Ben had done very well the previous weekend on streamers. He started experimenting with different retrieves and found a pretty counter-intuitive (at least for us anyway) way to fish streamers that we hadn't figured out before or heard of. He texted me that he had a new technique but left it at that. This of course got the wheels turning. We finally caught up and he explained what he was doing (Jumping forward here for a quick second but since I've had a chance to fish this technique for at least 5 hours water time, I've since come up with a name for it). Ben came up with the technique and it seems to take an infinity to complete one cast so -
THE BENFINITY RETRIEVE
Ben began to explain the Benfinity and it went as follows
. Cast your streamer out and when it hits let it sink. For a LONG time. Just barley keep enough tension on your line in order to pick up a hit. This means pointing your rod straight at the fly with rod tip just off the surface of the water. Run the line over your pointer finger of your casting hand and pull straight back with your non casting hand until you can JUST BARELY feel tension. You don't want to move your fly much. Let it sit for 5 - 10 seconds on the bottom and then pull VERY slowly to move your fly along the bottom a few feet and pause again for 5 - 10 seconds. If you see your line move (just where the tip starts to go under water) in any sort of unusual way or feel a slight "tic" STRIP SET!
Sounded good to me. I couldn't wait to try it out so when we showed up Friday evening I jumped out of the truck and grabbed the streamer rod. Two casts later and I was hooked up. I was fishing just off the side of the bank and I could see them picking up the streamer off of the bottom during a long pause. Crazy.... Some would pass it over and then come back and clobber it when you barley moved it. A lot of hits came on the sink. Just as the fly was about to hit bottom it seemed. That's how I picked up the brown shown above. She hit about 5 seconds after my fly hit the water. Probably about 2 foot off the bottom. And the take was barley noticeable. I would say that has been the most counter-intuitive thing I've learned over the summer streamer fishing. Takes on streamers can be super subtle. .
It's fun when you can see the take. Bigger trout don't always get all crazy every time they hit a big streamer. From what I've seen that is the exception. It does happen and it's awesome when it does, but most bigger trout will simply swim up deliberately, open their mouths and swim forward over the prey item. It's very casual! I've seen it happen a lot on the end of a retrieve when a trout has followed the fly in. Lots of calories, not a lot of exercise. Seems to be the big trout mantra. I seem to be following the same pattern lately!
