Good advice for beginners, and experienced alike.

[gutterpunk]

I like this article. Often times we get hung up on the perfect drag free drift, or some other technique. But fishing is more varied and complicated. True, in many conditions the presentation and drift is quite important, but the first trout I ever caught in Montana (I think) hit my dry as dangled and skated at the end of the drift just as I started to pick it up. And more than a decade later i know that happens a lot.

Multi-purpose flies | Hatch Magazine - Fly Fishing, etc.

 

[rodneyshishido]

I caught a couple of nice browns that way! I'm not proud, I take them any way I can get them.

 

[Monello]

I often fish still water. I have often began to start a new cast, only to find a small fish close to the bank has inhaled my fly. When the last part of the line begins it's forward cast, there is a small panfish attached to the end of the line. I still get a big smile on the rare occasion when that happens.

 

[silver creek]

One of the first times I went fly fishing with Gary Borger, we went with our wives. Gary taught my late wife Elizabeth and I to fly fish a couple of years earlier and our families had become friends. We were on the Wolf River, one of 2 scenic and wild rivers in Wisconsin. We had rigged up and Gary's fly was dangling in the water below him. He was holding the rod between his knees as he was busy with something else.

All of a sudden he jerked his knees to the side and had hooked a trout that had taken his dangling fly. Gary's wife Nancy, my wife Elizabeth and I broke out in laughter. Even when when his fly is dragging, the trout prefered Gary's presentation!

These are the exceptions that happen to all of us which proves the rule. I have caught trout on a dangling fly as have many of us. What it proves is that trout populations have diverse behaviors when they are feeding opportunistically. What it does NOT prove is that most of the trout are susceptible to that presentation.

I have told this example before, but here it is again. On another BB, a member said he was fishing one of the famous spring creeks in Pennsylvania. There were a group of fly fishers fishing a hatch and he asked what the hatch was. He did not have that fly so he put on a Royal Wulff and caught 3 fish. His conclusion was that the fly fishers were wrong and the fish were not feeding selectively.

I pointed out that the only thing he could say was that the fish that took his Royal Wulff were not feeding selectively. He could not make any conclusions about the fish that did not take his fly, nor could he even say most of the fish were were feeding non selectively.

Whenever we do catch a fish, of course the fish was susceptible to the method we were using. However, our goal is not just to catch the occasional fish by using a method that will work on a small proportion of the fish. It is to figure out the method that will work on the greatest proportion of the fish, because that method will result in the greatest chance for success.

The difference between the very good fly fisher and the average fly fisher is not just their ability to read water, or thier casting ability, or a whole host of other assets at their disposal. It is also the ability to figure out the fly and the presentation that will result in the greatest chance for success.

I appreciate the truth that the article reveals but let us not forget that these are exceptions unless the dragging fly imitates the behavior of a hatch of insects like the capering and skittering caddis flies mating on the water surface or skittering caddis drying their wings and taking off. So a skating or dragging fly is a specific technique that has a time and place when it imitates the insect that the majority of fish are taking.

“Then we have a capering sedge hatch which 99 % of most lakes don’t have. That is an insect that looks like a tent-winged caddis and it’s those that bring the fish to the surface because they actually run and mate on the water. It’s just an explosive top water action when they hit those bugs, so it’s one of those huge draws that makes people really like to come.”

History of Monster Lake Ranch | Monster Lake Ranch


"Hatching caddis often scuttle across the surface of he water drying their wings trying to get airborne. It is this that is imitated with the jerk and pause retrieves. Imagine the speed of the sedge on the water, that is what you must imitate."

Understanding The Caddis / Sedge Life-Cycle For Fly Fishing

Don't let a hasty generalization or a biased sample fool you into thinking that the exception should become the rule. The way to avoid this in the case of the dragging fly is to try to figure out if there is a logical explanation like a caddis hatch or other skittering insects that could explain this event. Then the event is not exceptional because it fits into the well documented behavior of trout during a caddis hatch.

 

[redietz]

I caught a couple of nice browns that way! I'm not proud, I take them any way I can get them.

It's often a legitimate technique. If you figure out skating a fly is what they (often true when caddis are one water, or winter stone flies) you should be proud about your power of observation!

Leonard Wright wrote a whole book on the subject, Fishing the Dry Fly as a Living Insect. When it first came out, it certainly changed my erroneous belief that "presentation" and "drag free drift" are synonyms.

 

[bigjim5589]

Excellent article and comments.

Don't let a hasty generalization or a biased sample fool you into thinking that the exception should become the rule. The way to avoid this in the case of the dragging fly is to try to figure out if there is a logical explanation like a caddis hatch or other skittering insects that could explain this event. Then the event is not exceptional because it fits into the well documented behavior of trout during a caddis hatch.

