Richard Tong

 1. Choice of equipment- Rods, reels, fly lines, fly floatants, clothes, glasses, and other useful items.

On the northern freestone rivers I fish I generally use a 10’ rod which gives greater line control than a shorter rod and can also help achieve longer drifts by keeping as much line off the surface as possible. In Cumbria where a lot of my ‘serious’ fishing is done, the trout can run to a good size so I prefer a 4 weight rod which has enough backbone to apply pressure to a feisty trout, but also has enough delicacy to land a dry fly softly in low river conditions. My favourite stretch of river is in the upper reaches but has a lowland feel, with mostly gentle gradients and a lovely pool structure.

 In Scotland in the spring I normally use a 5 weight as the rivers are larger with more flow, delicacy is not such an issue, fly size is bigger (generally 12-14 in spring), and the 5 weight just has more turning power on larger trout. 

On tree lined upper reaches of the northern rivers, I often fish an 8-8.5’ rod, (either 3 or 4 weight). Current favourite which was used a lot last season is an old Sage FLi 8.5’ 3 weight which found itself very much in favour

 I prefer a middle to tip action- poker like ‘casting’ rods are not for me. A rod needs to perform well with 1-2’ of fly line out when fishing both at close quarters and in the late evening. My main go-to rod is an Orvis Helios (mark one) 10’ 4wt and this is still a benchmark rod IMO, so why change!

My 5 weights are a Hardy Sintrix 9’ which is a superb tool, whilst back up rods are a Greys Streamflex 9’ and Orvis 6 piece Frequent Flyer (neither of which have been put to use yet). These are also the 3 rods which get taken on fishing trips abroad.

Reels- disc drag and large arbour. There are several old click & pawl reels in my collection but haven’t used them for years. I am a big fan of Lamson and have 2 Lightspeeds, a Velocity and a Speedster. Also in the collection are 2 x Orvis Mirage, Ross Evolution and 2 x Nautilus disc drag reels. I like the comfort of a disc drag and have had to crank up the resistance many times in Russia, Iceland and New Zealand. Some big UK trout also warrant a disc drag. The reels all have one thing in common in that they are either black or non-reflective

 Fly lines- Weight forward with a long belly for stability when in-river topography etc. just means you cannot get closer to a trout and have to sometimes cast a longer line. I have been using a Barrio GT90 for years and it does everything asked from it, at a very good price. I have recently also been using a Mackenzie NX trout line. I know the research and testing involved with  the development of this line and the type of situations it was developed for and also like this very much. Although there is much debate about fly line colour and fish scaring, there is comfort to be gained from fishing a nice olive coloured line

 Fly floatants- Aquel is my go-to gel/paste floatant and doesn’t tend to liquefy at higher temperatures like Gink. Last season I tried Moser Miracle floatant which was excellent too. Shimizaki Dry Shake is my powder floatant which gets used for cdc flies as well as Veniard CDC Gel. After ruining/waterlogging several amadou fly patches over the years I have been carrying a cheap supermarket microfibre cloth. Unlike amadou whose efficacy reduces the more it is used (especially if it gets any gel floatant on it), the microfibre cloth is both easily washable and very absorbent 

 Clothes- because much of my fishing is upper reaches of rivers for larger than average trout all my clothes and hats are sombre coloured khakis, olives etc. I wouldn’t go to the length of actually choosing camo waders….but my next pair are actually camo as I got them in a sale. I’m more of a t-shirt or long sleeved t-shirt guy than a buttoned shirt- less ‘bits’ to catch your leader on!

Boots- Orvis Ultralight. These are low slung, easy to get on/off and designed for walking long distances. I used them in New Zealand for a 3 week trip in January 2020 and they are still going well despite having walked a few hundred miles in them by now. They are Vibram soled with Supatracks studs put in them by myself for extra purchase on in-river rocks. The compromise between a surer grip and slightly more noise made by these is worth the trade off to me and I am not aware that these have resulted in more scared trout!

Glasses- 2 really decent Costa pairs- one yellow (low light/evenings and most days in dull UK!) and a grey pair for brighter, sunnier days. My eyesight is not great; I am short sighted and usually wear soft contact lenses for a full day’s fishing, but they are specifically for distance vision which causes problems when tying on a fly. After trying a few flip-focals, I now use cheap magnifying glasses from Amazon with a +3 magnification. I have some prescription sunglasses which I bought for fishing in New Zealand and these have proved useful where sometimes the vicious norwester’s can cause problems with my contact lenses. For nipping down to the locals (Aire and Wharfe) for a few hours I just tend to wear my glasses with steel Costa retainers (which are worth the money and are far better than the cheaper alternatives I have tried)- losing your vision aid mid-river would be not so clever especially if you are driving afterwards.

