** NOTE ** This article is an excerpt from the upcoming Troutbitten book, Fly Fishing the Mono Rig. This is part of the chapter, Finding Your Confidence Flies.
Finding your confidence flies comes from catching trout, from testing a theory, tying on a fly and having a trout confirm your efforts. Confidence is only gained by catching. You can surely get a jumpstart on that confidence by picking up a pattern from a trusted friend, but only a trout at the end of the line — repeatedly — converts hope into assurance.
General Simplicity
My philosophy of fly selection is rooted in simplicity. I build just a few materials into a fly rather than tying in the kitchen sink. I believe trout are looking for reasons not to eat our fly. Even in rivers that don’t see many anglers, the nature of a wild trout is cautious. These fish inspect and consider our nymph more than they fall head over heels for it.
If I tie ten different materials into a fly (dubbing, rib, CDC, a flashy wing case, Krystal Flash, an orange collar, etc) the trout has ten things to reject. But if I tie just dubbing on a hook, like a Walt’s Worm, the trout has one material to reject as a fake. This is precisely why simplicity wins more often.
I’ve had many guided clients who show surprise by how few flies I carry and how infrequently I change the pattern. Everything in my box is there for a reason. There’s not much redundancy, yet I feel I have every base covered. I’m ready for anything.
READ: Troutbitten | Troutbitten Fly Box – Seventeen Confidence Nymphs
Signals?
Some anglers lend too much credence to the hatch charts for nymph selection. A nymphing angler must be careful not to take every dry fly concept and principle underneath.
Never forget, what you see on the surface or in the air does not necessarily correlate with the best fly choice under the water. Tan Caddis may be all over the water’s surface, but are they easily available as a nymph to the trout right now? We can’t know that for certain, but we can test the theory.
Mayfly nymphs spend three-hundred and sixty-four days under the water, until the big day happens. About half of that year, the nymph is adult sized and available to the trout. Many nymph species move and migrate across the riverbed. There are cased and uncased caddis, midges and stoneflies, constantly available underneath. There are also cress bugs, scuds, aquatic worms and eggs to consider, none of which make it to the air to draw the attention of anglers.
The bugs you see in the air or under the leaves of bankside brush provide a clue, but much of the mystery remains.
Changes
I surely won’t ignore the next emergence of Blue Winged Olives. So if I’m not fooling trout, I’ll reach into my fly box for nymphs that roughly match the size, shape and color of a Blue Winged Olive nymph. The truth is, my fly box has at least a half dozen options that match a BWO nymph, and I don’t even carry many patterns.
As I’m wading upstream and working through the water, I’m constantly analyzing success and failure — are trout responding or are they not? If I’m fishing well, then I have confidence in my drifts. Failure, then, is not a flaw in my presentation, it’s a signal to change something: the fly, the water type or the presentation style.
Those emerging BWO’s are a good signal to fish a slim, #18 in the middle column, and I can do that with a tracking approach or with a nymph on a tag about two feet up while bottom bouncing or gliding through the strike zone.
However the trout respond, with activity or inaction, I’m looking constantly for the next clue about changes to make in the fly or the weight.
Fish hard, friends.
** Donate ** If you enjoy this article, please consider a donation. Your support is what keeps this Troutbitten project funded. Scroll below to find the Donate Button. And thank you.
** Subscribe to Troutbitten and follow along. (It’s free.) **
Enjoy the day.
Domenick Swentosky
T R O U T B I T T E N
domenick@troutbitten.com
Great points, Dom. The problem, as you know, is that confidence can be bred by a small sample size. And angler has a great half hour using a certain fly and then catches nothing the rest of the day. However, the memory of that stellar half hour is burned into his brain, and that fly becomes what “crushed” it. Never mind that there may be a myriad of reasons besides the fly pattern that fishing was hot for that period. Never mind that another fly could have done as well. It’s like anglers I see welded to a spot because they caught a few fish there when they started fishing.
I’ve never done this, but I suspect that if one fished a simple brownish Walt’s, in different sizes and weights, for an entire season, the results would be better than if the same angler had gone through several boxes of different nymphs.
Right on. Good way to put it.
Dom, I have way too many flies (I may be addicted to buying them, but I justify it because I prefer to buy directly from individual fly tiers).
Based upon our conversation last year I have assembled a much simpler box for this year
Kinda more fun that way, right?
Vert good points and a timely article. Timely, why? because I was just h avingmthis discussion with a buddy.
Nice