The Case for Fishing Slower Than You Want To

There is a strong correlation between the speed at which an angler strips a fly and the size of the fish he catches, and it runs the wrong direction from what feels right.

Small fish chase. A fourteen-inch speckled trout will run down a fly moved quickly, because it is small enough that most of what it eats is capable of escaping, and it has to be aggressive to eat at all. So the fast retrieve gets bites. It gets a lot of bites, in fact, which is why people keep using it.

A five-pound trout has stopped chasing. She is holding on a grass edge in eighteen inches of water at first light, she has a metabolism suited to eating one large mullet rather than twenty small shrimp, and a fly moving past her at four feet per second reads as something she cannot catch and does not need to try to.

The reasoning

Predators budget effort. A fish that expends more energy pursuing food than it gains from eating it dies, and evolution has selected fairly precisely for the fish that decline the bad bets. Anything moving fast and away is, from a large fish's perspective, a bad bet — unless it is close, wounded, or cornered.

So the retrieve that works on big fish is the one that presents the fly as available. Slow. Short. Occasionally stopped altogether. A fly that has stopped moving is a fly the fish has time to look at, and a good fly holds up to being looked at.

What slow actually means

Slower than you think. Two- to four-inch strips with a full pause between them. Long enough that you become convinced nothing is there.

The trouble is that a slow retrieve gives you less information. You cannot feel the fly, you are not sure it is swimming, and after ten minutes of nothing your hands speed up without your permission. Watch your line hand. If you have not consciously slowed it in the last five casts, you are fishing faster than you were.

Winter is the extreme case. Trout in a deep mud hole in February will eat a heavily weighted fly that moves perhaps six inches per minute, and they will eat it firmly. It requires standing in cold water doing almost nothing, which is why very few people do it and why the ones who do catch large fish.

Where fast still wins

Fast is right when the fly is imitating something that flees and the fish is already committed — a school of redfish crashing bait, trout under working birds, a bass following a popper it has already decided to eat. Speed triggers a reaction from a fish that is hunting. It does not create one in a fish that is resting.

Read which situation you are in before you decide how to move the fly. That decision matters more than the fly.