Knee pads- essential for low river conditions where frequently you can be motionless on your knees for long periods- saves on wear and tear on both waders and knees! I bought mine from Amazon 

Net- McLean short handle weigh net- weighs up to 14lbs. Bought my first one probably 25 years ago and replaced it a couple of years ago. Takes the guess work out when you catch a decent trout. Each season I test mine with bags of sugar to make sure they are still accurate- they seem to hold their accuracy very well

 Net holder (magnetic)- after using various types over the years and suffering many involuntary detachments when jumping over fences, I switched to the McLean Heavy Duty Magnetic Net Holder which I was assured was way stronger than the others on the market. It is! Problem solved!

2, Leader material, build-up, length and knots.

The first 7’ is steeply tapered section of a Leeda Profil SELECTA. At the end of this there is I ties a presentation loop and then presentation loop the top section of my tippet material of 3x and attach this loop to loop to the Leeda Profil section. To 3x section of tippet is joined a length of 4x via a surgeon’s knot and to the other end is tied a small tippet ring of 1.5mm. Tippet rings have negligible weight and enable swapping the terminal tippet section for a new length without compromising the length of the rest of the leader. To the tippet ring is attached a section of 5x copolymer. Copolymer is limper than fluorocarbon so I prefer this- anything to delay the dreaded drag! The 5x tippet allows me to play UK trout as hard as I dare to get them in ASAP. Overall length can be from 13-18’ depending on wind, fly size and tree cover and the set up above gives flexibility in altering the lengths of tippet to suit. 

When fishing size 18 or smaller I will go to 6x and have landed fish over 3lb on this, but it is a heart in the mouth job and care has to be taken. I have used Frog Hair copolymer for years and it has never let me down. I will occasionally use 7x when fishing tiny dries in the autumn for grayling (sub 20s).

A Double Davy Knot to the fly is quick to tie, has little bulk, does not eat tippet and is the one I have used for years. It ticks all of the boxes for me

Using the above set-up means that I will get a full season out of one leader which appeals to my frugality! 

3, Approach and stealth.

low and steady when on a fish! On a day when the fish are not so active I may cover up to 10 miles in my waders. On our freestone top river beats the levels fall very quickly, so high water conditions do not tend to last long. I do not fish the water and instead concentrate on trying to spot feeding fish. On our rivers, sight fishing is not the norm, so you are looking for a disturbance that a feeding fish makes. 

Apart from the spring when hatches of upwings can be more or less reliably be counted upon (LDO/March brown/olive uprights) together with grannom and falls of black gnats or hawthorn flies where rises can be relatively easy to spot, I am trying to see trout feeding on bits and pieces during the day, with infrequent rises, sometimes many minutes apart. Patience is definitely a virtue and rather than rushing from pool to pool, it pays to loiter and properly scan a pool before moving on

Keeping a low profile is also paramount. On one river I fish the banks can be high in places and the amount of anglers I see ambling down the bank in full view of any trout in the river beggars belief! Many times over the course of a  season good trout are spotted by slowing down and scrutinising a pool, that could otherwise have been missed by rushing past. If a pool looks promising it can pay to loiter for a while to make sure that you stand a chance of seeing any rises. This can easily take over 30 minutes at times- especially on a ‘honey-pot’, but how good does it feel when your patience pays off and a good fish is spotted! Sometimes a trout may rise over 20 minutes apart, and this takes a huge amount of patience (especially when the water and weather are cold!) not to just cast and hope for the best until you are sure of its location. When you are waiting for the rise to confirm X marks the spot, peel enough fly line off the reel for the estimated distance, instead of waiting till the trout rises to do so. This keeps the false casting to a minimum and reduces the chances of the trout cottoning on to your presence. Of course once you have given up and decide ‘it was a oncer’ it is worth having a ‘just in case cast’, but this is not usually a successful tactic! 

In low water where there is not much flow the trout can cruise about picking titbits (generally terrestrials such as aphids, beetles etc.) off the surface- here it can take 20 minutes to get in position on hands and knees and the delivery is frequently only the leader plus a couple of feet of fly line. The water can be very shallow- this is proper sight fishing which is both very exciting and extremely exhilarating when things come together. 

Evening fishing in the summer is not for everyone, but this is when big trout lose their caution and many is the occasion when an angler can get literally on top of a large feeding trout in the gathering twilight, no more than 15’ away. This does not mean you can barge up to them and care still needs to be taken. 