IMO, there really aren't any rules, except that fish will eat something to survive, and always a logical explanation. Doesn't mean I've always been able to figure out what that may be, even when my presentation worked. As much as "matching the hatch" has been proven, as a general rule, I'm convinced that what we see in the flies we tie on & how they're presented, may not necessarily be what the fish see, or how they perceive them. Yes, there is behavior that they learn, such as keying on specific forage during a hatch, but even that is not always the rule.

I follow this idea of using flies that may represent multiple items of interest to a fishes diet. However, from our human perspective, most times what we see in the form of the flies, will often match what's prevalent. Flies are often tied with purpose, to match a specific forage. That doesn't necessarily mean the fish see it as we do, but the probability is high that they at least see our offering as something they regularly eat.

I believe we increase the chances if the flies used might look like multiple forage, and yet match the prevalent hatch of the time.

Still, as Silver Creek points out, not making hasty conclusions is the best approach, and knowing the waters you fish and the available forage base will refine your knowledge, and enable better choices in fly selection.

When fishing "new" waters, those you haven't had time to learn, then drawing from past experience, and the idea of using flies that might represent many things, may be the difference between catching and casting practice.

I've been pleasantly surprised more than once over the years, when I stumbled upon an approach or "presentation" that caught fish, but wasn't the usual or generally accepted manner of presenting the fly. In some cases, they were exceptions, having only worked in a single instance, but sometimes, they became a "rule" when I found the same situation again, or when the normal presentation didn't seem to produce.

My conclusion from many years of fishing, is that only the fish know the rules, and we just do the best we can.

 

[dennyk]

I caught a couple of nice browns that way! I'm not proud, I take them any way I can get them.

After catching Brown trout just as I was about to peel the line off the water for another cast, I intentionally make a slow retrieve prior to making another cast. Browns being aggressive fish will strike on the retrieve. Fly patterns don't seem to matter, they are going after the movement either surface or sub-surface.

Denny

 

[silver creek]

Often times we get hung up on the perfect drag free drift, or some other technique. But fishing is more varied and complicated. True, in many conditions the presentation and drift is quite important, but the first trout I ever caught in Montana (I think) hit my dry as dangled and skated at the end of the drift just as I started to pick it up. And more than a decade later i know that happens a lot.

What I did not have time to write about in my first post is that there is a hidden assumption whenever we post about a technique that happens to catch trout. Those assumptions are called presuppositions; and in this case, the presupposition is that a fish that happens to be accidentally caught by a dangling fly will be just as large as the average fish caught by a drag free drift. Unless there is a hatch of skating caddis or some other hatch that is imitated by a dragging fly, my experience is that the fish that take a dragging fly tend to be the smaller fish.

Although there can be exceptions, I submit that there is a reason that happens to be true. I have written about the biological laws that govern selectivity and why larger fish are efficient feeders.

Fish size affects feeding behavior.

It works like this. To survive, every organism has to have a positive energy balance. It must take in more energy than it uses to live and feed. Otherwise, it will die.

The formula for life is energy in minus energy out. If the sum is positive, you live. If it negative, you die. It is as simple as that.

Larger fish require more energy because they have more body mass that burns more energy. Therefore they must be more efficient than smaller fish, both in the energy they use to feed and the energy they get from each food item. They must "choose wisely" not only on how they feed but on what they feed. Trout are stupid so they have evolved to "feed wisely". Selective trout are not hard to fool because they are smart, but because selectivity helps them survive. The small fish that feed efficiently have a survival advantage and become large trout that feed efficiently/selectively.

Smaller fish need less energy but they get the same amount of energy as the larger fish for each item of food. So they have to eat real food less often. They are free to sample what may not be food and to waste energy chasing, leaping, and wasting energy during the feeding process. Every experienced trout fisher has seen fish leaping out of the water during a hatch. What size are those fish? They are invariably the small fish. Now you know why.

With selective feeding, the larger fish do not waste energy by chasing or moving to feed on something that may or may not be food. They are locked in by evolution to feed on what matches the search image for what they know is food. That is why some of the largest fish feed with the tiniest surface disturbance. Experienced fly fishers know that some of the quietest rises are largest fish, because these are the fish that are feeding efficiently.

That is why the largest fish are most often found in the best feeding station, the location that brings in the most food and requires the least motion to feed. It is also why you will rarely catch a large fish with a random dragging fly unless there is a hatch that is inducing them to feed.

 

[silver creek]

Right below the article that the OP posted is this article:


RIO wants you to know exactly how lousy your casting is | Hatch Magazine - Fly Fishing, etc.

