Fly Fishing Tips

Color

Matching color gives the most wiggle room in my opinion.  As long as you have the size and profile down, you can use a color fly that is “close enough” to the natural.  Now, I’m not saying that if the natural is olive to go ahead and tie on an orange one, but a green or brown one might be just fine.  As a matter of fact, my favorite  dry fly, and probably the most common dry fly there is, the Adams, is really not a great imitation of any particular insect.  It is, however, a good imitation of many insects.  If you fish it in the right size, profile and color (it is mostly grey and brown), it can pass for a blue winged olive, a march brown and a caddis, just to mention a few.

Great, so now what?

So how do you figure out the right color, profile, and size of the naturals around you?  Use your eyes, Ahab!  Look in the air around you for adults – of course, they are easier to spot in a hatch.  If you can’t see them right away, look in the bushes and trees around you.  Shake some branches.  All you need to catch is one.  To figure out what’s below the surface, I recommend buying or making a seine to catch and see what’s in the water.  You can cut up your wife’s old pantyhose.  They work great...  I do suggest you ask her first though.  An aquarium net will work too.  If you don’t have a seine or net with you, just turn over a few rocks in the stream and see what’s hanging on.  You can get a tool that looks like a small baster to pump the stomach of any trout you catch.  I understand, though, that the trout aren’t too happy about this.  Jokes aside, it is easy to hurt the fish this way, and sometimes mortally.

All right, so now you know what those trout are munching on, what do you do next?  You have four basic choices in terms of the kind of fishing you will be doing.  First, there is nymphing.  Here you are imitating the nymph or larva and fishing near the bottom.  Remember, if they are feeding on the bottom and you are fishing the bottom with the wrong fly, you will catch nothing but a sun tan.  When nymphing, you will usually work with a strike indicator.  A strike indicator indicates strikes… of fish… that you want to catch.  Make sure you are fishing the bottom – your fly should bump the bottom occasionally as you drift and your indicator should let you know this.  You can tie on more than one fly to fish at different depths as well.  This way, you can find out what the fish are feeding on and at what depth.  There may be no surface activity, but if they are going after your higher nymph, then they are most likely keying in on emerging pupae (referred to as emergers).

Wet fly fishing is another form of fly fishing you may be interested in trying.   This form of fishing lost its popularity to nymphing several years ago, but has been making a resurgence lately (I attribute this to the fact that it catches fish!).  Basically, the fisherman is imitating an emerger in the surface film, a new adult whose wings have yet to dry, or a recently deceased bug.  The technique is different than dry fly fishing, where you are using an adult fly imitation or terrestrial exclusively.  Wet flies are skittered and dragged along the surface with line tension created by the current and line control.

Dry fly fishing is the most popular form of fly fishing.  It is what most people think of when the subject comes up.  Personally, I find it the most fun and rewarding because you can witness the strikes, but I acknowledge that it is not the most productive.  That honor goes to nymphing.  Generally, dry fly fishing is casting your fly to stay on the surface, letting it move with the current on a drag free drift.  Most strikes come when there is no tension on the line and that bug moves freely with the current; however, I have caught many fish at the end of my drift when I was in the process of hauling my line and lifting my rod to begin my back cast.  That always makes me smile.

*This is intended to give a basic understanding of fly fishing techniques for the fly fishing beginner as well as the experienced fly angler.

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