I was watching my friend work under a streamside canopy of overhanging sycamores. Greg was working around what I call ghost limbs, because when the leaves depart their parent branches, these limbs are easy to miss — especially with your attention riveted to the river....
Here’s my biggest takeaway from being a full time guide: Casting is hard, but it’s an essential skill. And many anglers don’t work on it enough. Some seem happy to get the fly near a target, giving very little thought to where and how the tippet and leader will land....
Fly anglers like to fish with a couple flies once in a while. The standard method for attaching a second fly is run it in-line — as a trailer from the bend of the first fly. Instead, I prefer to create a tag dropper for that attachment. Tag droppers have big...
Part of what distinguishes fly fishing from other styles of fishing is retrieving line by hand. We don’t crank a reel to pick up line the way we do with a a gear rod. Instead, we use our line hand to strip in slack or give the fly motion. But then we need to get the...
There are no flying fish in Montana, not in Pennsylvania, and not anywhere. Norman Maclean’s line in A River Runs Through It sums this up:
“One reason Paul caught more fish than anyone else was that he had his flies in the water more than anyone else. “Brother,” he would say, “there are no flying fish in Montana. Out here, you can’t catch fish with your flies in the air.”
And yet, anglers everywhere love the false cast. I daresay most fly fishers spend more time setting up their fly for the next drift than actually drifting it — exactly Paul’s point.
The most effective anglers are the most efficient. So they spend double, triple or a lot more time with their fly FISHING the water instead of casting in the air above it. And inevitably, these anglers catch more trout — a lot more trout . . .
Only a small percentage of anglers have the necessary accuracy to tackle the tough situations. And big trout seem to know where to hide from average anglers.
In fact, accuracy is the most important skill an angler can learn. The simple ability to throw a fly in exactly the same place, over and over, with subtle, nuanced differences in the tippet each time, is the most valuable skill for any fisherman . . .
Success in fly fishing really comes down to one or two things. It’s a few key principles repeated over and over, across styles, across water types and across continents. The same stuff catches trout everywhere. And one of those things . . . is contact.
. . . No matter what adaptations are made to the rig at hand, the game is about being in touch with the fly. And in some rivers, contact continues by touching the bottom with something, whether that be a fly or a split shot. Without contact, none of this works. Contact is the tangible component between success and failure.
In short, turnover gives us freedom to choose what happens with the line that’s tethered to the fly. How does the tippet and leader land? With contact or with slack? And where does it land? In the seam and partnered with the fly, or in an adjacent current? By having mastery of turnover, we dictate the positioning of not just the fly, but the leader itself. And nothing could be more important . . .
Classic upstream nymphing feels a lot like fishing dry flies. The challenge of making precision casts is there; it can be employed at extra distance if necessary, and it’s most often performed with tight loops and light flies than don’t change the cast.
While pure tight line nymphing is performed with no line on the water, classic upstream nymphing does the opposite.
Then there’s the induced take and floating the sighter . . .
Find water you can fish close up, and work on deadly accurate casting. You’ll find that, when fishing shorter, you can fish harder. Instead of hoping a trout eats or wishing for a strike, the kind of precision possible at short range lets you make something happen with intention . . .