A dead drift is the most common presentation in fly fishing for trout, because it imitates their most common food forms. We want a dead drift on both a dry fly and a nymph. But what is it?
It’s a one-seam drift that travels at the speed of the current without tension from the attached tippet. That’s hard to achieve, but it is possible by first understanding what a dead drift looks like, both on the surface with a dry fly and below the surface with a nymph.
This latest Troutbitten video breaks it all down. Below the video are a few more paragraphs with important details, along with some links to other key Troutbitten articles about understanding great dead drifts.
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Up Top
Seeing a dead drift on a dry fly is the easier of the two. We can see success, and this is why we all love fishing dries. If the fly is traveling perfectly with the bubbles and the currents, well, there’s your dead drift. But as soon as it crosses seams, if it travels faster or travels slower than those currents, the fly is dragging and the dead drift is over.
Any amount of drag kills the dead drift, and selective trout rarely eat a dragging fly. So we aim for perfection and hope for willing fish.
What causes drag to set in? It’s tension on the tippet. When the dry fly gains direct contact with a tippet or leader that is moving in another seam, that fly drags.
And to prevent drag, we provide slack to a dry fly, often in the form of s-curves.
READ: Troutbitten | Dry Fly Fishing — The Stop and Drop
READ: Troutbitten | Dry Fly Fishing — The Crash Cast
More slack, or more grace, given to the dry fly equals longer rides, more dead drift time and more trout. And while most of the slack in a good dry fly presentation happens in the cast itself, skillful mending certainly has its place
READ: Troutbitten | The Hop Mend — (with VIDEO)
Remember, a dry fly should travel down one seam without tension — without crossing seams, speeding up, skating, or slowing down.
That’s a good dead drift.
Underneath
Getting dead drifts on a nymph is much more challenging, simply because the currents below are three dimensional. When the fly disappears under the surface, things get a lot more complicated. And just like dry flies on the surface, a one-seam drift is the goal for a nymph underneath.
READ: Troutbitten | One Great Nymphing Trick
So how do we do it? Providing s-curves of slack to a nymph doesn’t work. The currents below are too complex, and that slack gets dragged at all angles.
READ: Troutbitten | See the Dead Drift
Instead, we aim for a tight line to the nymph. We need a tippet that slices through the water and eliminates cross-current drag.
This applies to tight line nymphing tactics, of course, but the same can be said for good indicator tactics. What is below the water should be a straight line to the nymph, and all of it in one seam.
READ: Troutbitten | The Tight Line Advantage Across Fly Fishing Styles
READ: Troutbitten | Tight Line Nymphing With an Indicator — A Mono Rig Variant
But with that tight line, with that contact, is a dead drift ever really possible?
In short, yes. The real magic of tight line nymphing happens by slipping in and out of contact with the nymph. Yes, we want to be in touch, but just barely. And our goal is a dead drift with a bit of contact at key times throughout the course of the fly. That’s advanced nymphing talent that produces big results.
PODCAST: Troutbitten | Finding Contact — Tight Line and Euro Nymphing Skills #5
Lastly, a skilled nymph angler can drift the flies down one seam, remaining in contact the whole time (or just barely) while presenting a very convincing dead drift. It’s tough. But that’s what’s fun about it.
READ: Troutbitten | Tight Line and Euro Nymphing — Leading vs Tracking vs Guiding
Do It
So a dead drift has the fly traveling in one current seam, uninfluenced by the attached tippet. That idea is easy to understand. But achieving it takes a lifetime of practice. A fly crossing seams is not a dead drift. We can fairly say it’s drifting downstream, but a true dead drift always holds one seam.
READ: Troutbitten | That’s Not a Dead Drift
We achieve that up top by providing slack and s-curves in the tippet. And underneath, we do the opposite, keeping the connection tight to the nymph, but critically, always keeping that tippet in one seam.
Fish hard, friends.
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Enjoy the day.
Domenick Swentosky
T R O U T B I T T E N
domenick@troutbitten.com
As Gary Borgert puts it, on a scale of 1 to 10, the problem of unwanted drag rates 1,000.
Nothing interferes with a dry fly dead drift more than casting across varying current seams and tongues. One solution is to mend with your feet. Approaching a rising trout from directly below (whenever possible) puts you, your fly line/leader/tippet/fly, the rising trout, and the bugs all in the same seam or current tongue. Long. 12 to 16+ foot leaders sacrifice some accuracy but go a long way in eliminating drag as well.
Drag is much more problematic in dry fly fishing. Few trout are caught on a dragging dry fly. Tens of thousands of trout are caught on dragging nymphs every year. Even real nymphs get tumbled and pushed and pulled in the chaos of those three-dimensional currents down below.
