Trout Blindness

By Kurt Shaffer (PGH Flyco)

Trout Bum?  Nah, just a bum in general.  There’s a consensus amongst fishermen that fly fishing is only for trout.   This couldn’t be further from the truth.   For every trout fisherman, theres an adventure loving dummy out there throwing flies at anything that moves.  Whether it’s Bass, Musky, Carp, RedHorse, or Walleye…someone is throwing flies at it.  

In my fishing journey, I’ve strived to be the most well rounded mediocre fly fisherman in Pennsylvania.  Im not even sure how to measure this, but I think I’m doing pretty good.  Once water temps warm up I don’t put the rod away and go golfing…ok, maybe sometimes.  Instead I explore my local waters for anything that eats bugs or baitfish.   Some of my best days on the water were fishing for Greater RedHorse or Carp in a spillway.  If I can’t get out, I’m looking at maps, property lines, reported aquatic insects, and fish surveys from the area.   I’ve taken extensive notes documenting water temperature, local entomology, and documented the time of day.   I find myself taking pictures of bugs to identify later on, then sitting at the vise and trying to painstaking recreate them.  The day I figured out that catfish love stoneflies or RedHorse love a bright green caddis, it was mind blowing.  I had a realization that a lot of fly anglers will never experience it, let alone figure it out.  My goal is to help find a cure for trout blindness.  So many of the fly fishermen I’ve met haven’t considered throwing for anything other than trout, not realizing there’s a whole world of fly fishing for any fish imaginable.   

 Have you ever driven past a body of water and wondered if there’s fish in it?   Of course you have, who hasn’t?    Being from the Allegheny River Basin, I’ve been surrounded by water for my entire life.  This has lead me on quite a fishing journey.  I started fishing for trout when I was 4 years old, and at age 5 caught my first steelhead.  After that it was a challenge to catch every fish out rivers and lakes have to offer.  When I got into fly fishing I focused so much on trout that I lost sight of other species.  It wasn’t until I caught a sucker on a steelhead trip that my mind started to wander.  I decided to take a trip to my local spillway to see what happened.  I ended up hooking into multiple Red Horse.  The fight from those hard and slimy trash hogs got my heart racing!  I started telling all of my fishing friends and they thought I was crazy.

I told them about all of the runs and riffles that are meant to be drifted with a floating fly line.   Yet, none of them have come with me.  Taking a look around, there were bugs of all sorts.  Caddis, stoneflies, sowbugs, and water spider were literally surrounding me.  All of the hatch charts and techniques applied to most of the fish in the area I was fishing.  How can I be the only one here with a fly rod?  Lack of awareness, and no sense of adventure.  When most of the fly fishermen I knew were hanging it up for the season, my drag was screaming.  

I’ll end this by saying that Trout Blindness is a serious problem, at least in my neck of the woods.  I’d love to get to a point that for every trout fisherman, there’s a spillway cowboy out there drifting a long run and slaying a trash fish.  There’s so much water and so many species that are begging to be caught in a fly.  Fly fishing is so much more than trout.