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Show Wednesday, May IS, 1974 bbCOAUTION Page SB Wind and Meadows, the Season Draws Near by Dave Mueller Last week I touched on a few flycasting techniques which can help the flyfisherman cope with the wind. You may have wondered: Why fight it? It is hard to control your cast in the wind, no matter what is your method. You might as well drink beer and get out of the sun because the fish w7ont bite in the middle of the day, anyway. Well, the fact of the matter is that trout do feed during the day, sunny or cloudy or windy or calm. They are quite a bit more wary during the but some of the best bright hours and that calls for finer fishing fish in the river can be caught at midday. Even though casting is tough, a bright windy day can produce some memorable fishing. Once you can cast well enough to counter the wind factor, here are a few of the things you will have going for you. First, just by sticking it out you will find that your chances with the fish are increased. A lot of guys will hang up the rod in disgust when they have a fly detoured into an ear. That means less fishing pressure on that given day. Less fishing pressure means fewer trout spooked in- to a mood. Knowing that it is windy, the angler must determine exactly where his offerings will be most effective. We all are aware of the shifting patterns of tree shade when the wind is blowing. And so do the trout . . . only they dont consider a fleeting shadow such a lovely sight . . . seeing that fish hawks, kingfishers, mink, herons, otter and fishermen cast fleeting types of shadows. So get out of the shade and search out a consistently meadow stream. So Alright. youre fishing the cottonwood lined stretch of the Weber at Woodenshoe, and the wind is blowing and the shadows are dancing all over the bottom of the stream. Get into your car and drive over to the meadows on Lower Beaver Creek. You will have achieved several advantages over the trout, no matter how badly you wanted to fish the Woodenshoe section. Watercourses that traverse meadows do so in a meandering fashion. Wide loops that oxbow back on themselves are the rule rather than the exception. Because of the bending you will be able to some part of the stream with the wind no matter what its direction, you mignt De all day long if you insist on staying to fish the the victim of a cross-win- d more direct course of the forested section. But probably the most important item in windy-da- y strategy is the composition of a trouts diet. It is widely acknowledged that meadow stream fish have a much greater percentage of their diets made up of terrestrial (land) insect forms (grasshoppers, ants, beetles) than non-feedi- ng sun-expos- ed forest stream trout (which feed more exclusively on aquatic insect life like stoneflys and mayflys). Where the aquatic hatch is blown off the d river on a windy day, the insects are blown into the water. The wind may be blowinso hard that you get one out of five casts where you want it, but when you do . . . POW. Windy midday fishing is for the most part the ultimate in patient flyfishing. Sometimes I have waited for as much as fifteen minutes for the wind to quiet or change direction so I could cast effectively to a feeding fish. Another thing worth waiting for is one of those scattered puffy clouds that covers the sun for just a few seconds, long enough to make a cast. In fact, my favorite midday fishing is on those days when the sun is alternately bright, and then completely blotted out by a cloud for a few minutes. Where waving h shade seems to put down the fish, intermittent cloud cover seems to encourage them to feed. If you are fishing during the hours of ten in the morning and two in the afternoon, you are in essence fishing two different streams. The first stream is the one from 10 a.m. until noon. And the second one is from noon until 2 p.m. Once again, I am talking about shadows. Certain pools and cut banks have the sun shining directly into them in the morning hours. The fish that live in these pools and under these are going to be extremely wary at this time. As the sun shifts over to the other side of the stream in the afternoon, a shadow from the bank is cast where in the morning there was none. With the cover of the shadow, the trout which were just hiding out in the morning begin to feed in the afternoon. Conversely, the pools which had the shade in the morning will have the sun in the afternoon and their trout will be less likely to feed than they were earlier in the day. The concept comes in handy when the meadow section are is you fishing only a short stretch of water. You can fish up one side in the morning, walk back to your starting point at noon (or whenever the shadow switches over and it varies according to the time of the year and the direction of the rivercourse), and fish up the other side in the afternoon. I have had some very good meadow fishing in the high in the small outlet creeks from the lakes. Uintas during mid-da- y Sometimes the meadow is no more than a half mile across, but it will occupy four or five hours with interesting fishing. Another bonus is that these meadow fish are thicker and healthier than their canyon-streabrothers, who dont get as much food, and use much of the food thev do get in holding their positions in the swift current. Windy day fish the meadow. land-base- tree-branc- cut-ban- two-strea- ks m m WOODSY OWL HOOTS: Books IS NOW OPEN 10am -- 6pm (closed Mondays) with a complete stock of ... 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