Fall hatches, streamers, and changing lines in midstream

I remember standing thigh-deep in the Missouri River one afternoon, changing spools on my reel. That's a tricky maneuver. More on how to do that later.

The breeze (you'd call it wind in other places) had just died down and every blue-winged olive mayfly in that stretch of river decided it was time to hatch. The trout in the channel between weed beds I had been fishing with a streamer decided to eat them.

I'd seen big trout get silly like that before. When there are hoards of blue-winged olives on the surface big trout can go after them like kindergartners eating jelly beans, and ignore the ste...