How to Catch More Trout Out of Your Inflatable Fishing Boat This Summer

This isn’t your standard “10 tips to catch more trout” article. I’m not going to cover “fish the future,” “use more split shot,” or “get a drag-free drift" in this article.

This is about what’s really going to move the needle if you want to catch more trout out of your boat this summer—not just one more fish, but consistently more trout and better quality trout. These are universal truths and can be applied regardless of where you sit in the country or the type of river system you fish.

Let’s dig in.

Become a Better Rower

If you want to catch more trout out of a boat this Summer and Fall, the single most underrated and valuable change you can make this year is to become a better rower. Get off the lean bar and park it in the rower's seat.

That’s not a sexy answer—but it’s true. Guides catch fish for people every single day not because those clients stand out as great anglers, but because the guide can literally row them into fish.

A good rower can:

• Slow the boat down during for a dry or streamer retrieve

• Hold position in a foam line during a hatch

• Ferry angle into soft edges with subtle oar strokes

• Back row into holding water to get one more drift

Better rowing = better drifts = more fish. It’s that simple.

Whether you're rowing a self-bailing inflatable fishing boat or a drift boat, mastering your boat's movement and positioning will always lead to more trout in the net.

Want to be a better angler this summer? Row more. And if you're not rowing, fish with someone who can.

Cover More Water

Floating gives you the ability to fish miles of river in a day. But not every fishing boat makes that easy.

Some fly fishing rafts are designed to be light, fast, and responsive. Others row like a barge—especially when flows drop. If you want to cover more water effectively, you need the best boat for the job—something stable, durable, and built to move through skinny water without getting hung up on every log or gravel bar.

Linked Article: “Choosing the Right Inflatable Boat Size for Your Fly Fishing Needs”

Outside of having the perfect boat for any water conditions, putting in more miles of water gives you more chances to find:

• Actively feeding fish

• Less pressured zones

• Varying bug life

• Changes in structure and depth

The more river you float, the greater the chance you'll find feeding fish and the more fish you’ll connect with. That’s just math.

Chase Hatches (and Be There When It Happens)

If there’s one universal truth in fly fishing, it’s this: you want to be fishing when the bugs are hatching.

Not all water is equal all day long. Tom Rosenbauer who has repeatedly wrote about, and talked about on his podcast, how you could catch 12 fish in 30 minutes during a hatch—and only one more the rest of the day from the same exact run. Posting up in a section and roping fish back to back is the type of fun that keeps us chasing trout for years.

Trout are programmed to feed during hatches. Their caution fades. They rise eagerly, miss the fly, come back for another swipe, and even fight each other for position. If you can time your float to intersect with a hatch, it can completely transform your success. If you have new anglers your a young family these hatch windows will give you the best odds of getting youngsters on fish.

Fishing boats give you that flexibility:

• Time your float to hit hatch windows in specific zones

• Stop and fish one run hard if the hatch is strong

• Bypass slow water and shore stretches choked out by wade anglers until you find rising fish

Rig Multiple Rods

Linked Articles: “Essential Accessories for Fly Fishing from an Inflatable Boat” and “Packing for a Day of Fly Fishing: Organizing Your Gear on an Inflatable Boat”

If you're still rigging one rod per person and constantly swapping out flies, you're wasting time—and opportunity.

Rigging multiple rods (and keeping them safe in something like a SwiftCast system) lets you be ready for any condition:

• Switch to a dry fly immediately when a hatch begins

• Grab a sinking line setup when a deep slot shows up

• Pick up a heavy nymph rig for fast plunge pools

The versatility this adds to your fishing is huge—especially when every hatch and depth change can mean a new feeding window.

Inflatable fishing boats with built-in storage and frame systems make it easy to set multiple rods, organize gear, and keep your dog from stepping on something sharp. It's a complete package that keeps you ready all day long.

Go on a Guided Trip

Even if you’re confident behind the oars or with a rod in hand, nothing accelerates learning like a day on the water with a professional guide. For a lot of fisherman this hands on instruction can be the ticket to help connect what you know in your head to what you're doing with the rod. And if you already a very experienced angler, this is a incredible way to continue to deepen your understanding of certain tactics and rivers systems.

Guides do more than just row:

• They teach about the entire river's ecosystem, how to read the river, and most importantly where to find fish

• Correct bad habits you don’t even realize you have

  • A big one I didn't ever realize till a guide badgered me for an entire day is I unknowingly keep my rod tip too high off the water which reduces the chances of a quality hook up. Now I think about it all the time and hear Colt chirping in my ear whenever I catch myself reverting back to old ways.

• Offer localized insight on favorite rivers

• Help you read seams, foam lines, and the rhythm of trout behavior

Split the cost with a friend and it becomes one of the best values in fly fishing with ease. If you're not sold on a guide trip we wrote a an article on Why You Should Consider Guided Fly Fishing Trips. 

Get More Flies

Let’s be clear—you don’t need more flies to fish, but you need more flies to catch when the trout start refusing your go-to pattern.

Load your fly box with:

• More sizes (especially tiny stuff)

• More colors (because olive isn't always the answer)

• Different silhouettes and materials for the same hatch

That extra 2mm of profile or a different tail material can make the difference when you’ve cast to the same fish 15 times. Trout are tough, and having options boosts your odds.

Here's a picture I snapped out of Tom Rosenbauer's Guide to Hatch Strategies to illustrates this point really well. 

I learned this a couple years ago when I discovered the X caddis. During evening caddis hatches in the summer on the Provo I was getting refused constantly with my standard elk hair caddis and when I learned about Craig Mathew's x caddis and how important the trailing shuck is I started using it and the same fish that refused my standard elk hair 3 minutes earlier took the X caddis like a kid snatching the last cookie on the counter while mom turned her back.

Extend Your Season with a Fly Fishing Raft

The versatility and durability of inflatable boats makes them the go-to choice for extending your season well beyond when most anglers hang it up.

As the water drops, a tough, self-bailing raft keeps you out long after others have called it a season. Even a 10-year-old boat that’s built well can still fish hard and haul gear, your dog, and a cooler full of snacks to the best spots.

Late-season perks:

• Less pressure from other anglers

• Cooler water = more active fish

• More solitude and a chance to reconnect with why you started fishing in the first place

• Access to river systems that are off-limits to drift boats when winter flows run low.

Add in the fact that the best boats are light enough to throw in the truck, carry to the shore, and launch without a ramp—and you’ve got something you’ll keep using well into fall.

Final Thoughts

Most anglers look for small tweaks—add more weight, change tippet size, or try a new fly. All of those work and are tactics you should use each time you're on the water. But these tips are frequently over looked and taking a step back to see these other aspects of fly fishing will help catch more trout from your boat this summer.

• Become the best rower in your crew

• Fish smarter and more efficiently with multiple rods

• Be present and ready when hatches go off

• Cover more water in a stable, easy-to-row fly fishing raft

• Learn from someone better than you

• Stay on the water longer than the next guy

At the end of the day, catching more trout from your boat isn’t about chasing a single “magic bullet” tip—it’s about stacking small, smart advantages that compound over the course of a day, a season, and a lifetime of adventures on the water. Master the oars so you can put yourself—and your buddies—into the right water. Cover more miles to find fresh fish and intersect with hatches. Keep multiple rods rigged so you’re ready for anything. Learn from people who know more than you, and carry the flies that make selective trout eat. Most of all, fish a boat that’s stable, durable, and built for the kind of water you actually fish, so you can stay out longer, explore farther, and turn more opportunities into fish in the net. That’s how you turn a good summer into a great one.