My first trip to the Connetquot this season started inauspiciously. The beat I selected in the morning wasn't happening. I flailed around in the water hoping for a trout to miraculously appear. This made apparent the limitations of fishing via a beat system. You get your own private stretch of water, but if nothing's doing, you're SOL. I was reduced to four hours of casting practice.
I took a different beat in the afternoon and it started slowly, too. I watched a guy at the edge of my beat 100 yards away catch four trout in ten minutes drifting a caddis emerger. I switched to a nymph but it didn't help matters. I went back to slow-stripping a rust colored woolly bugger and what do you know, a rainbow nailed it. Then another and another. Finally, the fish turned on.
