I saw a guy doing it the other day at the Dream Stream. He was doing great by using this technique and fishing through the floating silt and whatnot. I heard that it was illegal from a couple of guys, is this true?
LOL guess I should have specified. The San Juan Shuffle is where someone goes above a great fishing hole and kicks their feet around to stir up the silt and whatnot. This dislodges bugs and makes the fish start to feed. All you gotta do is drop the flies down into the hole and the feeding fish will grab it.
I wouldn't have had a clue what he was doing and would have asked him. If he has told me the truth I would have laughed, called him a no fishing tool, and walked away.
I've heard it is illegal! I don't see any specific reference to it in the 2007 fishing regulations. The only reference is to Chumming, which I guess this could be classified under.
"CHUMMING: Placing fish, parts of fish, or material fish may eat, in water to attract fish so they may be taken.
Fishers guilty of this are not necessarily placing material in the water, but are creating material that attracts fish. It's crazy, if you are wading the Dream Steam, look back in your eddy and there will be fish, most likely several of them, right at your feet, feeding on the nymphs you kick up. It's tempting to turn around and fish to those fish, but apparently it is illegal. The first time I fished the Dream Steam I was doin this and was told by a guide that if I get caught doing it I would get busted. It is also illegal to fish in someone elses eddy; like telling your buddy to go upsteam so you can fish behind him.
Does anyone know if they have specific rules posted at the access points on the Dream Stream? It's been a while since I fished it, so I don't remember.
After about 4 hours of her missing strikes at Lee's Ferry, I did "the shuffle" so my wife could drop her fly into the silt and catch her first trout----about 22" and then I made her go back to "earning" them
From what I have seen at LF, it attracts the dinks and spooked the big ones outta there
Never would have thought of doing at the DS, it is a good enough fishery that someone with only a few skills (like me) can still catch nice fish
The San Juan Shuffle- this practice comes from San Juan below Navajo dam.
They use to do this in the river there before they outlawed it. Now the wardens there will watch you from the hillsides with scopes or come right up to you dressed in fishing gear. They keep a close eye on it!!! When fishing there you can look down at your feet and see rainbows eating away!!!! It is not a very ethical way to fish, kind of like chumming!!!!
It's the intentional destruction of the natural streambed and disruption of insect life purely to catch fish that the angler is too stupid, too lazy, or too inept to catch in a sporting manner. Fatty said it best - Unethical.
Don - I agree, but the average fisherman or someone who hasn't fished that river before doesn't know any differently. When you're fly fishing, you're generally walking in the steambed, so to call it intentional destruction is not accurate IMO, but if you know it's not ethical on a certain stream and you go and do it; different story. I guess anyone entering a steam is intentionally disrupting the natural steambed and disrupting insect life, when you really think about it. Environmentalists would love that topic.
doing the shuffle is wrong. might as well drop feed pellets and corn too.
one sure way to know if the shuffle would be effective is to see the trout stacked up in your boot wake. i call these trout boot sluts. the frying pan, numerous south platte spots, blue, yampa, etc. all come to mind where this happens.
i figure if a fly fisherman is doing this and it makes them feel better and allows them to catch fish, then what the hey... when they ask me what i am using while catching fish i always say a hopper - even in winter. they don't know the difference. if they did, they wouldn't be shufflin.
i have never seen a spin or bait fisherman do the shuffle.
those snob rude fly fisherman - they ruin everything
I tried it one day on the Ark out of sheer bordom when nothing was bitting. I didn't catch anything either. It's not something I would do on a place like the D.S. or would do on a regular basis anywhere.
Phil, get out in the middle of the river and dance the same way MC is in your avaitar. ;D
Don - I agree, but the average fisherman or someone who hasn't fished that river before doesn't know any differently. When you're fly fishing, you're generally walking in the steambed, so to call it intentional destruction is not accurate IMO
I'm not talking about the inadvertent dislodging of material that comes with any wading. I'm talking about people who intentionally "shuffle" around in an area with the sole purpose of disrupting the bottom sediment and bug life as much as possible, to concentrate the fish and get them to start feeding, so they can be caught.
Do you know how bad if at all the shuffle messes up the natural habitat for the larvae/nymphs? I think this could be a bigger issue than suckering a few fish to bite. Or are there so many lying or lodged under these rocks that it's small on the scale of habitat destruction?
Do you know how bad if at all the shuffle messes up the natural habitat for the larvae/nymphs? I think this could be a bigger issue than suckering a few fish to bite.
I don't know the answer to that. But I think any intentional destruction of habitat or stream bug life deserves our contempt. My understanding is that that was the reason it was outlawed on the San Juan where the practice got its name. That's the big reason I think it should be considered unethical.
It's the same thing as chumming and it does damage large stretches of stream habitat, especially those with any sort of vegetation, not to mention that it creates silt and sediment in the water column. One person doing it, probably no big deal; but several, day in day out doing it will very much affect the amount of insects in the river as well as the habitat...
And it's just plain pathetic...seriously, just go fish at a hatchery while they're feeding the fish.
I've seen people get nasty about it on the Bighorn and Missouri Rivers. Many of the guides on these rivers are excellent stewards that will not hesitate to call people out on doing this intentioanlly or unintentionally. I think it is all of our resposibilities, no matter our method of take, to do the same. Probalby not a great thing to do when fish are spawning as well.
I've seen people get nasty about it on the Bighorn and Missouri Rivers. Many of the guides on these rivers are excellent stewards that will not hesitate to call people out on doing this intentioanlly or unintentionally. I think it is all of our resposibilities, no matter our method of take, to do the same. Probalby not a great thing to do when fish are spawning as well.
Interestingly enough, there was a study done several years ago on the Middle Fork of the South Platte to determine whether angler wading during the brown trout spawn had any appreciable negative impact on fry hatch and survival and the answer was it did not. I don't remember all the details. I'm not sure whether it's available on the DOW website somewhere. It was done in the Tomahawk area.
I don't know how much it hurts the habitat, but I think that guy was catching many of the same fish. I bet some of them died. Every time he let them go, they went back down into the same hole and he had one on the very next cast. I bet he probably caught somewhere between 30-50 fish while I was standing there.
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