Part 4
Fighting fish
Once you have a trout on the reel, lower your rod tip to 45- 60 degrees and begin actively fighting the fish. The fish will now be working against the flexibility of your rod. The more it pulls to flex your rod, the greater the pressure the rod puts against it.

With a small trout, the pulling against the pressure of your rod will almost immediately tire it out or overwhelm it, so you can just reel it in. This small fish doesn’t have the strength to break your tippet. Don’t play with it. Just reel it in and release it so it can grow up to be a big guy some day.

Having a hooked fish on your line, even a small one, is fun and shows that you have successfully managed to fool a fish into taking your fly. There’s a terrible temptation to extend the fight. Don’t give in to this temptation! If you overtire the fish, you are probably condemning it to a slow death after you release it. And anybody who sees you spend too much time fighting a small fish is going to think of you as a jerk, not as a successful and knowledgeable fly fisher.

With a big fish, the time to tire it out is longer and any attempt to reel it in quickly could snap your tippet. You need to let bigger fish tire themselves out by pulling against your rod long enough, but not hard enough to snap your line. You do this with the drag on your reel. Remember, you can add extra drag by pressing the palm of your stripping hand against the edge of the reel spool, making it more difficult for the fish to pull line off the reel. Your ideal is to keep the line tight, but not too tight. You’ll learn this with practice.

With a big fish, don’t try to keep every bit of line that you have on your reel remaining on your reel. When the line threatens to become too tight, let the fish pull line off your reel, which is called “letting the fish run”. When the fish ends its run, start retrieving line again. Eventually, you will be able to bring the fish to your net without it ever being able to put enough pressure on the tippet to snap it.

Throughout this process, use your rod to steer the fish. If it is trying to run for an area or obstacle where it thinks it can snag your tippet and break it off, use the pressure from your rod to steer it away from this area. Remember you are not trying to stop the fish from reaching this area by making it totally impossible, you are just trying to prevent the fish from reaching this are by applying pressure that makes it easier for him to head in a different direction. You are steering him, not stopping him.

If the fish is in moving water, try to steer him sideways into an angle that will make him use more energy fighting the current. Remember he is streamlined to point directly into the current and has to work harder if his body is angled away from it. Make the current work in your favor during the fight as you try to tire him out.

At the start of the fight, I like to have the fish fighting against the upper half of my rod. Any lunges it makes are less likely to break my rod if it is bending near the tip

As the fish begins to tire, point your rod tip to more like 45-degrees away from the fish. This will cause the rod to take more of the pull from the fish lower on the rod, where it is stronger and harder to flex, putting more pressure on the fish.

A good technique from here is to “pump the fish”. Point the rod more towards the fish, reel in the line to make it tight, pull the rod tip back towards 45-degrees. Repeat this as you work to reel the fish within netting distance.

For most trout it doesn’t make much difference if they choose to run downstream or upstream. If you are hook a big trout with lots of fighting power, though, it is to your advantage if it is running upstream. That way it is fighting both your rod and the current instead of having the current add power to its fight and, thus, pressure on your tippet.

If you have hooked a really big and powerful fish, and if it is safe and easy to do, try moving downstream while keeping tension on the line with your reel and rod. Once you are downstream of the trout, it will usually begin running upstream to get away from your line. I’m not a good wader so I generally don’t do this unless I can get on the bank and walk downstream. Otherwise I worry about tripping and falling while my attention is on the fish, not on where my feet are going. I’d rather have the trout break off than to fall in the water.

Sometimes you can trick a big fish into turning around and running upstream. You do this by giving the fish lots of slack so that it is no longer feeling pressure from the rod. With no pull from the rod, it may turn back upstream. The risk here is that it might also use the slack to throw your fly loose from its mouth, but there is generally less risk of this than there is of breaking your tippet if the fish can get downstream into some really fast water.

If the trout leaps from the water, briefly point your rod tip directly towards it to give it some slack. That slack might allow the trout to shake off your fly but, if you don’t give it a brief bit of slack, the tug on your line as the fish falls back into the water can snap your tippet. Again, better to take the chance on the hook holding than on your tippet’s strength.

Reel it closer to you as it tires. With a big fish, it sometimes helps to lower the rod tip until it is almost parallel to the water and point it at an angle about “2 hours” horizontally away from the fish. This has the effect of pulling the fish through the water towards you, which they resist less than being pulled upwards toward the surface.