Writing On The Fly: Occam's Razor And Fly Fishing

By George Liset, InDepth NH

I have been going through my flies getting ready for a trip up north to Pittsburg, New Hampshire at the end of the month. We usually have a lot of luck when we fish Pittsburg because the Connecticut River has a bottom release dam which keeps the water cold and there is plenty of food to sustain a fish population. This means there are fish in the water

Things are a little different down here in the Seacoast region of New Hampshire. The fishing is a little more hard scrabble which means there may only be a few fish, if any in the water. This is primarily because most of the rivers are put and take, which means they are stocked then fished out.

I decided to hit one of my favorite local rivers where I had some luck a few days before. I brought my friend Ray who is getting back into fly fishing. I wanted him to get into some fish so I gave him a black Wooly Bugger and put him in a good spot and we began to fish. We were having no luck. We were getting no bites, no tugs, unless you count the times we were getting our flies unstuck from the bushes and the rocks and branches in the river.

After a couple of hours we called it. I was trying to explain to Ray why we didn’t have any luck. I mentioned that we may not have been throwing out the right flies. Maybe we should have been using some nymphs or a dry dropper rig with a caddis and a nymph. If you have fished for any length of time, the thought occurs to you that for all the flies you have in your fly boxes, you never seem to have enough flies, or the right ones in the right colors or the right sizes.

I then mentioned to Ray that it had rained really hard the previous night and that makes a difference. The fish were probably hugging the bottom or the undercuts. We were probably not getting our flies deep enough even though we were catching bottom. Then again, the air temperature had dropped significantly and that could play a part in it. I should have checked the barometric pressure.

As I was thinking about it on the ride home it could have been that we needed to use smaller leaders and tippets. We could have put on size six leaders and six or seven tippets. If we had done that and maybe changed our placement, presentation and drift depth that might have made a difference.

My mind kept going down the “What if” rabbit hole when I finally remembered Occam’s Razor. I remembered this from the “Big Bang,” because that’s where one gets all their scientific information, there and “Bill Nye.” Occam’s Razor is a problem-solving principle that, according to Sheldon, suggests the simplest explanation is the best one when faced with competing hypotheses.

I looked over at Ray and said “The bottom line Ray is that the fish weren’t biting and we don’t stink. Let’s try this again next week. I think the barometric pressure should be down and we’ll use smaller leaders and tippets and we’ll try some different flies.”

George Liset of Dover is an award-winning outdoor writer and avid fly fisherman who shares insights of his time on the water exploring New Hampshire streams and rivers as well of those around New England. George is a graduate of Wheaton College, Illinois, and the University of New Hampshire. His column Writing on the Fly has been honored by the New England Press Association and the New Hampshire Press Association.

This article first appeared on InDepthNH.org and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.