February 3, 2021
Peter Stitcher
The Answers to the Test are in Your Seine!
| The Answers to the Test are in Your Seine! |
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| What would it take to make this the best fishing season of your life? Would you have to drop big bucks on a new Winston rod and Hatch reel? Would you have to get a second mortgage on your house and put a fishing guide on retainer so that they can accompany you every trip to the river? What if I told you that the secret to consistently getting more strikes and fish in the net was having and using a seine (a net to sample aquatic insects)? Incorporating this one tool into your daily fishing ritual is like fishing with a cheat sheet! The answers to the test of which flies the fish are feeding on are almost always in the seine!
Before you write this off as way too geeky or think that you need to be an aquatic biologist to make heads or tails of what's in a seine, I assure you that it really isn't that hard. Let me define what a seine is and how to use one. A seine is a fine-mesh net that stretches over the basket of your landing net and is used to quickly and easily capture a sample of the aquatic insects in the water you are fishing (aka. a real-life look at what the fish are eating!). The first thing I do when I arrive at a river and before I delve into my fly box is the following:
- Stretch the Sci-Fly Seine around the basket of the fishing net.
- Gather the loose elastic band in one hand and grip it to the neck of the fishing net.
- Press the net and seine into the streambed with the basket facing up into the current.
- Aggressively stir and kick the streambed upstream of the seine with your wading boot or hand.
- Examine your sample and match the hatch!
You don't need to know the names of the flies in your seine or even the patterns in your fly box, you only need to be able to look from the insects to your fly patterns and identify which look the most similar.
Having and using a seine is going to help you improve your fly fishing game in three distinct ways.
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It's going to break your dependence on the fly shop for info at a price - Instead of relying on the shops to tell you what might be working and selling you a dubious set of overpriced flies in exchange for the suggestion, you are going to know the exact sizes, colors, and profiles of the most abundant bugs in the river and can match to that. Only after sampling might you then decide to pick up one or two targeted flies instead of going with the more expensive "shotgun" approach done by most shops.
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You are going to maximize your time on the water - Done are the days of hunting and pecking, selecting flies at random, and spooking fish that may otherwise be ready to eat when we drift some oddball fly in front of their faces. You will be making informed fly selections based on what is actually in the water, you will be spending less time switching flies, and you will catch more fish.
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You will be able to fish with confidence and you will have more fun - No one likes feeling like an idiot. Fly fishing has a large enough learning curve as it is with learning to cast, reading the water, and keeping your flies out of the trees. Using a seine is going to dramatically reduce your learning curve, and when you are catching more fish, everyone is having more fun!
A special thank you to fellow fly geek Eddy Wittry for sharing the saying "The Answers to the Test are in Your Seine" and inspiring this article!
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