Coming from a winter steelhead background, normal trout fishing always seemed like a consolation prize, I’ve had steelhead hit so hard and take so much line so fast that I literally jumped into the river and swam a rapid rather than lose the fish. There’s just nothing that compares to that experience, it gets into your bloodstream like a drug addiction until eventually no other fish seems interesting to you.
Change is hard, but it’s been 10 years since my body would let me hunt winter steelhead, so my sights are slowly turning towards trout fishing, and it’s actually kind of fun, but I also kinda suck at it!
Maybe it’s because I’m fishing barbless these days to reduce the mortality of fish I don’t keep, but I’m only managing to hang onto about one fish per 12 strikes, which is about four times worse than I used to do for steelhead. Even barbless I should be able to do better than that right?
Right now I’m just using my winter steelhead set up with smaller spinners, but I really have no clue about trout poles, reels, landing nets, line size, hook size, or, barbless fishing in general. I also have a possibly unfounded fear of fly fishing. It has just always seemed like a way for old guys to spend insane amount of money catching a lot fewer fish. But then again I’m slowly turning into an old guy and maybe flyfishing isn’t as complicated as it seems? There’s also just a romance to the idea of a fly rod and a canoe. Can you really catch the same amount of fish on flies?
I’m hoping to skip the ridiculous amounts of research and over purchasing of gear that I went through with steelhead fishing in the beginning, so I’m looking for recommendations for a simple, quality (but not break the bank quality) set up (fly or spinning) for 10-24” trout. If you could only have one trout pole, line, and reel combo, what would it be? Any advice on gear or technique is greatly appreciated!
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