Aiden walked behind me on the bank after fooling around in the woods for a while. He’d been playing fetch and find-it in with our Aussie pup, River. Recent fishing trips have been just as much about hanging out with River in our favorite places as actually fishing....
** NOTE: This is Part Seven of a Troutbitten series on fly fishing for trout through the winter months. This will all read a little better if you back up and find Parts One, Two, Three, Four and Five and Six. ** Smith and I found ourselves on another...
One of the biggest misconception in nymphing is that our flies must bump along the bottom. Get it down where the trout are, they say. Bounce the nymph along the riverbed, because that’s the only way to catch trout. We’re told to feel the nymph tick, tick, tick across...
Good fishing happens by doing a bunch of the small things right. And improvement happens when you do more things right than you did last time. Our favorite wild trout teach us good fishing habits because they’re discriminating. They are rarely fooled by inferior...
Every winter our rivers go through changes, and the trout follow suit. Regardless of how much water flows between the banks, I encounter a predictable slowdown in trout response at some point. Call it a lack of trout enthusiasm. Or call it hunkering down and waiting for warmer water. However you look at it, the trout just don’t move as far to eat a fly.
For some, the solution is a streamer — to go bigger. Get the trout’s attention and add some motivation to peel itself from the river bed and move to a fly. It works — sometimes. (everything works sometimes.) But just as often you’re left with an empty net and more questions than answers. I do love fishing streamers in the winter though. I use it as a chance to build body heat, to warm up by walking and covering more water. But my standard approach is a highly targeted pair of nymphs, right in the trout’s window. Served up just right, you can almost force-feed a trout that didn’t even know he was hungry.
I walked to the familiar counter and laid a small bag of orange material among the aged fly fishing stickers covering the coffee stained wooden slab. Seated on a stool, the shop manager looked up from his magazine and over to my bag of orange fluff. Then he slowly brought his gaze up to mine. We made eye contact and he grinned until we both slowly chuckled.
“It’s all you need out there right now,” he said . . .
I know, I know. You don’t like to fish with indicators, right? You think an indy removes the angler from contact with the nymphs. You believe a fly fishing indicator actually gets in the way of strike detection more than it helps the situation. Granted, there are big problems with the way most fly fishermen use indicators. And I know a lot of anglers who refuse to attach them to a leader.
But I also know many more good anglers who see the value of indicators, who reach for an indy (or a dry-dropper rig) when a tight line nymphing presentation fails, who recognize that an indicator is an amazing and useful tool that extends our effective nymphing range, balances out a drift and helps keep the flies in one current seam.
I think a lot of anglers miss the finer points of the indy game. Good indicator nymphing (or dry-dropper fishing) is not just a chuck it and chance it affair. Instead, careful attention to the indy itself, reading the water vs the position and behavior of the indicator, is a necessary skill if the tactic is to be productive.
I’ve watched a lot of anglers fish nymphs. Most of them pick up at least a few trout, and some guys are like a vacuum cleaner. But I like to watch how differently everyone approaches the game. It’s curious to see so much variation, because essentially we’re all striving for the same thing — we want a drift that looks a lot like what the natural bugs are doing down there. (And yeah, usually that’s a dead drift.) But while the refinements and nuances between anglers are plenty, I think we can fairly group all approaches for dead drifting nymphs into two camps: tight line or indicator nymphing styles. The next question: Which one is better?
Of course, the merits of each method have been and will be argued for decades. But it really comes down to this: Which one puts more trout in the net?
Indicators are often added to our leader as an afterthought — which leads to another compromise. We’re left with a tool that is not well suited for the job. It works, but it could be better.
So for many years I’ve carried a third leader dedicated to indicator nymphing. And built into the leader are three features which are specifically up to the task of floating nymphs under an indy . . .
This August, 2016 Troutbitten article is retooled and revisited here. Bobber, cork, foam, yarn, dry fly. Those are my categories, but who cares? If you’ve been fly fishing and nymphing for a while, you’ve probably tried all of the above. You have your own categories...