RULE BREAKERS
It sometimes pays big to ignore tried-and-true tactics to catch fish, as these expert anglers reveal
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EXPERT ANGLER: STU THOMPSON
TROUT TACTIC: FEED ’EM POPPERS
The author of Tyed & True: 101 Fly Patterns Proven To Catch Fish, fly-fishing guru Stu Thompson is a stickler for using precisely tied imitations to match the insects that trout are eating. Except, that is, when he isn’t. By way of example, the expert angler points to one time he was fly fishing with his youngest son in Manitoba’s Duck Mountains.
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“I was catching what I call ‘dinkers,’ which are rainbows under 10 inches in length,” Thompson says. “After I caught a couple, my son came along and said, ‘Can I see your flies?’ I give him my box and he picked out a panfish popper. I said, ‘You’re not going to catch anything with that.’”
His son started casting the popper anyway, and soon caught six rainbows measuring between 25 and 27 inches in length. “Here I am using carefully hand-tied traditional trout flies, catching six- to 10-inch trout, while he’s whacking giant rainbows with a panfish popper,” says Thompson. Since that day, he’s caught so many trout himself on poppers (below) that he never goes fly fishing without stashing some in his vest.
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Believing that rainbows mistake panfish poppers for backswimmers struggling on the water’s surface, Thompson has also discovered that tiger trout—known for their aggressive nature—will annihilate much bigger bass poppers. “You can whack 26- to 30-inch tiger trout on them all day long,” he says. “It’s just amazing how out-of-this-world they are. Nowadays, I use poppers to catch tigers, rainbows, browns and brookies. Every fly angler knows how good deer-hair mice are for brook trout. They always work. So, why not other styles of poppers?” Why not, indeed.