Those of you who have read Joe Humphrey's Trout Tactics (link to Amazon) will have an idea what I'm getting at here. I would say the book is recommended reading for anyone who fly fishes for trout, and certainly required reading if you fly fish for trout on small streams and spring creeks. Joe Humphrey's is a well-known central PA flyfisherman and between the book and classes at Penn State, I developed a toolset for solving fly fishing problems on trout streams. Almost any day I went out, I could get some rises from fish. Didn't catch fish every day, but things weren't terrible. When I went to fish the Missouri River in Montana and the Bow River in Canada, I could adapt the same toolset and catch trout.

Now I have moved to Illinois (some of you might remember my earlier thread about that), and I am completely lost. I have no toolset. I have gone out fly-fishing once in early september on the Fox River and once a week ago on the Kishwaukee. The fishing situations and the fish themselves are different; clearly these are not limestone streams holding trout. The only things I have caught are tree branches, moss, and knee-deep mud.

So my question for people who fish the slower-moving rivers in the midwest, what's in your mental toolset? What water temperature ranges do use? How did you develop it? Do you have links or books to recommend, or suggestions you can give me?