Good stuff, Rick.
“Drag is much more problematic in dry fly fishing. Few trout are caught on a dragging dry fly. ”
Actually, I believe drag is just as problematic, if not more, underneath. We just don’t see it as easily, so we are more forgiving. Drag underneath is more challenging, in my experience.
Cheers.
Dom
Nice piece. I wonder whether it’s more useful to use “imitative” rather than “dead” to describe a drift. There is nothing dead about a Leisenring Lift or Leonard Wright’s caddis presentations. Another point. Sometimes I’ll get bit on subsurface drifts gone awry – like from wind stall. Is it a pause or a jerk or a few inches change in depth? I don’t know. But it happens.
Hi Mike,
Respectfully, this article and video is not about those drifts. This is about a dead drift, and we all acknowledge that trout take other presentations at times, but that the baseline for dry flies and nymphs is a dead drift, and then we go from there. So if a Leisenring lift is imitative at the moment, and they take it, game on. And if they are eagerly eating your skittering caddis, cool. But the most imitative drift out there for dries and nymphs most times is a dead drift.
More here:
https://troutbitten.com/2021/04/21/natural-vs-attractive-presentations/
Cheers.
Dom
Putting a nymph into one seam to get a dead drift in the strike zone is a nice goal, but realistically, we’re only guessing at the currents below based on what we see on the surface, especially in deep runs. The sighter straightening out and running slower than the surface is a great start, but does it stay in one seam? Hard to tell. Perhaps the reason we don’t catch fish on every dead drift is because they’re actually not as dead as we thought.
Great point.
And what we can do is try very hard to understand the seams down there by reading the sighter, by using the nymphs or weight as a probe to learn about the seam we are fishing. That’s how we refine the drift, in one seam, over and over until we are satisfied that we’ve gotten a good one. Then we move on.
Overweighting is another excellent way to gain data about the seam. By touching a bit more, by having extra control, we can be quite certain about that strike zone. By contrast, an underweighted system leaves more questions.
Thanks for the video, Dom. It’s all valuable, and the sequence where you show how to read a sighter especially so.
Thanks. Getting good film on that is a challenge. But we’re figuring a few things out.
Dom
I need advice on applying your lessons. I nymph big rivers – the Bighorn and Missouri Rivers, regularly, and most often with an indicator while wading. The currents are often 3-4 feet deep and very fast in both runs and riffles, and the drop-offs below the riffles are often even deeper, ranging to 6-7 feet or more. As a result a long leader (at least 8 feet from the indie to the weight together with 36 inches, total, of tippet for two inline flies) and substantial weight are required to get the flies to the strike zone and keep them there. The indie, in the surface current, often outruns the flies moving in the slower strike zone. To further complicate matters the cast often must cross 15-20 feet or more of those fast currents to get to the seam where the fish are holding (just to be difficult, I’m sure), which means a huge belly quickly forms in the line unless I can get a couple of substantial stack mends out immediately, at which I am not always successful. Periodic mends don’t seem to work as well as the two stack mends, I assume because I move the flies with each sequential mend. The result of all this is that a fish will often take the fly 6-7 feet or more upstream of my indie, which makes for a tough fight given the strength of the intervening currents, etc. Any suggestions on how to address these issues, short of boat fishing all day or moving to smaller streams?
Hi Tom,
Couple things . . . First, I don’t find trout feeding in 7 feet of water. If it really is 7 feet deep, then I’d fish the other stuff. Choose what you can fish well, and leave the rest. That’s always a challenge on bigger rivers. And yes, boat fish it.
One thing you mentioned:
‘The result of all this is that a fish will often take the fly 6-7 feet or more upstream of my indie.”
But . . . that’s where we WANT them to take the fly. The nymph should be upstream of the indy. That’s the only way you have a chance at good strike detection.
If you really want to nymph that deep stuff, I’d drop shot it.
Dom
Thanks. Appreciate the info and will try as you suggest.
Tom
Some of the steelhead guys here in MI fish the real deep runs on centerpin tackle (10 ft+ rods and large diameter, fly-like reels that freespool). All mono with float, shot, and tippet, long downstream presentation. Likely too far a stretch from fly fishing, but an interesting solution to getting flies down quickly and keeping them there in the deep stuff.
Right on. The way we do a tight line to the indicator approach has centerpin traits.
https://troutbitten.com/2017/02/14/tight-line-nymphing-with-an-indicator-a-mono-rig-variant/
It’s a deadly presentation.
Dom
Cheers.
If you’re running a perdigone on5x and want to trail it with a size 18 beadless pheasant tail should you run the pheasant tail on 6x