Night Fishing for Trout, and the Mouse Emerger Concept

Alright, this is gonna be a good one. Because my friends Josh and Trevor are here to talk about night fishing for trout and . . . the mouse emerger concept. 

Thanks for tuning in. And . . .  I just want to say thank you SO much to all the listeners and subscribers out there. Your kind words, reviews, donations and support have really given this Troutbitten Podcast series a strong start. So . . . sincere thanks to everyone out there.

I’m Domenick Swentosky, owner of Troutbitten and author of Troutbitten.com. Since 2014, I’ve published over 700 articles on the website: with stories, commentaries, tips and tactics, the website has grown into a huge resource for fly fishers.

And . . . about forty of those articles are on night fishing for trout. In fact, the first article I ever published on Troutbitten, titled, One of These Days, is about night fishing.

I love the night game,  because everything I do in the dark is backwards from what I do in the daylight. I love it because, so often, I don't know what the hell to do out there — because there are always more questions than solutions.

Night fishing is a mystery with no resolution. Almost every other aspect of trout fishing — of fly fishing — has been written about, understood and fleshed out — the meat has been put on those bones.

I mean, you can learn everything you’d possibly like to know about fishing dry flies over rising trout. There’s more information than you could ever digest about nymph fishing, streamer fishing, wet fly fishing. Lifetimes of information are available at your fingertips — the lives of SO many fishermen who’ve come before you. You can read the accounts of their discoveries, their failures, their new ideas and understandings.

You may not agree with one author’s approach to casting over trout that are sipping spinners, but you can go find a half dozen different methods without looking too hard. All of this information is available because the experience is there. It’s documented.

But the night fishing game? It’s like a bare cupboard.

There are very, very, very few people who’ve spent much time on the water at night. And there are even fewer anglers who’ve written or shared info about fishing for trout after dark.

So go ahead — look around. You’ll find a handful of articles. You’ll find a few chapters in trout fishing books, often written as an add-on or an afterthought. I know of only one book that’s dedicated, in full, to night fishing for trout on a fly rod. And that’s Jim Bashline’s work, The Final Frontier (which is a great book title for the subject). 

And because there are so few practitioners of the night game, so few anglers willing (and able) to put in the hours and search for those answers, we find the same beliefs repeated time after time. The same advice. The same wives tales rerun again and again, because they SOUND like they make sense.

These days, almost everything we run into about night fishing is focused on mousing. And my God, when it works, there is nothing more exhilarating than the biggest wild brown trout of the season smacking your mouse fly with a vengeance. That BIG sound breaks the stillness. That feeling of raw power jerks the line tight in your hands. And it is electric.

There’s no other feeling like it in fishing. It’s all the anticipation of casting and working and casting the flies, for hours at a time. Patiently. Methodically. It’s the wonder, the not knowing if or when anything will happen. It’s the blindness to where your fly truly is, the unseen, and all the blanks that your mind fills in, on every cast, all night long, always with hope — with belief — in the fish of a lifetime.

And then . . . that big trout eats.

That’s why we do it. 

And I will say, there is NOTHING like that topwater eat at night. Absolutely nothing like it. If that doesn’t get the adrenaline pumping through your body until your hands are shaking afterward, then you might as well just stay home. Go to bed on time and have an easier tomorrow.

So . . . the truth is, night fishing is TOUGH. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done with a fishing rod. And I’ve been after it pretty steady now for a decade or more. I’ve fished top water, and I’ve fished sculpins on the bottom. I’ve fished wets in the middle, crawled buggers over rocks and nymphed with everything in my box at one time or another.

And it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

Meaning, really, that consistency at night, for me, is still largely unattainable. Maybe it’s not possible. But I like to think it is. And just like fishing in the daylight, I’m not going to stop until I’ve explored every tactic, fished every corner,  and tested every theory. 

All of that, though . . . the streamers, the wets and nymphs fished five different ways — it takes a lot of time on the water to feel like you’re getting anywhere with it. I mean, the whole thing, once again, is just HARD after dark. 

So, simplifying it down to mousing is a great way to start. And it makes sense that most anglers who do a few night trips these days, fish the mouse. It’s exciting, it’s pretty straightforward and the takes are absolutely heartstopping. What’s not to love? 

Well . . . here’s my answer to that. All too often, trout simply will not eat topwater at night. There are plenty of reasons, and we’ll get to that. But on so many nights, a mouse fly or another topwater pattern is ignored. Other nights, you might have 30 blow ups on the mouse and only a few hookups — and one of those is foul hooked.

Just like big streamers, at times, trout aren’t looking to EAT the mouse, they just bump it to see what it is — or they’re trying to kill it before eating it.  All of that — all the slashes and hits — can be exciting for a while, and then it becomes nothing but frustrating. And you're left standing there in the darkness wondering how  the hell to get a trout to eat your fly. 

After years — and I do mean years — of that kind of failure, I found an answer. Not foolproof, of course — but there was a fly and a handful of tactics that turned the hook-up ratio around for me. I started landing far more trout by fishing what I’ve come to think of as a mouse emerger.

And that is what we want to talk about tonight. 

. . . Introduction and conversation . . .