Stalking Fish: Live With It

Stalking Fish: Live With Poor Casts

You see a trout rising in a riffle with consistent, steady gulps. You wade into position for a cast, make the perfect false cast, let fly, and—pow!—a gust of wind tosses that dry fly two feet left of what you thought would be the perfect shot, just outside the fish’s feeding lane. What do you do? If you're like most people, you want to give it another shot. You quickly load up and try again. Bad call.

“Live with it,” said Missouri River guide Pete Cardinal, after that scene played out for us one afternoon. “If you make a bad cast, let your fly float out of that trout’s range of vision, then go again, but not before.” If you miss, even by a little bit, there’s nothing wrong with letting the fly slide behind a trout before casting again. And more importantly, there’s everything wrong with the whirling, splashing, slurping racket of a frustrated caster ripping a slightly off-target fly from the periphery of a feeding fish.

It takes practice and discipline, believe me. You make a mistake, and you want to try again. That’s human nature. But there are no do-overs in trout fishing. The sooner you learn to accept what happened, good or bad, and adapt your thinking to what might happen next, that's when you become a better angler. Watch that fish the next time. Rip it away, and the show’s over. Let it ride, and you're still in business.