The first 2 sentences are" "Ongoing advancements in fly line materials and design continue to offer anglers ways to get more out of their casts. Today's fly lines load rods more effectively...."

Here is the counterpoint to that statement about modern fly lines and rod loading written by Aitor on his fly casting blog. I believe he is correct.

How to Bend a Rod << One More Last Cast

"I stumbled upon the quote above the other day and thought that it was worth talking a little bit about “rod load” or, as I prefer to say, “rod bend”.

There is only one thing able of bending a rod: force.

Force is related to mass and acceleration as per the formula: F = m.a.

Mass is the amount of matter of a body; on planet Earth it is equivalent to weight .......

So what is the requirement in a line for it to bend the rod more, for the same acceleration applied to the rod butt? Obviously to increase it mass, i.e. its weight. You don’t need much technology to put more plastic material in a line, do you? In fact if you were a line manufacturer you wouldn’t need to change your production process at all, just put the lines formerly labeled as #6 weight —or even #7— in a spool and box with a #5 on them......"

 

[bocianka1]

As someone who is quick to consider switching flies when the hits slow to nothing, I found this article gave me pause to think. Presenting the same fly in several ways isn't something intuitive. I've seen trout quickly grow wary of a fly or pattern and I usually figure they will still be wary of it, even if it starts behaving differently. Particularly with wooly buggers I've found fish in a given pool will quickly give up on a fly after awhile no matter how I retrieve it.

Apparently that's not always the case. It certainly worth experimenting with. I'd much rather fish one fly several ways than have to stop and switch flies several times. It's also a good reason to try and tie some attractor patterns and add them to my box.

Sent from my SCH-I605 using Tapatalk

 

[yikes]

He was holding the rod between his knees as he was busy with something else.

All of a sudden he jerked his knees to the side and had hooked a trout that had taken his dangling fly. Gary's wife Nancy, my wife Elizabeth and I broke out in laughter. Even when when his fly is dragging, the trout prefered Gary's presentation!

That happened to me earlier this month on the Williamson river. It had been a very slow day of fishing, mainly due to a change in the weather. We had stopped to anchor at the tail end of a riffle, and while I was applying sunscreen I held the rod between my knees. The indicator + copper john was about 35' downstream, water-skiing over the top of the next riffle for a couple minutes. BAM! A nice redband hooked itself.

 

[ifitswims]

It is always better to be lucky than good in fishing.

 

[patrick62]

I once had a brown hit a submerged swinging Stimulator so hard it bent the hook almost straight out. Not a giant fish either, 15 inches or so.

I think it's a good idea to learn the rules. It makes breaking them much more fun.

 

[Rip Tide]

Just for fun, tie up some "Neversink Skating Spiders" and give them a go.
Because the stiff hackles block the gap of the hook, it's quite difficult to hook a fish with one , but it sure is a blast to try.
The conditions have to be right. You want a stiff breeze coming at your back
Hold your rod tip high and let the wind catch and propel your line. Skate your fly in front of down-stream cover and hold on.

The fly is all hackle with the rear hackle tied in concave to the front and the second hackle concave to the rear

 

[desmobob]

After catching Brown trout just as I was about to peel the line off the water for another cast, I intentionally make a slow retrieve prior to making another cast. Browns being aggressive fish will strike on the retrieve. Fly patterns don't seem to matter, they are going after the movement either surface or sub-surface.

Denny

For sure. A dry that has been pulled under at the end of the drift will often solicit a strike. Fish out every cast right until the moment you pick it up to re-cast. It will help prevent back-casting small fish!

Tight lines,
Bob

 

[corn fed fins]

I just have to cringe when I see "drag free" as I personally think there is no such thing. We get as close as possible when using dries but even then it's a fleeting unicorn seen from the corner of one's eye. That dry may slow, speed up, spin, etc., for fractions of second. Long enough to cause a problem? Absolutely. But I firmly believe that drag is a trigger, more often than not, and especially while nymphing. The second a nymph rig goes down the current now becomes variable vertically, laterally, and with time. Yet the rig is attached by a single line running through all these variables being influenced differently with each passing increment of line. There is no telling exactly where your flies truly are or how they are behaving. This is where those years of experience come into play allowing for a close approximation. I know I can not see my nymph rigs, even in winter months, with little flow. I can't even begin to count the number of times I've casted to fish to have them ignore that morsel until I introduce movement created by the drag everyone talks about avoiding. The situations that call for my fly resembling a unicorn are far FAR less frequent than those times where I want the fly looking like it's time to skidaddle. I guess I would refer to this as controlled drag. Like flying a kite, you can make flies behave using drag. Obviously you don't want your fly doing mach 3 coming out of a bellied line but that rise, bump, swing, skate, twitch, all courtesy of controlled drag is the ticket to enticing fish...IMO of course.

