New Water Important During Trout Outing

Jim Bedford and I were surprised and disappointed to find another car at the bridge where we planned to slip into one of Jim's favorite Michigan trout streams. It's a small river where he very rarely has company, and we knew that fishing in other anglers' tracks might not be good. We didn't know if the other anglers had waded upstream or down, though, and we could remain hopeful that they wouldn't travel far.

An unusually slow first hour or so on a normally productive river suggested that we might indeed be fishing behind the other anglers, and eventually a group of three appeared on a streamside "fisherman's trail," hiking back downstream to their car. Jim queried them a bit about their methods and success and about how far they had traveled and learned that they were using minnow baits and spinners (same as us) and had caught several trout, and that they had gone about as far as Jim had been planning to wade.

Not long after they continued down the path, Jim determined that it would make sense for us to cut losses by hiking back out ourselves and then walking one bridge crossing downstream and fishing back to the car. He likes the waters we were fishing best, but following three anglers throwing the same types of lures at the same targets didn't seem to be working.

It didn't take long after we got to the "Plan B" waters to confirm that Jim's decision had been a good one. We landed four trout in the first five minutes, which was more than we'd even seen in the other section. The fish were still a little off, relative to what they can be, and we didn't hook any big browns. However we ended up landing several trout, and the difference between the new water and the waters that had been fished was very noteworthy.

We caught most of our fish on Rebel Minnows, with most of mine coming on a 2 1/2-inch Tracdown Minnow in the Slick Brown Trout color pattern.