Well, Kingfisher had asked me about "short floating" in another thread, and I realized that there might just be a need to expand on some of the techniques used to fish our rivers for salmon....
What is the point of bringing this method to our attention? Recently some of you may have noticed that there has been an increased number of clean, chrome fish lying dead on the bottom of some of the pools you fish, and you may have wondered why? ...or you may have noticed that a great many people fishing around you have been hooking a lot of fish, but unfortunately many of them have been foul hooked, as in hooked in the tail, or by a fin...you may also have noticed that many fisherman seem to be hanging up on the bottom, and you have to wait for them to try and dislodge their gear all the while spooking fish that were holding in the pool...you may have also noticed that the coho seem to be quite tight lipped under these conditions....there is one very simple reason why these and other things are occuring more frequently on our rivers. However, let's go off on a brief tangent for a second...
Many of you have gone and fished the Fraser river for sockeye during the summer, some of you have never fished for salmon in rivers before and your first exposure to the sport may have been out on the fraser on a warm summer day. If you have, then you might know that sockeye don't bite. This is why the technique used on the fraser is to have a leader length of more than 6 feet, no float, and to be continuously bouncing the bottom of the river in a manner that is not unlike "dredging"... The reason this works, is because sockeye swim with their mouths open, and in dragging your long leader line along the bottom, inevitably your line will end up "flossing" the sockeye mouth until the hook lodges in the corner of it and you set the hook....The fish did not bite your presentation, it was deliberately and some might argue skillfully hooked against its will in a technique that equates to legal (for now) snagging. This method is not sporting and is employed so as to catch fish and take them home for the table.
Unfortunately this method is often the first exposure new fishers have to our sport, and when they explore other fisheries like the vedder river right now, they use methods such as these...with a bit of a twist...this method of flossing has evolved somewhat. Coho, springs, pinks, and chum salmon will bite a well presented peice of wool, bait, spinner etc, etc unlike sockeye on the fraser which almost all of the time will not.
Most fishermen on flows like the vedder use floats to present their gear, and when novices see this, what occurs is a type of hybrid method between long lining of the sockeye fishery and the float fishing method used for other species that will take a presentation. It's important to understand that salmon will tend to swim within a foot or two of the bottom of a river because the current is slower in this lower portion and they expend less energy in their migration upstream. So when one is bottom bouncing with a float or without a float, their line is being dragged though the fish, it drags along their bodies and fins, the weight hits them in the side and they swat it with their tails, or peel off quickly in an instinctually defensive move...this is why many of the fish hooked when one fishes with a length of float to weight that is greater than the depth of the river they are floating in they either snag on the bottom with their weight, or they snag a fish by the tail or by the ***...well, you get the idea...keep in mind of course that longer leaders also make it easier for the leader line to get tangled up in the mass a fish bodies swimming around down there and people hook fish without the fish actually seeing the presentation, liking it and biting it of their own volition...
So there are many reasons why you might short float instead of dredge/floss/sweep...these are just some of the reasons short floating is a more ethical and appropriate way to fish rivers than floss
-you don't snag bottom and so don't tie up the pool trying to get your line free or spook fish for the remainder of the day by yanking on the line like some spaz... :
-you don't spook the fish by hitting them in the side with your weight
-you don't snag a fish in the tail, ***, fin, belly or anywhere else by setting the hook when you feel the weight hit that fish accidentally...wasting your time and other fishers time trying to land a fish that isn't under control! You cannot "play" a fish that is foul hooked, you have no control over it and will also likely kill it, lose your gear, and/or snap your rod in two horsing it in....
-you don't put a hole in the fishes belly with that hook when you snag it, consequently killing the fish within hours or days depending on the severity of the wound and therefore killing it before it spawns which has an impact on fish stocks...(their body cavity fills up with water, and they either "drown" cause they can't swim properly, or they die of some infection).
-you only hook fish that want to come up just a bit to your hook, because you are drifting over their heads... this allows you to hook a fish with a definite visual float strike which is more exciting than trying to tell the difference between a rock and a fish.
-over the course of the entire days fishing, the fish will be more willing to bite as they have been less spooked from the start...meaning if you aren't bumping them, or snagging the bottom right next to them or snagging the tail of the chum right next to the nice bright coho you'd rather have, then that nice bright coho is less likely to get tight lipped and refuse all presentations...or hide in some obscure piece of slack water you'd never think to check.
So how does short floating work? The golden rule is the length from your float to your weight, (not to your hook, but from float to weight), should be less than the depth of the water you are fishing by at least a foot...in fact usually a shorter float than that is better as you want your hook floating above the fish's heads...not disturbing them or spooking them at all...enticing them to strike, not striking them.