Sent from my VS988 using Tapatalk

 

[rfb700]

I don't know, maybe the fish I go after are dumb but drag free isn't much of a consideration. Getting a fly into their feeding lane is however. Any fly a lot of days.



Sent from my SM-G920W8 using Tapatalk

 

[brownbass]

Last year I was talking streamside with a new member of our group as I tied on the first fly of the day. I mentioned that I usually just dropped the first fly into the water at my feet because it was bad luck to catch a fish on the first cast (don't judge me!). It was a Wulf Royal Coachman, just as it hit the water a 12 inch Rainbow dashed up and grabbed it. I landed that fish and had a great day on the river.

Bill

 

[gutterpunk]

All good comments. Thank you. My original comment (and what I took from the article) was more in line with Corn Fed and less Silver Creek. I don't believe dangling a fly will catch more or better fish--but that we should always be challenging assumptions and think creatively in our fishing. What I took from the article was not specific to skating flies or any other particular technique. But that trout eat, or try to kill, many things and we're always best served by exploring unorthodox (I acknowledge that orthodoxy exists because it's time tested) methods and experimenting outside the box--as the situation allows.

 

[Unknownflyman]

One of the first times I went fly fishing with Gary Borger, we went with our wives. Gary taught my late wife Elizabeth and I to fly fish a couple of years earlier and our families had become friends. We were on the Wolf River, one of 2 scenic and wild rivers in Wisconsin. We had rigged up and Gary's fly was dangling in the water below him. He was holding the rod between his knees as he was busy with something else.

All of a sudden he jerked his knees to the side and had hooked a trout that had taken his dangling fly. Gary's wife Nancy, my wife Elizabeth and I broke out in laughter. Even when when his fly is dragging, the trout prefered Gary's presentation!

These are the exceptions that happen to all of us which proves the rule. I have caught trout on a dangling fly as have many of us. What it proves is that trout populations have diverse behaviors when they are feeding opportunistically. What it does NOT prove is that most of the trout are susceptible to that presentation.

I have told this example before, but here it is again. On another BB, a member said he was fishing one of the famous spring creeks in Pennsylvania. There were a group of fly fishers fishing a hatch and he asked what the hatch was. He did not have that fly so he put on a Royal Wulff and caught 3 fish. His conclusion was that the fly fishers were wrong and the fish were not feeding selectively.

I pointed out that the only thing he could say was that the fish that took his Royal Wulff were not feeding selectively. He could not make any conclusions about the fish that did not take his fly, nor could he even say most of the fish were were feeding non selectively.

Whenever we do catch a fish, of course the fish was susceptible to the method we were using. However, our goal is not just to catch the occasional fish by using a method that will work on a small proportion of the fish. It is to figure out the method that will work on the greatest proportion of the fish, because that method will result in the greatest chance for success.

The difference between the very good fly fisher and the average fly fisher is not just their ability to read water, or thier casting ability, or a whole host of other assets at their disposal. It is also the ability to figure out the fly and the presentation that will result in the greatest chance for success.

I appreciate the truth that the article reveals but let us not forget that these are exceptions unless the dragging fly imitates the behavior of a hatch of insects like the capering and skittering caddis flies mating on the water surface or skittering caddis drying their wings and taking off. So a skating or dragging fly is a specific technique that has a time and place when it imitates the insect that the majority of fish are taking.

“Then we have a capering sedge hatch which 99 % of most lakes don’t have. That is an insect that looks like a tent-winged caddis and it’s those that bring the fish to the surface because they actually run and mate on the water. It’s just an explosive top water action when they hit those bugs, so it’s one of those huge draws that makes people really like to come.”

History of Monster Lake Ranch | Monster Lake Ranch


"Hatching caddis often scuttle across the surface of he water drying their wings trying to get airborne. It is this that is imitated with the jerk and pause retrieves. Imagine the speed of the sedge on the water, that is what you must imitate."

Understanding The Caddis / Sedge Life-Cycle For Fly Fishing

Don't let a hasty generalization or a biased sample fool you into thinking that the exception should become the rule. The way to avoid this in the case of the dragging fly is to try to figure out if there is a logical explanation like a caddis hatch or other skittering insects that could explain this event. Then the event is not exceptional because it fits into the well documented behavior of trout during a caddis hatch.

I skate a lot of caddis and I believe your post to be very accurate, when it’s on nothing better but otherwise it’s just a few fish. Skating caddis always results in at least one fish without fail for me, but I could say that about many flies such as the the prince nymph or the pheasant tail or an adams or a Mickey Finn.