Some late summer tailwater dry-dropper angling … and did somebody beat me with a sock full of nickels while I slept ?

Okay. Firstly I am not getting any younger. And jeez Louise this river reminds me of that every time I fish it. Honestly, the next day I woke up and it felt like I’d been assaulted in my sleep. Every muscle aching. Not to mention the swollen knee from when I fell on a rock with my full weight.

A few years back at the Tenkara Jam in Boone, NC ERiK Ostrander gave a talk about how fly fishing can be pretty physical and how to be at your best as an angler you need to be in good shape. I took that to heart and managed to loose about 30lbs for the next fishing season and wow! What a great thing to do – it made a world of difference with stamina and my balance. But this river really puts that to the test.

Is it worth it?

Yeah it’s worth it. I am not usually the kind of guy that says “Well it was just nice to get out”. When I go fishing I really do want to catch fish and I want to catch a decent number. If I simply wanted a nice day out I could go for a hike. But some rivers are just so beautiful that you can’t help but to think to yourself that “gee it really is nice just to get out.” And for me this is one of those places.

And honestly, the challenging wading adds to the appeal for me. It feels good to be sore and beat up the next day, you know? You feel like you earned those fish.

But, if you also catch decent numbers and some nice fish and catch some nice fish on dry flies to boot … then I’ll chalk that up as a great day to be on the water.

I was fishing the Douglas DXF 3114 11-ft 3WT as I described in this previous post ( Limestone Explorations & Some Nymphing ) and using the same leader as then too. But this time I spent most of my time fishing a dry-dropper rig. With a size 12 elk hair caddis as my dry and various small tungsten beadhead nymphs as the dropper.

The elk hair caddis had a dark reddish-brown body made SLF Squirrel Spikey Dubbing (Rusty Brown). And is shown below.

If you’ve been reading my blog you know that I’ve been digging the dry-dropper fishing. Check out these posts to see more on how I rig and fish the dry-dropper system –>>> Spring Creek: Edges, Hoppers (and Droppers) and some other thoughts and The Ninja, Dry-Dropper rigs, Brown Trout, and the Savage… In addition to being effective and fun it can be very practical for numerous reasons. Usually I’m fishing with the dry-dropper rig much as I would if I were contact-nymphing. That is I’m using a fairly short line out of the rod tip (really just the leader usually) and the leader held off of the water. And very often I’m doing it to avoid snags on particularly rocky, gnarly stream bottoms or ones with lots of weed and algae, or in this case both. Sometimes I just don’t feel up to the intensity of staring at the sighter when nymphing and watching a dry fly can be more relaxing. In this case it was definitely the former. Nymphing this place was a pain in the butt – snags and algae … Maybe I could catch more with a straight ahead nymphing approach – but I find that the dry-dropper rigging with a small tungsten beadhead fly on a fairly short dropper (18″ or so) is very often quite effective and essentially snag free. I know some people knock the dry-dropper thing as some how being less than other nymphing styles but really sometimes it is just the perfect technique and I think you’ll find, at least I have that the more you do it – you start to suss out the nuances of the technique and get better and better at it. There can be more to it than you first think. And I find that with a long rod and light line (either tenkara style or euro-nymphing) you can make it a pretty elegant technique.

And sometimes they start eating the dry fly …

And sometimes they start hitting the dry fly in earnest. That was the case this time. No caddis were in evidence, nor any other large bugs of any kind that I saw. And yet the browns starting coming up the caddis dry pretty regularly. It was a bright, sunny day too. So go figure. But if I’d been only nymphing I’d missed out on some nice topwater action.

Most of the fish that came up to the dry fly were holding in what looked like fast mid-depth runs with broken riffly surfaces. Faster water than I’d have expected to find many willing takers while blind fishing a dry fly. I’ll usually fish those fast runs with nymph though, there are lots of nooks and crannies for fish to find quiet lies among the fast water – but I guess I usually think that they won’t trouble themselves to rise up through that fast water to hit my dry fly. But they did.

They can be sneaky in that rough water …

I had a bit of an eye opening experience when my dry fly suddenly disappeared in one fast run. The dry fly went down and I was thinking “yeah got one on that nymph!” … when I brought the fish in I found that he’d taken the dry fly. It was that fish in the picture above.

I was watching that fly like a hawk when it went under – and I never saw that fish take it. He somehow nabbed it without me even seeing him. The thought that I then had was ” gee whiz I wonder how many times fish come up in that fast current and look at my fly and then refuse it without me seeing it, if I don’t even see a fish that actually took my fly?” Must happen all the time. And then I started thinking how fish could be rising in that faster current taking natural flies, right under my nose… and I don’t even see them. Some food for thought.

Another lesson learned …

So with the fish rising to dries I figured I’d take off the nymph. Well that didn’t work at all. With the long level nymphing leader that I was using I couldn’t cast the dry fly alone at all really. Just couldn’t turn that fly over. So I put the nymph dropper back on. So if you ever find yourself nymphing and then thinking you want to switch to a dry fly but can’t cast it on the nymphing leader that you’re using, and don’t feel like re-rigging, then you can try tying on a weighted nymph as a dropper. And now that weighted nymph has enough momentum to drag your wind resistant dry fly along for the ride.

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