The Orvis Guide to Beginning Fly Fishing, page 11
The most exciting fishing for redfish is on a calm, sunny day when you can spot them tailing or cruising in very shallow water. Not only is sight-fishing for them more fun, you’ll learn a lot about their behavior and reaction to your fly presentations when you can see every move they make.
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How to get started with stripers on the fly
STRIPED BASS ARE EXTREMELY COMMON ALONG THE Atlantic Coast from Maine to North Carolina and can be found as far south as Florida. They are also found in the Mississippi Delta and were introduced over one hundred years ago to the West Coast, where they are abundant in estuaries from San Francisco Bay north to Oregon. “Schoolie” stripers from eight to twenty-four inches are very common, often traveling in schools of hundreds of individuals. These juvenile striped bass are very aggressive and seldom pass up a streamer, bonefish fly, or popper.When even a sixteen-inch striped bass takes a popper, you’ll think a fish three times its size has crashed your fly.
Schoolies tend to concentrate inside harbors and along beaches, often moving far inside tidal creeks and salt ponds. Look for them at the mouths of creeks, around jetties, near docks, and on shallow sandy flats, especially in early spring when they’re more comfortable where the sun warms the bottom. Schools often move quickly, so you should cover a lot of water, stripping a small weighted baitfish pattern with aggressive short, quick strips. If there are any small stripers around, they’ll quickly pounce on the fly, and once you find a concentration of them, it’s fun to put on a surface fly and watch them smash it.
Schoolie stripers are always eager to take a fly—and they fight hard!
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How to set the hook on bigger saltwater fish
FOR MANY SALTWATER SPECIES LIKE BONEFISH, STRIPED bass, and small redfish, a simple strip strike is enough to penetrate the jaw and secure the hook firmly. However, for large bony-jawed fish like tarpon, tuna, sailfish, trevally, redfish over twenty pounds, and even large freshwater species like pike and muskellunge, you need more force and a wider arc in your strike, plus you should strike using the butt of the rod instead of the tip. With the bigger species, strikes should be long and low. You can’t do this by raising the rod tip straight in front of you because your body blocks the butt of the rod from moving past the vertical. So to strike them, jab your rod down and off to one side, using your stronger forearm and shoulder muscles instead of your wrist, which should remain locked throughout the strike. If there was any slack in the line or if you don’t feel a very firm pressure when you set the hook, make another sideways jab with the rod and also make a hard strip strike by yanking the line away from the rod, just as if you were making a double haul. To be absolutely sure, some fly fishers make yet another strike after the fish has made its first run and has paused before trying its next move.
The best way to strike larger saltwater fish is to strike to the side with a low rod, sometimes using the line hand for added pressure.
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Preparing for your first bonefishing trip
MOST PEOPLE TRAVEL A LONG WAY AND SPEND A WEEK’S PAY or more for a bonefishing trip. I’ve watched even experienced trout anglers get frustrated, angry, and even embarrassed on bonefishing trips because they weren’t ready for the wind, difficult fish spotting, and unfamiliar directions given by a guide. Just a little preparation will make your first trip a lot more fun.
First, practice your casting. Most bonefish are caught within forty feet, but that forty-foot cast must be made quickly, under pressure, with deadly accuracy, and with the good chance of a stiff breeze. Being able to get forty feet of fly line outside the rod tip is not enough. Pace out forty feet and make sure you can hit a target the size of a hula hoop with reasonable consistency, with a wind coming from any direction, and be able to change directions to cast to another hula hoop with just one false cast. Bonefish are spooky critters and too many false casts will ruin your chances.
A Short Cast
Either before your trip or just after you arrive, take a heavily weighted, lightly weighted, and unweighted bonefish fly to some shallow water where you can see the fly sink. Watch how fast each fly lands, as having different sink rates in bonefish flies is far more important than having the favorite fly on the island. Over sand and mud bottoms you want the fly to sink to the bottom and make little puffs of silt when you strip, because these plumes attract the attention of a bonefish looking for a crab or shrimp trying to escape. Over weedy and coral-covered bottoms, a bonefish can’t see a fly that sinks down into the debris (and you’ll get hung up), so you’ll begin to strip your fly before it hits bottom. And you never know beforehand how deep the water will be on a given flat, so you must have some idea of how fast your fly will sink.
No matter how good you are at spotting trout or steelhead, you will have trouble seeing bonefish in the water, at least for the first day and probably for a couple days. Count on it. Bonefish are nearly invisible underwater because their shiny sides reflect the bottom, and without a shadow to pinpoint their position you’ll have a very difficult time. If you are unlucky to have a week of cloudy weather you may see very few of them unless they are tailing in shallow water. Some guides are excellent at helping clients learn to spot bonefish. Others, because of a language problem or reticence, just tell their anglers where to cast and forget about trying to teach them. Try to discipline yourself to see through the water, not at it, and remember that bonefish hardly ever stop moving, so look for shadows and grayish indistinct shapes that don’t stay put.
Once you get onto a boat with a guide, remember that he will be giving you directions to cast by the hands of a clock in relation to the boat. Twelve o’clock is always directly in front of the boat, not where you are looking. And you will get befuddled—guaranteed. I don’t know how many times I’ve had a guide say, “Cast thirty feet at nine o’clock. Sigh. No. The other nine o’clock.” I even saw an enterprising young Bahamian guide on my last trip who had painted the hands of the clock, including the numbers, on the bow of the boat, just for clods like me.
