Why do trout refuse my fly or lure even when they are clearly feeding?

Because inspection is cheap for a drift feeder. A rainbow holding in current lets the river deliver food past its nose, so it can afford to examine every item at close range and reject anything that drags unnaturally or does not match the insect it is keyed on — this "selectivity" is a feeding efficiency strategy, not intelligence. During a heavy hatch a trout may lock onto one prey image (size and silhouette first, color a distant third) and ignore everything else. Brook trout are far less picky, and lake trout, hunting baitfish in dim deep water, are hardly selective at all — the refusal problem is mostly a rainbow-in-clear-water problem. Fix drag and size before you change patterns.

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