near or in a trout stream and find something that will tempt trout. Otherwise, keep your bait in a small tupperware container and put it in your pocket. You can use large stonefly nymphs, tiny crayfish (where legal), minnows, worms, nightcrawlers, grasshoppers, small leeches, large scuds, waterworms (the larvae of the crane fly), mice, frogs, water dogs, sculpins, madtoms, lampreys, ammocetes, crickets, mayfly nymphs, rockworms, cicadas, moths, and cut fish. All will absolutely work wonders in the right situation.

Pliers and Forceps
You are going to be losing these, constantly. Buy cheap ones. Always carry both a small pliers and a forceps, because you will most likely lose one or the other before the day is over and each can take the place of the other in a pinch. The pliers work best for attaching shot, and the forceps are for removing hooks from trout.