As I sit working on a website for a fellow guide, I look outside to see a cloudy, dreary day. This took me back to a tough day in New Zealand, having endured a few rainy days in a row. We found ourselves on a back country river, the fog down to the trees, a dense layer of cloud off the Tasman Sea, rain dropping its love on my soaked head. I'd "stepped on" 3 trout by lunch time - that is, though I waded slowly and was looking intensely as possible, due to light conditions could not see trout holding until I'd passed the point of no return and the trout bolted downstream. Tough. Once every 45 minutes I'd see a trout scoot. Trouble was that I could see everything on Amelia's side of the river and her mine, but for the critical line of good water just off shore where the trout were holding. Every once in a while I'd look to her side and see a fish scoot past her and she wouldn't see it - the same held true for her. We were literally blind but seeing everything post haste. And haste is accurate pertaining to the escaping trout.
The trout we wound up catching that day were only due to a change in our tactics, finding water that we could see into. We found a reach of water that allowed us to walk higher on the bank, to gain a better angle for shoreline viewing. We also picked a reach where the shoreline trees and vegetation created darker reflections, allowing a steady, dark backdrop to view against. It worked and we were able to view into a few windows and spot fish on a very tough day of sighting browns.
As you can see in the photo below, remaining at river level was simply not an option as the extreme glare was impossible to look through.
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