Nothing turns a good fishing day into a great one like efficient casting. Consistent accuracy puts the fly, leader and line just where we plan. Over and over, great presentations start with a cast full of intention, a cast with purpose, that leads to an effective...
The Troutbitten Podcast is available everywhere that you listen to your podcasts. ** Note ** The Podcast Player, along with links to your favorite players is below. What might commonly be referred to as a junk fly makes its way to the end of my line pretty often....
You’re working through the river, wading upstream or down, aiming for dead drifts or otherwise -- and you’re moving, covering water and searching for active trout while trying to draw every possible insight from the experience. You learn with each step, with every...
Wading or floating, up top with dry flies or underneath with wets, you can fool a trout on just about any fly. And experience teaches the frequent angler how the presentation of a fly trumps the specifics of the pattern by a wide margin. We have a better chance at...
Trout learn to see some colors, some materials, some shapes and movements as fake. And when they see the same fake fly often enough, they stop eating it. That’s what we mean by angler pressure. So, part of the game becomes a guess about what flies the trout have learned to reject and how we can turn the fish on again.
That’s the unnatural thing about trout seeing too many fishermen and too many flies . . .
The first time out, a new fly needs a good showing. It should run strong out of the gate. If any die-hard angler is to lend his fragile confidence to a new fly pattern, it takes more than the adoring recommendations of a friend or some well strung sentences of persuasion in a magazine article. No, a new fly has to show up at the first dance. It must make a good impression. It has to put fish in the net . . .
My buddy, Smith, is stubborn. Whether traveling across the country or fishing our local rivers, he fishes the same handful of flies, year round. Smith can literally hold his selection of nymphs, wets, dries and streamers in one hand without them spilling over. With patterns that are fine-tuned from experience and a selection ruthlessly stripped down to the bare bones, his handful of hooks is the very definition of confidence flies.
Smith’s trust in those patterns is so spot on, you might assume that he rarely changes flies. But you’d be wrong. Ask Smith, and he’ll tell you he changes flies whenever it’s necessary.
Now, what does that mean? . . .
Competition hooks are most often designed with penetration as the primary goal. When you’re scoring fish, one nine-inch trout can put you at the top of the leader board, (I think that’s what they call it). So super-sharp hooks with wide gaps and long points are the norm. While the standard nymph hook for many years has been 1X or 2X strong wire, competition style hooks are most often designed with medium or even light wire, under the belief that thinner wire penetrates easier. Of course it does. But oh my, the difference is slight. And the trade off is not worth it (for me).
That lighter wire is where the cheaper companies get into problems . . .
The old man and I spent a few more silent minutes together. We watched the growing cloud of energetic midges again, and he pointed out a few rises on the surface that I never saw. But I believed him. Somehow I knew he could see things that I hadn’t — that he understood things that I didn’t.
“It’s Mop Fly mania, I guess.” That’s how a fishing buddy described it in a text, along with a link he sent to another Mop Fly article. When the Wall Street Journal writes about a fly pattern, you know the fly has made it to the big show. Now, smart fly shops are even...