Rickard Gustafsson | Saturday, 19 July 2025
To begin with, I’ve spotted the river monster I mentioned last time. It wasn’t the monster trout that I had hoped for. For a while I thought it could have been a splash cake sed by the river, but spending a lot of time by that stretch of the river never seeing it happen the dream of a big fish lived on. Until I spotted something swimming in the river. A beaver. And as I got closer the beaver got annoyed and again show its disapproval of me being there. It smack down hard in the water, twice, with its tail. Causing a huge splash of water and a loud smack. As a big fish jumping. Well at least now I don’t have to leave thinking that I missed my shot at a monster.
I’ve caught a decent number of trout and grayling. Some even approaching big. I do very little stream fishing so I’ve learned and discovered some things during my fishing. Like what a long and a short cast is. What I did consider a short cast was actually quite a long cast. That short casts are most of the time better, each day learning that casts could always be shorter. That by sometimes doing a lazy Spey, forming the D-loop and waiting for the anchor to drift in place, and getting strikes next to me.
Even if I’ve learned that it is best to keep the casts short, spending most of my time with less than a meter of line outside of the rod tip, I’ve had great use of my practice. During my training sessions I often end up just playing around with variations of Spey casts, anything I can come up with. And I would say that Spey casts are the king of casts for stream fishing. They make you more efficient and keeps your flies out of the bushes.
Not needing to strip the line in to start the next cast, just reposition and cast again makes things faster. Slipping and shooting line makes things even more efficient.
And catching fish with a long tricky Spey cast is quite satisfying.
Other things I’ve learned. That some fish like dragged flies. Small trout can have eyes bigger than their stomach and hit BIG streamers hard. Nothing new but always surprising how small fish you catches sometimes. The principle of the bucket cast can be used for line management on long casts. Collect the line and drop it in a pile and overcome drag for the cast. The HT4 is a magic stick.
Cheers, Rickard