The heavier the hatch/fall the less cautious trout are and I well recall one late evening in the summer when I took 3 trout between 2-3lbs all feeding in a line within a couple of feet of each other and no more than 20’ from me. Each when hooked went berserk, but the others’ continued feeding seemingly undisturbed given the amount of BWO coming down. In these low light conditions large trout can be found in shallow margins where they wouldn’t lie during the day and pool tails is also a favourite at this time.

4, Reading the water

On my usual waters I know many of the good lies, but these can be absent or change due to river levels. On new rivers or beats I would be looking for tree cover, in-stream structure, drop-offs, depth and flow. As we know, a good feeding lie can also be a good holding lie, but a holding lie may not be a good feeding lie and the trout may have to move to feed. Whether it does so depends on many factors such as availability of food and size of trout.

5, Casting ability which casts are essential

Before a new season I go out and practice on a field, with hoops scattered about at 30’, 40’ and 50’ distances. I will practice into the wind/with the wind/across the wind. I will throw from a straight overhead to a side cast and also the same off my other shoulder. I try to land my fly with an amount of slack in the delivery to try and mimic a real fishing situation. Of course this is difficult to gauge since in each situation a different amount of slack will have to be introduced depending on multiple factors. This or a variation of it (such as the very useful reach mend, dump cast, parachute cast ) are the casts I use for 99% of fishing, with the very occasional roll, single Spey and bow & arrow thrown in when required. Reach mends can be useful as is the ability to throw loops on the water to prolong a drift at times It should go without saying that the ability to double haul is an absolute must.

 Before going to New Zealand and no matter how busy I am I will go down every day for at least 20 minutes and practice to throw off the ring rust as in the UK we are mid-winter by then and I will not have cast properly for a few weeks as I don’t tend to fish beyond the end of November. I don’t want to go to the other side of the world to practice my accuracy on trout that I have been dreaming of!  The time put into honing my casting has definitely paid dividends when I get there. 

6, Entomology, what should we know?

Although knowing the genus and species of many upwings is interesting to some (including myself), this is not essential to fly fishing success.  I don’t take the same level of interest with stoneflies except the Leuctra species which we get great hatches of up north in the autumn and the large stoneflies which hatch in spring. With terrestrials I know the black gnat and hawthorn fly by their Latin name and that’s it! I DO have a very good working knowledge of what hatches/falls and when and like to carry imitations to suit. 

Some of our best fishing can be with terrestrials and outside of spring it will be a strange day when I don’t have a foam beetle or a wee black job knotted on at some stage. The spring fall of black gnats has been very good in recent years and has lasted for up to 3 weeks, giving superb, consistent sport. The spread of the alder beetle larvae has got me excited for the new season and if this can get anywhere near the willow grubbing scenario seen in NZ then we are all in for a treat!  

7, Rise forms can they tell us something?

Despite years of experience looking for big trout, the amount of times a friend and myself say something like “I knew it was a big trout but I didn’t know it was THAT big” shows that it is difficult to tell the heft of a trout sometimes. Large trout taking large items like March browns, olive uprights, Mayfliy duns cannot help but betray their size by having to stick their snout out to take the fly. The same trout or indeed a more modest trout taking a spent spinner, cripple or aphid can do so by making a barely discernible disturbance at times.

As we know, a small rise form can be deceptive and  is not always necessarily made by a small fish!  I well recall crossing a Scottish river at the start of a mid-April day with a very experienced friend and a trout rose in front of us. We both thought it would be no more than 1lb, and my friend decided he may as well have a cast- it turned out to be 5lb 8oz and was the start of a superb day when the hatch seemed to last through the day with large dark olives and March browns predominating.

A rise form can give an indication of whether a food item is trapped, which will result in a leisurely rise, or has the potential to fly away which can be a more energetic rise form. A sipping type rise though may be to an emerger, cripple, drowned, spent or terrestrial fly so is often no more than an indication of what might be getting taken. A small muslin net is a great aid to telling us what is the prevalent flies on the river at any one time.

8, Fly selection, size, shape, materials, which flies are essential.