You may have noticed how salmon swim near the bottom, and when you walk up to a pool they see you and swim a bit further away....well this would logically mean that the salmon can see things above them and around them and react to them right? So the theory behind the short floating technique is to present your attractant, be it bait or a spinner, or a peice of wool that looks like some salmon eggs floating in the water, in such a way that the fish sees it, reacts to it swims over, and bites it. Fish don't have hands to inspect items that they are curious about, they use their mouths to check things out. Therefore by presenting your wares to the fish in such a way that entices them to inspect what you are offering, you are trully participating in and honing the skills of river drift fishing...you have tricked the salmon or steelhead into striking your presentation because it wanted to, not because you hit it on the head with your weight and it accidentally swam into your hook...when you fish with a "short float" and the fish strikes your hook, you will have trully experienced the "sport" in sportfishing and will learn that there is a science and methodology to catching these beautiful fish on our rivers that requires much more skill than just dragging your hook along the bottom and hoping for the best.
You bring in factors like what depth the fish are precisely at, how much weight to use to present your offering at the right speed, and what angle you need to approach the fish from so as to slow or speed up your presentation in such a way as to entice them to bite. Suddenly what color jig or wool or spinner you use becomes a part of the challenge.
I would also mention that down at the KW bridge pool you mentioned kingfisher, the majority of fishermen are flossing/dredging, you can tell because their floats are bobbing up and down non stop as their weight taps bottom every centimeter of the drift, you might also notice some people using a float, but that it seems redundant because that float is almost on its side because it is fished too deep. I am sure most of these fishers do not know better and are only a product of the overwhelming desire to hook fish. They likely don't know that 9 out of 10 fish they hook don't have to be hooked by the tail, but I would like to think that if they were shown alternative methods to catch these great fish they might realize there is a better, more responsible and ethical way to catch salmon in our rivers.
One other item of note is no technique is perfect...you will occasionally snag a fish by accident short floating, but this will happen 1 in 20 times as opposed to 9 out of 10 times with dredging with a long leader...and you will almost never snag bottom and lose another leader or weight again...also, short floating in a pool surrounded by flossers will be tough, all the fish in there will have already been spooked, and you will be waiting alot for fishermen and women to dislodge themselves from the bottom of the river or snap off a foul hooked fish....in short floating you will get a great many more drifts in than someone who is dredging, this is because you aren't wasting time with the "snags"... be they "bottom of river or bottom of fish..."
I hope this helps, and that any of you who didn't know any other way to fish might now make an attempt to angle in a more responsible manner...there are so many, many reasons why you should.
(PS: "Pass it on" )
thanks for listening,
rib
Here's also some more discussion and points re short floating:
http://www.bcfishingreports.com/forums/threads/8324-Short-Floating-Winter-Steelhead
Firstly, this has been touched on in this forum before, but it seems prudent to reiterate and expand on this technique here. Short floating refers to the length from your float to your weight, specifically setting that distance at a length that is less than the depth of water you are fishing.kingfisher2006 said:
What is the point of bringing this method to our attention? Recently some of you may have noticed that there has been an increased number of clean, chrome fish lying dead on the bottom of some of the pools you fish, and you may have wondered why? ...or you may have noticed that a great many people fishing around you have been hooking a lot of fish, but unfortunately many of them have been foul hooked, as in hooked in the tail, or by a fin...you may also have noticed that many fisherman seem to be hanging up on the bottom, and you have to wait for them to try and dislodge their gear all the while spooking fish that were holding in the pool...you may have also noticed that the coho seem to be quite tight lipped under these conditions....there is one very simple reason why these and other things are occuring more frequently on our rivers. However, let's go off on a brief tangent for a second...
Many of you have gone and fished the Fraser river for sockeye during the summer, some of you have never fished for salmon in rivers before and your first exposure to the sport may have been out on the fraser on a warm summer day. If you have, then you might know that sockeye don't bite. This is why the technique used on the fraser is to have a leader length of more than 6 feet, no float, and to be continuously bouncing the bottom of the river in a manner that is not unlike "dredging"... The reason this works, is because sockeye swim with their mouths open, and in dragging your long leader line along the bottom, inevitably your line will end up "flossing" the sockeye mouth until the hook lodges in the corner of it and you set the hook....The fish did not bite your presentation, it was deliberately and some might argue skillfully hooked against its will in a technique that equates to legal (for now) snagging. This method is not sporting and is employed so as to catch fish and take them home for the table.
Unfortunately this method is often the first exposure new fishers have to our sport, and when they explore other fisheries like the vedder river right now, they use methods such as these...with a bit of a twist...this method of flossing has evolved somewhat. Coho, springs, pinks, and chum salmon will bite a well presented peice of wool, bait, spinner etc, etc unlike sockeye on the fraser which almost all of the time will not.
Most fishermen on flows like the vedder use floats to present their gear, and when novices see this, what occurs is a type of hybrid method between long lining of the sockeye fishery and the float fishing method used for other species that will take a presentation. It's important to understand that salmon will tend to swim within a foot or two of the bottom of a river because the current is slower in this lower portion and they expend less energy in their migration upstream. So when one is bottom bouncing with a float or without a float, their line is being dragged though the fish, it drags along their bodies and fins, the weight hits them in the side and they swat it with their tails, or peel off quickly in an instinctually defensive move...this is why many of the fish hooked when one fishes with a length of float to weight that is greater than the depth of the river they are floating in they either snag on the bottom with their weight, or they snag a fish by the tail or by the ***...well, you get the idea...keep in mind of course that longer leaders also make it easier for the leader line to get tangled up in the mass a fish bodies swimming around down there and people hook fish without the fish actually seeing the presentation, liking it and biting it of their own volition...
