By Mike Cline, VP Operations, Venturist Inc.
You’ll note that the title of this topic is Strategies For Fishing The Woolly Bugger, not Tactics for Fishing The Woolly Bugger. Strategy and Tactics are two distinct, often confused, but related ideas. At some point in the future I will layout my tactical approach to fishing Woolly Buggers. You thought this blog was about Strategic Thinking and not fly fishing or woolly buggers. Well it is, it’s just that Strategy is Strategy is Strategy. In another post, John talked about his Strategic Thinking framework–the Essence of Strategy.
WHERE, WHAT, HOW and EXIT
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Here’s my strategy for fishing the woolly bugger and how I apply John’s Essence of Strategy to one of my personal hobbies:
WHERE: My strategy for fishing the Woolly Bugger is to always have at least one future fishing trip planned, if not scheduled SOMEWHERE. Since I live on a lake in the South, planning the next local trip is relatively easy. It involves setting the alarm clock and gassing up the boat or loading up the kayak (no those are tactics). However, my current WHERE strategy has a five day Spring trip planned for southwest Montana on the calendar. No doubt, other Montana trips will get scheduled later this year where I can target trout rising to BWO hatches on the East Gallatin or caddis hatches on the Firehole with #6 Olive Woolly Buggers. My strategy is to always have a trip planned where I can fish the woolly bugger.
WHAT: This might seem a bit simple, but when I want to fish woolly buggers, I am going to apply my resources to identifying good woolly bugger waters (just about any lake, stream or river) that contains good populations of fish that live with and eat woolly buggers (just about any lake, stream or river with good populations of game fish). The Firehole in Wyoming is my kind of stream. Once that’s done, the rest of the resources go toward getting there, staying there, eating there and fishing there.
HOW: This one is a bit trickier. Since my strategy is to be somewhere fishing woolly buggers for hungry fish, I have few obstacles to overcome. I do have a job and a wife. The job has to be carefully managed to make the “getting there” possible. The wife has to be managed to make the getting there, staying there, eating there and fishing there possible. The wife is the tough one since she is of the general opinion that whatever my personal strategy is for fishing the woolly bugger, a trip to the Arkansas River in Colorado is an extravagance, let alone I won’t be home to do some tactical thing around the house. Bottom line is, when it comes to the HOW, my strategy is to plan and execute my tactics very carefully and deliberately to ensure there are no obstacles to strategic success-being somewhere fishing a woolly bugger, especially to rising trout. Sometimes that means inviting the wife on that woolly bugger trip of a lifetime.
EXIT: Sometimes the WHERE, WHAT and HOW just don’t come together as planned. You want to go to Colorado in July. You’ve already made the necessary arrangements. The wife has conceded. But, a client pops up that’s willing to pay you and a colleague $75,000 plus expenses to do a week’s training in Rio de Janeiro. It’s too late to develop and arrange a strategy for Woolly Buggers in Brazil. You’ve got to EXIT your Colorado strategy and take the money, make your boss happy and promise your wife you’ll bring her something neat from Rio. Wisely managed Exits like this (especially the gifts for the wife) actually improve your overall probability of success once you engage in your next woolly bugger strategy, that three week (instead of two) trip to Montana in September where the extra days allow you to throw some woolly buggers at rising trout on DePuys Spring creek.
That’s my strategy for fishing the woolly bugger. Everyone should have personal strategies for the endeavors they are interested in. If you fished Woolly Buggers, would you have the same strategy, probably not? You might be more interested in what size hook to use, what color to tie on, and should I use a weighted fly, a sink tip line or both, should I wear the blue Orvis shirt or the Beige exOfficio. But then you’d be thinking about the Tactical side of woolly bugger fishing and that’s another topic.
What are your personal strategies and are you using the Essence of Strategy as your Strategic Thinking framework? Tell me and John about them.