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Just Get In the Water

What it takes to Sneak up on Fish

Timothy Kusherets

It doesn’t matter whether I fish in a boat, along the shoreline, or on the banks; the best location to fish, when waters run clear, is as close to the surface as possible. If you can see fish then they can see you. That can be a blessing and a curse at the same time. Sure it’s good to know there’s fish to be had but at the same time they’ll be on high alert and off the bite. That’s the trade off when you “really” need to see fish, so how do get around it and get fish to bite? Just get in the water and trust in the rest.

You can see from the boil, true fish sign, in the water that fish are just beneath the surface. There is no way for this angler to get in this steeply banked water without risk to himself; however stepping back from the bank, getting low, and making a flipping cast is virtually the same thing as getting in the water. Make refraction and glare work for you and have faith in your gear and skill to keep fish on the bite and on the end of your line.

It comes down to refraction, especially when fishing waters running crystal clear. There’s only one place to hide from the prying eyes of fish&right on top of them, so to speak.

The closer you get to the surface the greater the refraction, glare, from above and beneath the surface. Consider, fish absolutely do not care what you, your waders, or the bottom of your boat looks like. There focus is primarily centered on moving shadows and predators making them above the waterline. That’s all they care about so if you can hide movements of casting, reeling, and fighting then the rest will take care of itself. There are only three things to worry about after that; water depth and clarity, refraction angle and distance, and faith in your gear. The last seems a little fetched but there is some truth in the point, which we’ll get to after the first two.

Here I’m battling a salmon after getting in the water to hide from a patrolling school. This is an example of making refraction and glare work for a fisherman to keep fish on the bite. Note the smooth surface. The flatter the surface is the closer to the surface you need to get. My advice is not to wade deeper than the waist for safety purposes. Bing in the water coupled with my casting distance, my glasses no longer worked, so I simply took them off. Fish On!

Water clarity, whether fishing fresh or saltwater, has the ability to largely put fish off the bite since they can see well beyond the surface. Even the subtle movements of swaying tree branches put them on high alert, so movements of patrolling anglers makes it that much more difficult to garner strikes. Ironically, the clearer the water is the closer anglers need to get to the surface. Think about refraction in terms of glare. When the sun is out in front of you glistening on the surface it’s nearly impossible to see just beneath the surface; refraction works similarly. Visible light penetration of the surface is largely based on the position of the sun and how intense glare on the surface will be. The lower the angle of the sun the harder it is to see below the surface because light bounces off it at a shallower angle. I know the premise seems insultingly simple but bear with the idea for those many anglers that it escapes. I was one of those once. The shallow position of the sun to the surface makes water act more like a mirror than a clear liquid. When the sun is low, either at the beginning or the end of the day, glare remains the same. The great thing about refraction is that it works on both sides of the surface above and below it. If glare and refraction work the same then it stands to reason the closer an angler gets to the surface the harder it will be for fish to see out of the water (this premise does not apply if you attempt to get directly on top of fish). If you can hide from fish using this insultingly simple trick then they’ll stay on the bite. It doesn’t matter what the clarity of the water is, glare will persist so long as the sun is out (though glare does exist even on cloudy days to a lesser degree). The easiest way to combat this problem is to get, and wear, a pair of polarized glasses and a hat, brimmed hats are the best for preventing peripheral glare from open sides of glasses. When the sun is behind you glare is significantly reduced but still persists even if you can see the bed of the bay, river, or lake. I’m going to beat this dead horse with a brief example.

This is a no-win situation. Anglers are hovering above a school of salmon in crystal clear water. The dilemma is that the anglers have brush behind them, overhanging branches in front of them, and no good places to cast without alerting the stressed out fish directly in front of them. There were hundreds of salmon in front of this group but none of them got a single, legal, hookup. Those who did manage to garner hits were from snagged fish. Where’s the fun in that? It certainly was not worth the effort to even consider fishing here.

