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. The tight line dance is another collection of movements to the streamer loosely grouped together into...
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. With episode eight of this Troutbitten Skills Series, we’ve finally come to the point where we’ve...
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. Speed leads happen mostly in one lane, and they go faster than their parent current. Lane changes are...
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. We've covered many animations in these series. We’ve talked about the streamer head position and its...
I think drop rate is the most important quality of a streamer. I believe how fast a fly falls is the biggest factor in its performance, because drop rate affects everything else about how we might move the fly.
Weight is easily measurable, so it’s a comfortable quality to talk about and compare. Drop rate can be measured, but it’s not easy. And I don’t know many anglers who know the ips rating (inches per second) for their streamers. But maybe we should . . .
The Head Flip is a pivot. It’s a simple change of the streamer’s head angle, from down and across to up and across, or from upstream to downstream. This pivot doesn’t necessarily move the fly out of its area, but the motion might seem pretty dramatic to a trout. The Head Flip shows trout an opportunity for an easy meal, and it might signal a moment of vulnerability. It’s one of our favorites animations to a streamer.
The ability to move the fly with the rod tip and not just the line hand is a fundamental skill that opens creative options for every streamer angler.
Almost two decades ago, Kelly Galloup’s first streamer book changed the way anglers thought about moving a streamer. All these years later, the jerk strip isn’t just one way to move the streamer. It’s a technique for using both hands, in concert, synchronized, for presentations that are impossible to achieve any other way.
Move the fly with the rod tip and then recover with the line hand. In this way, the Jerk Strip sets the table for everything else to follow in this Troutbitten Skills Series on Streamer Presentations . . .
Season fourteen is a ten-part Troutbitten Skill Series, all about Streamer Presentations. Streamer fishing is salesmanship. But how do we sell it? What are the animations? What are the things we can do with a long fly, to make it look like a baitfish, like a crayfish, a sculpin, maybe a small trout or a fall fish?
Most anglers hate this wasted time. In fact, all of this preparation just to go fishing puts a lot of anglers off in the first place. And the colder it is, or the longer you plan to be out there fishing, or the more tactics you plan to use the more all of this pre-trip prep is required.
We want a system for minimizing the time between cutting the car engine to walking away from the vehicle with our fly rod in hand.
Nothing compares to actively fishing streamers and watching trout attack the fly. In early November, I found good streamer action in some favorite water. The takes were spotty enough that I had to work for them, but frequent enough that I could learn the preferences of the trout and dial in a presentation . . .
Moving the fly with the rod tip and not just the line hand is a fundamental skill that opens up many presentations that bring trout to a streamer.
The jerk strip is critical for any serious streamer angler. It’s a must-have skill for animating the fly — for selling the streamer to a fish. And it’s the baseline for what I think of as a jig strip, a twitch strip, a glide strip, a head flip and twitch, a lane change, and much more. At its core, the jerk strip is a hand off from left to right — it’s about moving the fly with the rod tip and then recovering with the line hand. In this way, the jerk strip sets the table for everything else . . .