Cold Weather Fishing

Cold weather fishing on a Google search gives you advice on gear and adapting your techniques. Here’s the AI overview: “cold weather fishing requires adapting your techniques, targeting warmer water areas, using slower presentations, and considering live bait instead of lures, as fish metabolism slows down in colder temperatures.” The search page goes on to describe the flies, lures, and gear one might use for cold weather fishing.

All that stuff may contribute but if you have ever gone fly-fishing in cold weather, slow retrieves, the wrong flies and/or lures are not what sends you bolting for the warm, comfy cab.

Go Deeper For Cold Weather Fishing

Before you even consider presentations, keeping ice out of your guides, the right flies or (heaven forbid) switching to live bait, think more foundationally. Assess your physical condition.

Take inventory:

• Do you have adequate (copious) muscle mass and strength?
• Do you have a power reserve to react quickly and avoid tragedy or get out of a jam?
• How is your balance? Falling while wading could be deadly.
• Do you have the stamina to enjoy all-day cold weather action? Can you stay warm?

Let’s call these factors physicality since they all relate to quantity and quality of muscle, physiology and the ability to thermoregulate—maintain steady internal body temperature despite external conditions.

Nature and Cold Weather Fishing Find You as You Are, Not as You Wish You Were

Wading in cold strong currents, stepping on, around, over and through algae-coated rocks requires power, strength, coordination and stamina. Staying warm requires herculean thermoregulation. The body-water temperature gradient relentlessly pulls heat (that is essential for life) from you like a powerful magnet. Even if you are not wading, the body-air temperature gradient is just as strong and wind chill makes it worse. While winter fly-fishing Conneaut Creek for steelhead, our water temperature was 38° and the air temperature was influenced by massive sheets of ice on Lake Erie, making the outdoors feel like a refrigerator. This is not frolicky fishing. Mild hypothermia happens when your core body temperature is from 89.6 to 95°F.  

The point is, it takes more than flies and gear to stay healthy, have an enjoyable cold weather fishing experience and land some beautiful fish. We need to put some serious effort into preparing ourselves.

Muscle is the crucial thread in your physicality more so than age. But muscle is more than coalesced fibers that provide locomotion. It’s more than functional. Quality and quantity of muscle determine the trajectory of health and aging. It’s the primary controller of glucose metabolism, inflammation, healing, and growth. At about 75-100 pounds on average per person, muscle is the largest, most vital organ in the body. What starts the decline in adults is muscle loss.

We lose 3-8% of muscle each year after middle age, around age 40. This fact is often ignored. Muscle loss doesn’t rank as a threat to the average fly fisher. It declines so slowly and out of sight. We can’t see it. And if we can’t see it, it doesn’t exist (at least to our limited human perception). See it, believe it or not, as sure as the alluvium under your feet, it is happening. We are all aging, losing muscle, slowly becoming less and less equipped to handle cold weather fishing. If the river is more muscular than you, that is a danger sign with a capital ‘D.’

Muscle isn’t the only decline that occurs parallel to the passage of time. Several biological processes dull as we get on in age with compounding effects. But if we make minor lifestyle updates to meet these biological changes head-on, we can slow the aging process and avoid suffering. Especially the pain of having to say, “I can’t flyfish anymore.”

Three Adjustments Will Prepare You for Cold Weather Fishing With Freedom, Confidence and Enjoyment

1. Exercise with the goal of building endurance, strength, and muscle
2. Stretch with the goal of staying flexible and limber
3. Improve your diet with the goal of reducing inflammation

Let’s unpack these three foundation-building lifestyle updates.

Do aerobic exercises. Aerobics will build endurance, improve your heart and blood flow, energy and immune function. As your heart gets stronger, overall health improves.

Do weight training/resistance training to build muscle. It gives you strength, stability, power, coordination, and confidence. And it contributes to your longevity on multiple levels. You reduce the risk of falling and risk of bone loss and fractures. You don’t need heavy weights. Body weight is enough to get started. Feeling the effects of resistance training is self-reinforcing and a confidence builder. As you become stronger and more stable, you’ll be inspired to stay active. 

Stretching may seem like it does nothing, because the effects are not immediate or blatantly obvious. Trust the process. Stretching once is a good start. But elasticity is something that you build over time. Gradually you will notice, sitting on your tailgate, how easy it is to pull your knee up to your chin. Putting waders on takes less effort.

The Standard American Diet has been consistently shown as a contributor to poor health. Six out of ten Americans have diets that promote inflammation. Chronic inflammation leads to tissue damage, chronic body pain (arthritis), and other, more serious chronic conditions. Taking pain-reducing drugs only numbs the symptoms while adding more problematic chemicals to the mix. Scientists have found, “dietary interventions are a particularly promising therapeutic treatment for chronic pain, with numerous studies suggesting that diet has a noticeable effect on pain as far down as the cellular level.” That speaks to the root cause!

Nature’s Hazards Have a Way of Finding Your Weak Areas. Prepare Yourself Beyond Purchasing Gear! 

As we age, the bodily processes that keep us vital, strong, flexible and spry become blunted, dull and less robust. Rather than accepting or acquiescing to aging, a better choice is to update our lifestyle and push ourselves. Use your endowed abilities to live and age with vigor—better than anyone you have known.

Categorized in: General Knowledge