Most stillwater advice starts and ends with an indicator. John Schultz fishes lakes a different way, and on this episode he gave the move a name: the Crazy Ivan. It is a trolling technique, it takes about ten seconds to learn, and it fixes the single biggest problem with dragging a fly behind a kick boat — that a fly moving in a straight line at one speed and one depth is the least interesting thing in the lake.
What the Crazy Ivan actually is
Troll along in a straight line, facing backward the way you do in a kick boat, with a streamer trailing behind you. Then turn hard. That is it. The turn is the whole technique.
What the turn does is the part worth understanding. When you swing the boat, the fly on the far side of the arc speeds up and rises. The fly on the inside of the arc slows down and drops. So in the space of a few seconds your fly has accelerated, decelerated, and changed depth — without you touching the line. That is three separate triggers, and it is far closer to how a wounded baitfish or a fleeing leech actually behaves than any straight-line troll.
In practice most of John's grabs come in the turn or immediately after it, as the fly recovers and starts climbing again. If you are trolling and not turning, you are fishing the least productive version of the presentation.
Why he trolls at all
The honest reason is coverage. Anchoring up and casting works beautifully when you already know where the fish are. On a big reservoir with low fish density, John's point is that you are searching, not fishing — and a boat covering water searches far faster than a fly rod does. He moves a lot. He finds the fish, and then he can slow down and work the area properly.
He is also upfront that he is not an indicator guy. He will fish one, and he specifically uses it when he is getting a newer angler started, because it is forgiving and it gives immediate feedback. But left to his own devices he is stripping streamers and covering ground.
The countdown is the real skill
Here is the part that transfers even if you never own a kick boat. Depth control on stillwater is not achieved by guessing — it is achieved by counting. Cast the sinking line, then count the fly down before you start moving. John mentioned counts approaching a full minute, and in one case counting well past sixty.
That sounds absurd until you do the math. A sinking line dropping at roughly an inch and a half per second needs something like forty seconds to reach fifteen feet, and a lot of stillwater fish live deeper than that. If your count is ten seconds, you have never fished where they are. The fix is boring and free: pick a count, fish it, and if nothing happens, add fifteen seconds and do it again. When you find the number that produces, write it down. That number is the lake's answer for that day.
The fish finder question
John runs a fish finder and a Minn Kota on his kick boat, and he knows some people think that is cheating. His defense is more interesting than the accusation: he uses it mostly to read depth and structure, not to spot fish. On a small tube you can learn one shoreline by feel. On big water, when it gets deep, you simply cannot see the shelf, the drop-off, or the old creek channel — and those are the things that hold fish.
The takeaway for anglers without electronics is not to go buy electronics. It is to accept that depth is information, and get it however you can: a marked sinking line, a countdown log, a topo map of the reservoir from before it was flooded, or simply a morning spent paying attention to where the bottom falls away.
One practical note he added that costs nothing: if you are in an unmotorized tube or pontoon, make sure you can get back. Wind on a big reservoir is not a joke, and a kick boat is a slow vehicle into a headwind.
Gear
Straight talk: we do not sell kick boats, trolling motors, fish finders, or sinking lines, and this article would be worse if we pretended we did. For the sink-tip or full-sinking line that makes the countdown possible, go see your local fly shop — the right sink rate depends on your lake, and a good shop employee will ask you which one before they hand you anything.
What we do have that fits here: our Tips and Tricks for Fly Fishing ebook covers the retrieve and depth-control fundamentals this technique is built on, and since stillwater rewards people who are on the water before the wind comes up, the FFIP Angler's Coffee Mug has earned its share of four a.m. starts around here.
