Trout and Salmon

Slow-sinking hard baits rank as some of the best trout fishing lures for the cool season. Learn how these baits can help you catch more fish.

Some of the absolute best offerings for enticing strikes from trout seldom get seen by stream fish. Learn how to get an upper hand on other anglers.

Spoons work well for catching stream trout. That’s no secret. Not all spoons are created equal, though, and the best trout spoons I have found for catching trout have never been seen by most stream fish.

“Why is that?” you might wonder. The answer is simple. The Lindy Quiver Spoon and Rattl’n Quiver Spoon were designed for ice fishing, so few anglers associate either with casting to stream trout, and you’re unlikely to find them sold as trout spoons or even available on store pegs outside the Ice Belt.

Casting natural offerings to drift in the current is a highly effective way to catch trout. Learn the tricks to this time-proven approach.

Trout fishing has its share of stereotypes, with one being that trout fishing always means fly-fishing. Another is that trout fishing with bait only means sitting beside a heavily stocked lake or a big pool with bait on the bottom to collect trout for a stringer.

While that certainly is a popular way to catch trout and a fine way to spend a day, anglers who prefer to work streams more actively – moving, casting and making active presentations – should not overlook the virtue of using natural offerings. Drifting bait is a fun and highly effective way to tap into outstanding action in a trout stream.

Hard baits, including minnow imitators and specialized crankbaits like Rebel Crawfish and Crickhoppers provide major advantages for stream trout and produce great results.

“This is all they’ve been hitting,” the guy behind the fly shop counter advised my son, Nathaniel, showing him a midge so tiny it was barely visible on the tip of his finger. “With it being all catch-and-release, those fish get very fussy.”

Nathaniel wasn’t planning to fly-fish, so the suggested pattern didn’t matter, but he listened politely and nodded, maybe wondering slightly if a small jig might work best when we got to the stream the next morning. Shortened version: The trout were highly aggressive, and Nathaniel caught most of his fish on Rebel Wee-Crawfish and his best fish on a 3 ½-inch jerkbait that he had equipped with a 1/O single hook. Other young anglers we saw that day were having minimal success.

Feeling a bit like I’d been placed in a jigsaw puzzle scene, I took a moment to take in the Crayola-bright treetops and their reflection the next pool upstream. Of course, I wasn’t just leaf-peeping. I needed to study that same pool and the shallow run it gave way to in order to strategize casts and a stealthy approach.

While brown trout do become a bit less wary at times during fall, they are still brown trout. Cautious and easily spooked. Because browns sometime abandon their deep dark lairs during fall, I decided to cast to the lower end of the pool and swim my lure through the shallow tail-out before I walked through it. That turned out to be the right choice, as the cast resulted in a modest-sized but spectacularly marked brown trout that hit in a nothing-looking, shallow spot.

Autumn delivers magical days on brown trout streams.