The Kickapoo Weed Slide

The Kickapoo Weed Slide

Fishing with my good friend Jon Christiansen in the Driftless Area of Wisconsin, we chanced upon a beautiful farm creek with undercut grassy banks, where surprisingly large brown trout liked to hang out.

We were fishing foam hoppers on a summer morning, and I made the mistake of hanging up my fly in the grass right above where I’d seen a big snout poke above the water surface only moments before. I gave a gentle tug to the line, the fly plopped down on the water and bang!

Not long after, the same thing happened to, or rather for, Jon: aggressive cast sticks fly in the grass, pull on the line, grasshopper falls into the water (the same way a natural grasshopper would fall out of the grass and into the water), trout eats fly.

After benefiting from poor, but richly rewarded, casts, we started trying to stick our flies in the grass, sliding them off into the water, rather than splashing them straight on target with our casts, and it worked better that way.

Granted, you have to have the right type of grass or weeds on the banks to pull this off. A bush that grabs a fly like Velcro won’t work. But I’ve taken this idea to other places, especially when I’m fishing hoppers to the bank from a drift boat.

Bouncing a foam bug off the rocks or sticking one in the grass and letting it slide into the water is a productive trick for trout lurking under cut banks.

Next time you’re out hopper fishing, don’t be afraid to get hung up in the grass–you might be surprised at how productive this technique can be.