Troutbitten

My friends are here with me to begin season twenty-one with a conversation about doing the opposite. Because if you’re struggling out there on the water, if the net hasn’t been wet in a while and the trout seem to disagree with everything you suggest, then maybe you should do the opposite. To quote Jerry Seinfeld’s advice to George . . . “If every instinct you have is wrong, the opposite would have to be right.” My friends Austin Dando, Bill Dell, Josh Darling and Trevor Smith join me for a f...

For this season finale of our skills series on fighting fish we take questions and comments from the podcast audience. We cover the following: -- Fighting and landing big trout in small streams. -- Fighting trout in shallow water, and keeping them down. -- Drag settings. -- Strip sets. -- Landing two fish at the same time. -- How location and water type affects decisions. -- Cranking the reel vs pumping the rod. -- More on rod choice. My friends Matt Grobe and Bill Dell to wrap up this seas...

This podcast is all about the the end of the fight. Everything we’ve walked through in the previous episodes gets you to the point where the fish is within range and just about ready for the scoop. A lot can go wrong at the end of a fight, so there’s a lot that needs to be done right. We cover body, fish, net and rod positioning, all in relation to the river currents. We talk about when we get the net ready and what to do with it. We cover trapping the line with your trigger finger and ...

Side pressure puts real leverage on a fish. It's where control begins and power originates. All the other skills before this one set us up to maximize side pressure, with the right angles and a great plan for landing the trout of a lifetime. I think the opposite of side pressure is upward pressure, or pulling up with the rod tip, and we don't want to fight the fish at the surface. So while side pressure can keep the fish lower in the water column, upward pressure brings a trout to the top, of...

Landing a good trout is more about planning, quick thinking and good technique than luck. And in this episode, we talk about being ready for a big fish. With a little forethought and preparation, with even slight adjustments to body positioning, we put ourselves in the best position to show a picture of a lifetime rather than tell the story of another trout that got away. A few months ago I published a video to the Troutbitten YouTube channel with the title: The Casting, Drifting and Fighting...