|
Category: Education
Fredericksburg August Meeting
Club Meeting Thursday August 8th, 6PM Social Hour, 7PM Meeting
Fredericksburg EMS Building 233 Friendship Lane
Kevin Hutchison will be our speaker. Kevin is the author and publisher of the revised “Fly fishing the Texas Hill Country” and, as a Certified Casting Instructor and Orvis Endorsed guide, has taught from Texas to Michigan and from Singapore to the Bahamas.
The Foam Line
A trout sips not one but two mayflies off the foam lined surface (photo: Jason Jagger).
Anybody who powered through a high-school psychology class probably remembers Maslow’s famous triangle chart—the famous Hierarchy of Needs.
At the base of the triangle lie our foundational needs—things like food, shelter, sleep, sex. Higher up, and slightly less important, are still-important needs, like safety, financial security, emotional well-being, etc. Still higher up, and still less important than the foundational needs, are things like love and acceptance, self esteem and, finally, self-actualization.
While this may not seem to have much to do with trout fishing, it really does. For the trout. Not so much for us anglers. Don’t get too excited. It’s doubtful that trout crave self-actualization.
The trout’s Hierarchy of Needs might start and end with the basest of requirements: food, safety and security, shelter and sex.
Anybody who’s spent more than a few days chasing trout knows they like structure—places to hide, both for the purpose of avoiding predators, and for the purpose of ambushing prey and finding food.
Undercut banks. Big rocks. Big wood. Overhanging branches. All help a trout meet its basic needs.
But often, anglers overlook a great place to find trout the needs at the base of the triangle: the foam line.
Consider the foam line the equivalent of the pizza delivery driver. It brings food directly to the shelter. A line of floating foam may not seem substantive, but consider that many predators that go after trout come at them from above—eagles, ospreys, etc. Foam lines break up the water’s surface just enough to make trout feeding on or near the water’s service more difficult to see, even for sharp-eyed raptors. That gives trout more security.
And foam lines generally occur below other features in a river or a stream, like a rapid or a waterfall. This means the water is likely well oxygenated and prime for holding fish that are on the prowl.
While it may not seem like real substantial structure, foam lines give trout a reasonable amount of security—enough confidence to venture out from under the bank or the root wad to go after food that’s drifting downstream. It may only be the illusion of safety, but it works for the fish, and it’s water we should never just wander by without at least making a cast and a drift, particularly if the water beneath the foam has any reasonable depth to it.
Here in Idaho, I fish rivers like the Henry’s Fork and the South Fork, both well-oxygenated tailwaters that have lots of foamy runs. One of my favorite South Fork side channels that I like to walk and wade in the fall has a deep eddy that features a giant foam mat. Trout will nose up through an inch of foam to get after Blue-winged Olives that get caught in the muck. Needless to say, the fishing can be stellar.
But foam lines aren’t just great for dry-fly fishing. Dropping a nymph under high-floating dry fly can be absolutely deadly, as can high-sticking a double-nymph rig through foamy water. Even streamers pulled under foam lines can work.
On smaller water, like my backcountry cutthroat creeks here along the Idaho-Wyoming border, foam lines offer great opportunities, starting in the late spring when native cutthroats are running upstream to spawn out of rivers like the Snake, the Greys and the Salt. Higher, slightly stained water from runoff helps trout feel more secure, but they’ll still gravitate to foam lines in search of food delivery.
Rocks are still great places to chase trout. Undercut banks will almost always hold fish. Wood? Wood is good.
But foam? Foam is home.
Streamers in Shallow Water
Master Class Monday: How to Fish Streamers in Shallow Water
Written by: Tom Rosenbauer
Fishing streamers is not always about casting large flies in deep water and heavy cover with a sinking fly line. Sometimes streamer flies are effective in shallow riffles and edges, especially when you use smaller flies and a floating line. Dave Jensen shows you how to rig a pair of small streamers and then demonstrates what type of water you should cover when trying this method.