I carry far too many flies, but I lose few as I make few casts, so the quantity grows and I do like a fix and go through phases of ‘needing to tie a fly.’ For upwings my selection is generally either a paradun or cdc (both in shuttlecock and F Fly design). I have for a few years now had a penchant for tying in a shuck of Mirage or Micro-Glint or similar. If I use coq de Leon it is tied in as a bunch rather than 3 fibres, again to represent a shuck. Size to suit the natural! Hooks are strong and wide gape- favourites are Partridge Dry Fly Supreme for duns/terrestrials and Tiemco 2488 for a curved hook. I have binned most of my flies tied with Kamasan B100s after a large trout straightened one a few years ago. For New Zealand/Russia/Iceland I use heavyweight wet fly hooks for dry flies such as Kamasan B175 or Partridge Wet Heavy Supreme G3A/L and these have served well. 

Materials- Both natural and synthetic are used, but apart from hackles (cdc, genetic cock, coq de Leon, plus grouse or partridge for Jinglers) and some body fur such as mole, hare, deer, peacock herl and Andrew’s Scruffy Dubbing I  tend to use more synthetic with Superfine dubbing being a favourite. Tiemco Aero Dry Wing (I have tons of the stuff which I wisely purchased years ago at about £3 a pop- it is almost three times the price now), black foam, Ice Dub (peacock black and peacock) and Straggle Legs are also favourite synthetic materials. The Aero Dry Wing is superb for posts and flies should be tied with a variety of colours to be used depending on the light conditions- favourites for me are fluo pink, fluo yellow, fluo orange, fluo green, fluo white, black and dun.

Essential flies- large dark olive, March brown (doubles for a large brook dun imitation), olive upright, grannom (emerger, adult and spent adult), Mayfly, black gnat, hawthorn fly, iron blue dun, blue-winged olive, yellow May dun, willow flies, beetles (foam + Ghandi’s Flip Flop), aphids. Upwings all in dun and emerger format. Really only BWO and Mayfly in spinner format plus a generic larger spinner pattern

Essential patterns- all of the above. I have probably caught more trout on a black foam beetle and a small black Klinkhamer than any other patterns. Paul Procter’s APT in its many guises(!!) is also very good

9, Presentation and drifts.

Anything which delivers the fly drag free usually- a long supple tippet facilitates this as does a slight manipulation of the rod at the very end of the cast. A variety of slack line casts are essential. In a heavy hatch/fall, accuracy is more important, though as mentioned elsewhere it is possible to get closer to fish in these situations as they are very focused on feeding and seem less aware of an angler’s approach. When there is less food available and/or the offering is worth it calorie wise, the trout may be prepared to move a greater distance, though in these situations they are normally not so tolerant and are more aware of unusual (angler) movement.

10, Upstream or down stream?

Whichever way is best, but dictated in part by riparian foliage, water depth and clarity. Funnily enough a lot of my grayling are taken with a downstream presentation of small dry flies <#18, but then grayling are far more tolerant than trout! As a lot of my fishing is to relatively low numbers of large(r)  trout in often low water, there is no way that you will get away with a delivery downstream unless the river is of sufficient width at that point to put distance between you and the trout. So delivery is normally upstream, though if I were given the choice it would be across stream where management of the line and leader is easier to try and avoid drag.

11, Fighting fish

I like to get fish in as quick as possible, without being too brutal. The longer a trout is on, statistically the better the chance of it getting off – not only by the hook hold giving way but also by running you round a tree root, boulder etc. A quickly fought and landed trout also recuperates and swims away sooner. In the UK, the trout tend to stick to the pool more or less where they are hooked, but in New Zealand the ability to traverse adroitly over large uneven bankside boulders in pursuit of your quarry which may be rapidly heading downstream is definitely required at times!

Using different rod angles on fish and varying these during the fight both disorientates fish and keeps them guessing, rather than always applying pressure from a vertical rod. When it turns left, swing your rod at an angle to the right to try and turn it right, when it turn to the right, do the opposite, never let it rest if possible, keep it off its guard and keep it guessing.

As mentioned elsewhere, tippet used in the UK is usually 5x and this gives me the confidence to exert some good pressure. I have had tippet sheared through by large trout’s teeth; this can happen depending on where in the mouth it is hooked and what angle the tippet is dragged across the teeth- the tell-tale sign of a sheared tippet is a spade/flattened end rather than the dreaded curly pig’s tail of a badly tied knot! This is just pure bad luck rather than bad angling and is unavoidable when it happens. For netting, don’t panic and stab at the fish as it gets close. If netting a trout for a friend and it suddenly discovers a burst of energy then back off in case you become the structure it gets the line snagged on or around. Try and keep it in the water as much as possible. I have given up on selfies and instead lay the trout across the net in the water, take a quick snap and then back it goes. I don’t mind a quick grip and grin, but for me I have to be fishing with a friend to achieve this.