So there are many reasons why you might short float instead of dredge/floss/sweep...these are just some of the reasons short floating is a more ethical and appropriate way to fish rivers than floss
-you don't snag bottom and so don't tie up the pool trying to get your line free or spook fish for the remainder of the day by yanking on the line like some spaz... :
-you don't spook the fish by hitting them in the side with your weight
-you don't snag a fish in the tail, ***, fin, belly or anywhere else by setting the hook when you feel the weight hit that fish accidentally...wasting your time and other fishers time trying to land a fish that isn't under control! You cannot "play" a fish that is foul hooked, you have no control over it and will also likely kill it, lose your gear, and/or snap your rod in two horsing it in....
-you don't put a hole in the fishes belly with that hook when you snag it, consequently killing the fish within hours or days depending on the severity of the wound and therefore killing it before it spawns which has an impact on fish stocks...(their body cavity fills up with water, and they either "drown" cause they can't swim properly, or they die of some infection).
-you only hook fish that want to come up just a bit to your hook, because you are drifting over their heads... this allows you to hook a fish with a definite visual float strike which is more exciting than trying to tell the difference between a rock and a fish.
-over the course of the entire days fishing, the fish will be more willing to bite as they have been less spooked from the start...meaning if you aren't bumping them, or snagging the bottom right next to them or snagging the tail of the chum right next to the nice bright coho you'd rather have, then that nice bright coho is less likely to get tight lipped and refuse all presentations...or hide in some obscure piece of slack water you'd never think to check.
So how does short floating work? The golden rule is the length from your float to your weight, (not to your hook, but from float to weight), should be less than the depth of the water you are fishing by at least a foot...in fact usually a shorter float than that is better as you want your hook floating above the fish's heads...not disturbing them or spooking them at all...enticing them to strike, not striking them.
You may have noticed how salmon swim near the bottom, and when you walk up to a pool they see you and swim a bit further away....well this would logically mean that the salmon can see things above them and around them and react to them right? So the theory behind the short floating technique is to present your attractant, be it bait or a spinner, or a peice of wool that looks like some salmon eggs floating in the water, in such a way that the fish sees it, reacts to it swims over, and bites it. Fish don't have hands to inspect items that they are curious about, they use their mouths to check things out. Therefore by presenting your wares to the fish in such a way that entices them to inspect what you are offering, you are trully participating in and honing the skills of river drift fishing...you have tricked the salmon or steelhead into striking your presentation because it wanted to, not because you hit it on the head with your weight and it accidentally swam into your hook...when you fish with a "short float" and the fish strikes your hook, you will have trully experienced the "sport" in sportfishing and will learn that there is a science and methodology to catching these beautiful fish on our rivers that requires much more skill than just dragging your hook along the bottom and hoping for the best.
You bring in factors like what depth the fish are precisely at, how much weight to use to present your offering at the right speed, and what angle you need to approach the fish from so as to slow or speed up your presentation in such a way as to entice them to bite. Suddenly what color jig or wool or spinner you use becomes a part of the challenge.
I would also mention that down at the KW bridge pool you mentioned kingfisher, the majority of fishermen are flossing/dredging, you can tell because their floats are bobbing up and down non stop as their weight taps bottom every centimeter of the drift, you might also notice some people using a float, but that it seems redundant because that float is almost on its side because it is fished too deep. I am sure most of these fishers do not know better and are only a product of the overwhelming desire to hook fish. They likely don't know that 9 out of 10 fish they hook don't have to be hooked by the tail, but I would like to think that if they were shown alternative methods to catch these great fish they might realize there is a better, more responsible and ethical way to catch salmon in our rivers.
One other item of note is no technique is perfect...you will occasionally snag a fish by accident short floating, but this will happen 1 in 20 times as opposed to 9 out of 10 times with dredging with a long leader...and you will almost never snag bottom and lose another leader or weight again...also, short floating in a pool surrounded by flossers will be tough, all the fish in there will have already been spooked, and you will be waiting alot for fishermen and women to dislodge themselves from the bottom of the river or snap off a foul hooked fish....in short floating you will get a great many more drifts in than someone who is dredging, this is because you aren't wasting time with the "snags"... be they "bottom of river or bottom of fish..."
I hope this helps, and that any of you who didn't know any other way to fish might now make an attempt to angle in a more responsible manner...there are so many, many reasons why you should.
(PS: "Pass it on"
)thanks for listening,
rib
Here's also some more discussion and points re short floating:
http://www.bcfishingreports.com/forums/threads/8324-Short-Floating-Winter-Steelhead
