O, sir, doubt not that Angling is an art; is it not an art to deceive a trout with an artificial fly?
You must lose a fly to catch a trout.
Often I have been exhausted on trout streams, uncomfortable, wet, cold, briar scarred, sunburned, mosquito bitten, but never, with a fly rod in my hand have I been less than in a place that was less than beautiful.
I shall now confess to you that none of those three trout had to be beheaded, or folded double, to fit their casket. What was big was not the trout, but the chance. What was full was not my creel, but my memory.
My dream home would be a fishing lodge in New Zealand.
I usually fish a Hornberg or a Muddler Minnow, a deer-haired streamer that comes in a variety of sizes and colors but replicates a sculpin minnow or a grasshopper. Even if a trout doesn't take the larger streamers, it can usually be counted on to come up and give a look, revealing its location.
If you want to catch trout, don't fish in a herring barrel.
Fly-fishing for wild trout on quiet waters must be one of the toughest and craziest ways to catch fish ever invented by man, as well as among the most frustrating and humiliating.
There is a lot of amiable fantasy written about trout fishing, but the truth is that few men know much if anything about the habits of trout and little more about the manner of taking them.
Far away Tongariro! Green - white thundering Athabasca river of New Zealand! I vowed I would come again down across the Pacific to fish in the swift cold waters of this most beautiful and famous of trout streams. It is something to have striven. It is much to have kept your word.
I doubt if I shall ever outgrow the excitement bordering on panic which I feel the instant I know I have a strong, unmanageable fish, be it brook trout, brown trout, cutthroat, rainbow, steelhead or salmon on my line.
One of the first rules in fishing is that there are few rules in fishing that resourceful trout do not manage to break.
What's his offense? Groping for trout in a peculiar river.
I grew up in Florida, started fishing with my dad going down to the Everglades and around the state, plus some offshore stuff for sails and wahoo - but I never really got the bug until my husband and I went float fishing on the Snake River at Jackson Hole for trout - I've been pretty much addicted ever since.
During my addled career as a trout fisherman I have gone on a lot of wild-goose chases, and I ruefully expect to go on a lot more before I hang up my waders
Fishing is such great fun, I have often felt, that it really ought to be done in bed
Trout fishing. One must be a stickler for proper form. Use nothing but #4 blasting caps, or a hand grenade, if handy, or at a pool well-lined with stone, one blast from a .44 magnum will bring a few stunned brookies quietly to the surface.
Has it ever struck you that trout bite best on the Sabbath? God's critters tempting decent men.
And angling too, that solitary vice, What Izaak Walton sings or says: The quaint, old, cruel coxcomb, in his gullet Should have a hook, and a small trout to pull it.
I fished upstream coming ever closer and closer to the narrow staircase of the canyon. Then I went up into it as if I were entering a department store. I caught three trout in the lost and found department.
I wind about, and in and out, - With here a blossom sailing, - And here and there a lusty trout, - And here and there a grayling.
So, when I say 'match the hatch', if the fish are taking the nymph, and you're actually producing a replica of a flying insect, you'll catch fresh air.
It is utterly soothing to fly fish for trout. All other considerations or worries drift away and you couldn't keep them close if you wanted. Perhaps it's standing thigh deep in a river with the water passing at the exact but varying speed of life. You easily recognize this mortality and it dissipates into the landscape.
When if or chance or hunger's powerful sway Directs the roving trout this fatal way, He greedily sucks in the twining bait, And tugs and nibbles the fallacious meat. Now, happy fisherman; now twitch the line! How thy rod bends! behold, the prize is thine!
The other day Aks and I went up to your ranch for a day's fishing. I cannot remember any day when we have had more fun on a stream. We had along with us three newspaper men and a few secret service people, many of whom had never seen a trout stream, so we did the thing up right by borrowing frying pans, bacon and corn meal from the wife of your rancher - and we cooked an outdoor meal for the crowd. It was really quite a day.
