Earlier this week I put out a piece called “Fishing the Gray.” In short, it is a quasi-autobiographical encouragement to get out and fly fish in even the ugliest weather. A good number of people read it. Hopefully, if you were one of those people, you appreciated it.

Still, I can’t help but think that some clicked in hopes that they were going to learn about some River Gray and how one could fish it. The header image is cold but idyllic. If I saw that, I’d be interested in learning more. So if that was you, I’m sorry. It wasn’t my intention to offer up an angling bait and switch.

Today I’m righting what I’ve perceived as some level of wrong. While the (slightly altered) header image is not of a river called Gray, I’ll go ahead and break down how I approach it. Chances are you have a stream like this near you. Maybe our streams have something in common.

First, this is not primarily a wild trout stream. There are some stream-bred brookies that move into the river from tiny tributaries every once in a while. More often, stocked rainbows make up a season’s tally. However, any trout that make it to mid-winter are savvy enough to not exhibit hatchery-truck naïveté. Which means work in the cold.

My approach angle matters. Anything dynamic stands out in a frozen landscape. There’s also the handicap of a few inches of rigid platform everywhere on the stream bank. There’s no soft ground or covering grasses when a half foot of snow covers everything. Slow and from downstream are the keys.

Although the river is smallish, I do prefer a longer rod (8’6” or 9’). If I’m in the river casting upstream I probably won’t need to false cast if I pick up my line we’ll. If I do come at the stream in a perpendicular fashion, I can use my rod tip to follow my fly or guide it through obstacles. With bank-clinging ice, having a fly as close as possible is important. Fish, already slowed by their metabolism, don’t need a few feet’s distance as an excuse to turn down my fly. My presentation needs to be tight to pull them from under banks.

The ice elicits other gear choices as well. Studded rubber wading boots are a must. Minding frozen guides saves fly line (my high-tech solution is to squeeze them, not snap them, until they melt with my fingers). Bumping up a leader size is a confidence move. Ice is so abrasive. Tying on 3X instead of 4X probably actually helps a little, but it’s also peace of mind.

Flies? That’s hard to say. Undulating streamers in sizes 6 or 8, dead drifted adjacent to undercut banks and through deep holes. Nymph rigs with a buggy lead in 14 and a finesse dropper in 18. Anything buzzing about on the surface calls for a facsimile, albeit one size larger than the natural. Or, I could scrap all that and strip a tiny woolly bugger.

That’s the long and the short of it. There’s countless decisions that make up what we do on the water. A myriad of variables that all get impacted when it is cold and frozen out. But what I wrote before still stands: get out and fish. Green is great. If you’re outside fishing? Gray is great too.