Watch for further installments of Master Class Monday every week here at Orvis News, in the Advanced Tactics playlist our You Tube Channel, and on the new Advanced section of our Orvis Fly Fishing Learning Center.
Second Fly in a Tandem Rig
Ask the Experts: How Do You Attach the Second Fly in a Tandem Rig?
Written by: Phil Monahan
Tying the dropper to the hook bend of the top fly is the most common method for creating a tandem rig.
Photo by Phil Monahan
Last year, we introduced a new weekly “Ask the Experts” Column and asked you to pose some questions for our panel of experts. Our latest question for them to chew on is: “How do you attach the second fly in a tandem rig: to the hook bend of the top fly, to the hook eye of the top fly, or to the tag end of a knot in the leader?”
Their answers are below. If you’ve got a question you’d like to ask our panel, write it in the comments section below.
Alvin Dedeaux, All Water Guides (Austin, Texas):
I use a regular old clinch knot tied to the bend of the first hook. Fast and easy, and when I want to change droppers or change the length of the tippet, it only takes a couple of minutes.
Joe Demalderis, Cross Current Guide Service (Milford, Pennsylvania):
Most often, I tie the second fly to the hook bend of the first. It’s fast, easy, and it works. The first fly is usually a heavier and larger bug, with the second being smaller Soft Hackle or emerger pattern. Other times, like when employing a contact-nymphing method, I’ll tie to the tag end of a leader knot to either fish separate parts of the water column or to have both flies down on the bottom, depending on weight of the flies. It all works, if you keep your flies in the right place.
Capt. Chuck Hawkins, Hawkins Outfitters (Traverse City, Michigan):
Due to the number of logs left in our streams from the logging era, we do very little nymphing or hopper-dropper fishing. The only time I use double rigs is when streamer fishing. When I use two flies, I attach the second fly to the bend of the first hook.That gives me the correct presentation.
Rob Woodruff, Woodruff Guide Service (Quitman, Texas):
I prefer to tie to the hook bend of the top fly, using an improved clinch knot. I believe this gives fewer tangles than other methods. I always attach the second fly with a tippet that is one size smaller than what is tied to the upper fly. Since the lower fly is the most likely to snag on the stream bottom or on overhead limb, this insures that I lose just one fly if I have to break it off.
Doc Thompson, High Country Anglers (Ute Park, New Mexico):
With dry-droppers, I tend to either tie off the bend of the dry fly or off the eye of the hook. Sometimes off the eye gives a little better or quicker sink rate to a beadhead dropper. It does sometimes create more casting tangles, and if that’s the case, I tie off the bend.
With tandem nymphs, it’s about a half-and-half split between tying off the eye of the hook or off the tag end of a knot. The deeper I fish, the more tendency I have to tie off the tag of a knot, as I think it gives the rig a quicker sink rate. On smaller water with double nymphs, I typically go off the eye of the front hook. Once again, tangles can dictate some of that.
Brown Hobson, Brown Trout Fly Fishing (Asheville, North Carolina):
That’s a hard question to answer quickly because they all have their time and place. Most often, I attach to the bend if the hook has a barb or mashed barb. I always use the bend if I’m fishing a nymph rig with split shot. If the hook is a manufactured barbless hook that wont work. The clinch knot just slides off and the dropper is gone. I’ll use tags if the flies have no barbs or remnants of barbs. I also use tags when fishing deep nymphs with no splitshot. The tag allows for the flies to move around in currents that aren’t moving perfectly horizontal to the bottom of the river, and allows flies in different parts of the water column to move independently of each other. I only use the eye knot when fishing a dry fly with hackle around the thorax. I think the dry fly rides better when the dropper is off the eye.
Mike Canady, Ellensburg Angler (Ellensburg, Washington):
I tie it directly to the bend of the first hook, using an improved clinch knot. I use this method as it seems to hinge well and is fairly fast to tie.