One day while drifting the salt in my 18-foot dory I came across a huge school of Coho salmon gravitating about 15 feet down. The surface of the estuary was glass smooth and the tide was slack. I saw the fish first and eagerly cast into the school using a No.3 Vibrax spinner and four-pound test monofilament, let it fall, and reeled in slowly towards the approaching salmon. Just before the two were about to collide, and my impending strike, some salmon saw me and the entire school bolted a few dozen yards away. Since I was drifting and making very little noise catching up to them was not a problem. In my zeal I repeated the same mistake and the school treated me to a repeat bolt. “Man I hated that!” I was too anxious and I knew it. It’s a hard thing to fight when there are so many fish in one spot. It occurred to me that they could see me but couldn’t come up with a way to remedy the problem. What would I do if I was on shore and in plain sight? I’d get down of course and the only way to get out of sight from these fish was to lie down in the boat. Its sounds goofy but I didn’t want to risk spooking the school a third time, so I did. I put out the oars, lowered my anchor a few feet, to slow the drift, and aimed the bow to pass near the school but not over it. Laying down I began flipping my line just a few yards out from the port side, let the spinner fall a few seconds, and began reeling in at about the same speed I had done on the first attempt. The strike came so quick momentarily I thought is was hung up on the side of the boat. The four-pound test was spider web thin but strong enough to bring the fight to the surface. Still wary of the rest of the school I sat up just a little and fought the Coho away from the rest of the salmon before continuing the fight in a full upright position. It’s surprising that such a thin line can withstand the mighty pull of a flailing salmon, which turned out to be a blue-back Coho. It weighed in at 13-pounds, which I am happy to say tasted every bit as good as the fight was.

In the end, there was another component to getting these fish on the bite that hadn’t occurred to me until after the fight.

Chaos abounds here as there are so many salmon that anglers are having a tough time deciding which direction to cast; however, all of them have figured out that wading to get close to the surface hides them from the nervous school of salmon.

Faith in my gear and the way I had to cast, make the presentation, set the hook, and stay low until I could get away from the remaining school to continue keeping them on the bite. Did I “really” need to see fish to know they were there? It all came to bear on that one simple premise we all take for granted when going to church. Faith in our gear and fishing capabilities is something that has to be experienced and not seen to make it work. Anglers, no matter what their skill level, will cast and reel in hundreds of times each trip making even novice fishermen expert at “feeling” the proper way to cast and reel in. Have faith in the gear and the skill behind casting makes all the difference when it comes to fishing waters where glare, and refraction, put fish off the bite.

All of this might seem like an overly simple set of ideas but there are those who struggle with it each and every year. I understand. You know there are fish in the water, you can see them right in front of you, there’s no fishing competition, and you think that the holding salmon will bite onto any line and hook thrown in front of it. Sometimes thinking like that works but most of the time it doesn’t. When it does it’s almost entirely based on luck rather than skill, patience, and trust in what we know as anglers. It all boils down to self-control and how much of it we’re willing to invest into before, during, and after a fishing trip.

Yeah Baby! It’s not the size it’s the quality and this saltwater trout is outstanding! It’s no accident I’m in a pair of hip-waders, though I had been fishing from one of my favorite dory’s. To keep fish on the bite I had to beach my boat, get in the water, and fish the rest of the day that way. Glare and Refraction, it can work for you too!

You know, in almost all my photos of me hitting the water I’ll have on a pair of polarized glasses and a brimmed hat, even during overcast days when clouds and precipitation abound. No matter what happens I know the glare and refraction will always be a part of fishing and prepare for that by taking along the gear, and knowledge necessary to put fish on the hook. It doesn’t mean I’ll always get a hookup, but it does mean that when all the opposing elements are eliminated there’ll be more flailing fish for me than others, which I don’t like, I’d rather share than horde. Everyone should get so many fish on their lines that they spend more time practicing catch-and-release than any other kind of angling. Wouldn’t you like to catch that many fish? You can. Just get in the water and you will.