High Water: What to Tie On After Rain or a Release

Most anglers see rising, colouring water and go home. That is a mistake often enough to be worth talking about, because a river coming up is a river where trout are feeding hard on food that has just been washed loose — and where a lot fewer people are fishing.

The important distinction is between rising and clearing and rising and blowing out. A river with a foot of visibility that is holding steady or dropping is excellent fishing. A river the colour of chocolate milk, still climbing, carrying branches, is not worth your time and is genuinely dangerous to wade. Judge it on visibility and trend, not on height alone.

What actually changes

Two things happen when flows come up, and both work in your favour.

Trout move to the edges. A fish will not burn energy holding in heavy current. The middle of the river becomes uninhabitable and the fish shift to the soft margins — inside bends, back eddies, behind boulders, and the flooded grass a foot from the bank. Water you would have walked through last week now holds the fish. Do not wade in before you have fished it.

The buffet opens. Rising water scours the silt and undercuts the banks, and everything living in there goes into the drift: aquatic worms, crane fly larvae, stonefly nymphs, drowned terrestrials. Trout switch to opportunistic feeding on large, obvious food.

Worms first

Aquatic worms are real animals that live in the silt of most trout rivers, and high water is when they get dislodged in numbers. This is not a gimmick; it is the single most predictable feeding event on a tailwater.

The Squirmy Worm is the one to start with. The silicone body never stops moving on a dead drift, which is exactly what a dislodged worm does and exactly what chenille cannot do. Brown and red are the naturals, pink is the stained-water option, tan for clearer low flows.

The San Juan Worm is the traditional version and still catches everything the Squirmy does. Carry both, and change colour rather than pattern if you are not getting takes — visibility, not shape, is usually the variable that matters.

Then big, dark, obvious nymphs

In dirty water a trout is hunting by silhouette and by the lateral line. Small and subtle is the wrong idea. Go bigger and darker than you would normally fish.

Pat's Rubber Legs is close to ideal — a big chenille stonefly nymph with six rubber legs that never stop moving. Stonefly nymphs live in the substrate for years, so they are always the most abundant large food item to get washed out. The Mop Fly is the other high-water specialist: the chenille moves like a crane fly larva and trout commit to it without hesitation. Brown and tan match the naturals; white is there for when visibility really drops.

If the water clears to two feet or so and the fish get pickier, a Scud is worth a swap — especially the orange version, which imitates a dead or gravid scud, and there are a lot of dead scuds in the drift after a flow change.

A streamer is a legitimate answer

Coloured water gives a predator cover, and big browns in particular will hunt hard in it. An Olive Bead Head Zonker worked along the bank and through the soft slots takes the largest fish of the day more often than the numbers suggest — the rabbit strip keeps pulsing on the pause, which is when nearly every streamer eat happens.

Rigging heavier than feels right

You need to be on the bottom, and the current is stronger than it looks.

• Go up in tippet. 3X or 4X. The fish cannot inspect anything closely, and you may hook something large in heavy water.
• Add weight. Whatever got you down last week will not this week. Add shot, or fish a heavier anchor fly, until you are ticking bottom occasionally.
• Set the indicator deep, then deeper. In fast, high water most anglers fish above the fish all day.
• Short drifts, close in. You are fishing a band of soft water a few feet wide along the bank. Long casts across heavy current just produce drag.

Know when not to go

This is worth saying plainly. Wading a rising river is the most dangerous thing most trout anglers do. Water above the knee in real current is already difficult, and a river that came up overnight has moved gravel, opened holes and put wood where there was none.

If you cannot see your boots in eight inches of water, or the river is still climbing, fish from the bank or go somewhere else. Tailwaters below dams are usually the better bet after heavy rain anyway — releases are scheduled and the water clears far faster than a freestone river’s.

The short version

• Rising and clearing is good. Rising and blowing out is not — judge visibility and trend.
• Fish the edges. The trout are in water you used to wade through.
• Worm first, then a big dark nymph, then a streamer.
• Heavier tippet, more weight, deeper indicator, shorter drifts.
• Do not wade a river that is still coming up.