Talk about fishing?
This I like. Here's a post I put on the Classic Flyrod Forum
about a week ago:
Most of Montana's rivers are too high and muddy to fish right now.
I'm not sure about the Big Hole. It could be fishable. I hope it will
be next weekend, because that's were I'm headed.
Yesterday I hiked up into the Beartrap Canyon on the Madison, with
a good friend. The water was high and muddy, but clear enough to fish.
Salmon Flies have not started yet, so the local fly shops said to dead drift
crayfish and sculpins near the bank. We tried that without much success.
I eventually put on a big stonefly nymph with a hair hackle wet fly trailer.
I absolutely wacked'em. I'm not sure I ever remember a day when switching
flies made such a huge difference.
I only caught one fish all day long on the big stonefly nymph. But I think it
was an indispensable part of the deal. I fished without the stonefly and didn't
do so well. Perhaps the big fly got their attention, in the muddy water, and then
they couldn't resist the Pott fly trailer. Mabye fish have a limited ability to refuse.
Maybe they were turning down the big fly, which used up their discretion quotient
for the next 2 seconds. The explanation doesn't matter. That two-fly combo knocked'em
dead when nothing else did.
What I'm now calling the Pott Sticker is my takeoff on the old Sandy Mite: Franz Pott's
most famous woven hair hackle fly. Weaving hackles is a bit too involved for me.
So I've developed a quicker and easier way to imitate those wonderful wet flies.
I don't use the classic dropper rig either, when fishing more than one fly (which
I almost always do). Instead I knot a trailing length of mono-filament
to the bend of the hook in front. Rigging that way is easier to setup and less likely to tangle too.
...anyway.....with the following flies the weighted stonefly nymph
was like a split shot that not only stays on, it catches fish.
The trailing fly catches even more. I do this a lot.
I often use bonefish flies for weight. I fish heavy Crazy Charlies in
Montana, with an unweighted or lightly weighted smaller wet fly
trailing behind. The two biggest fish of the day usually byte the
Crazy Charlie. The most fish bite the Sandy Mite.
https://localhost/mrb/Pages/Fly-Tying/Sandy-Pittendrigh/Nymphs/Hair-Hackle-Wet-Flies/index.html Pott Sticker </a>
https://localhost/mrb/Pages/Fly-Tying/Sandy-Pittendrigh/Nymphs/Marshmallow-Nymph/index.htmlMarshmallow Nymph</a>