Trout Myths
Trout Have a Blind Spot Directly Behind Them
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F A L L
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A good example is that “Trout have a blind spot directly behind them so you can creep right up to them if you approach from behind.” Theoretically true but realistically impossible. Most anglers have figured it out over years of trial and error, but propagating this
ILLUSTRATION BY TIM JOHNSON, TIMJOHNSONGALLERY.COM
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Much been written about trout in the last 500 years that while not exactly wrong, is often penned by an angler who fishes one watershed and doesn’t realize that fish in different parts of the country and world don’t follow those rules. I can think of a couple examples. One is Art Flick’s Streamside Guide to Naturals and Their Imitations—a delightful and helpful book I memorized as a kid and took as gospel, but soon found out that either the hatches he wrote about didn’t exist in my local streams, or the local insects didn’t behave like the ones he wrote about. Flick did all his research on the Schoharie and its tributary the West Kill and hardly even drove over the mountain to fish the Esopus or the Beaverkill. And then there was an author from Colorado back in the 1980s who wrote an entire book about a method he developed to fish emerging caddis pupae by yanking his special fly very rapidly to the surface. The problem is that the species of caddis in his local rivers is not widespread, and observations by angler/entomologists like the late Gary LaFontaine and Thomas Ames proved that most caddis pupae tentatively rise to the surface. I love it when someone busts these myths with science, or with decades of observation of trout in a wide variety of habitats. Not all of them are myths, some are just bits and pieces of facts that get contorted into whatever theory the author is trying to shoehorn them into.
BY TOM ROSENBAUER
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semi-truth to novice anglers may lead to frustration. Most authors who have really studied the vision of trout, Like Jason Randall in Trout Sense, Goddard and Clarke in The Trout and the Fly, and Gordon Byrnes in a 1990 article in Fly Fisherman magazine
