“Let it sink, twitch the line twice, followed by a long trip to take in the slack,” guide Scott Cunningham said. “You don’t want to have enough line out to make a lot of false casts. You want to make short, quick casts for slow, methodical fishing.”
That says it all for the way that Cunningham fishes the Catawba Bugger, a fly that fools an awful lot of big brown trout on the special regulation waters section of the Catawba River. For every fish landed, an angler will experience several tail-pulls and missed strikes, which an angler can see when the fish “flashes” as it approaches the fly and rolls without finding the fly or getting the hook.
“You want a slow-enough retrieve to get the fly down near the bottom, but not dragging the bottom where it will pick up trash,” he said. “Accurate casting skills are important because you have to hit small targets, such as eddies and swirls downstream of rocks and trees and the little seams of water that show where there are rocky areas and drop-off. Anything that slows the current flow and creates an anomaly is likely to hold a brown trout because there are so many fish in the river.”
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