The other miscommunication with guides and clients is distance. Different people have different ideas of what forty feet is, especially in the heat of the moment. Make a short and a long cast before you start and ask your guide how far the casts were. If you’re traveling to Mexico or Central America, it’s not a bad idea to learn the Spanish words for twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, and sixty feet before you leave.
Finally, the strike is the bane of all trout anglers.You should never strike a bonefish (or any saltwater fish) with the rod tip, but by making a long, firm strip with the line while the rod is held low. Raising the rod tip lifts the fly out of the water, and if a bonefish hasn’t really taken it or misses the fly, it may come back to a fly that just makes a long dart through the water rather than one that goes airborne. (Many guides, when they see a bonefish take a fly, will instruct the angler to “make a long strip” because they know if they say “strike,” up will come the rod tip.) One of the best suggestions I’ve heard for people who cannot modify their reflexes to strip strike is to retrieve a bonefish fly with the rod tip help a few inches underwater throughout the retrieve. With the tip underwater, the line stays in excellent control and it’s almost impossible to make a “trout strike.”
PART IX
Tackle Care
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Do you need to clean your gear after each trip?
MODERN FLY-FISHING TACKLE IS INCREDIBLY RESISTANT to the elements. After most fishing trips, you can put away all your gear without a care in the world. Graphite rods are totally resistant to dirt and moisture, reels are anodized to prevent corrosion and rust, and lines don’t need to be dried. For nearly every piece of tackle you own, a little soap and water is all you need. Here are some tips to help keep your gear in perfect shape for many years to come:
Your rod should not be put away in a rod tube wet, because the cloth sack can develop mildew. Just let your rod and its sack dry before putting them back in the case. Although saltwater reel seats are anodized to prevent corrosion, salt crystals can build up on a reel seat, so wash the seat with fresh water and dry before putting it away.
Reels should also be rinsed in fresh water after a day in the salt. Some anglers strip all the line off the reel and spray some water inside to prevent salt crystals from building up on the line and backing. If any mud or grains of sand have gotten inside the reel, remove the spool and clean them with an old toothbrush. A sparse application of light machine oil on all the moving parts of a reel except the drag surfaces is a good idea several times each season.
Lines need no maintenance besides keeping them out of the hot sun for extended periods. However, if you fish in areas with high salinity or profuse algae, it’s a good idea to clean your line with soap and water after every trip.
Waders don’t need any cleaning to prolong their life, but the soles of waders should be cleaned thoroughly with hot water and soap and a scrubbing brush whenever you move from one watershed to another. Then dry the soles and inspect them for any debris. Spores and eggs of invasive species like didymo algae, mud snail, whirling disease, and others not yet identified can become aquatic hitchhikers, and we all need to do our best to prevent their spread.
Never put flies away wet or they will rust and get matted out of shape, and the dyes used in some fly-tying materials may run and spoil the colors of other flies in your box. Leave your fly box open on a sunny table or on the windshield of your car—but not exposed to the wind or you might return to a nearly empty box!
Midwinter Daydreams
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How to keep your rod from breaking
MODERN GRAPHITE FLY RODS HAVE INCREDIBLE TENSILE strength, but the trend toward lighter rods has given us tools that don’t have the crush strength of older graphite or fiberglass rods. You can land a 150-pound tarpon with a rod that weighs a few ounces, but that same rod won’t survive even a glancing encounter with a ceiling fan or car door. To avoid breakage by fans and screen doors never put a fly rod together indoors. Never lean a rod against a car because the chances are good that it will either get slammed in a door or the wind will blow it over and someone will step on it. Always lean your rod up against a tree, rather than laying it flat on the ground, because those thin black tubes just disappear amongst the brush.
When transporting rods in a car or boat, resist the temptation to keep your rod strung up and banging around the deck of a boat or extending throughout the length of a compact car, bent against the windshield. We all do it, but you’re just asking for trouble. If you want to transport your rod still strung with a leader and fly, use a rod-and-reel case that protects the rod during transit.
When stringing up a rod before fishing, don’t pull the leader through the guides and then yank down on the leader to get the fly line out of the guides. Many rods are broken this way, and a better method is to pull the leader and some of the line straight out from the tip of the rod while the rod is placed on a safe, flat surface or held by another angler.
Many more rods are broken through carelessness when playing a fish, but one real danger area is when a fish is close to a boat, especially one that has sounded under the boat or at its side. Lifting straight up, with the rod tip in a near-vertical position, is a sure way to break a fly rod because the stress is concentrated at the fragile tip of the rod rather than using the more powerful butt. When a fish sounds near the boat, always try to play the fish at a sideways angle so you can use the lifting power of the boat. This may entail moving around the boat or asking the captain to back off a bit with the motor, but it will save you a broken rod.
Finally, be careful when using split shot or flies with heavily weighted eyes. Always try to cast a more open loop with these rigs and keep the weight away from yourself for safety reasons and from your rod for durability. A heavily weighted fly going well over a hundred miles per hour can fracture the graphite if it hits the thin walls of a light fly rod. Even a glancing blow from a weighted fly can weaken a rod, resulting in a fracture on the next long cast or big fish. When investigating the “I was just casting and the rod suddenly broke” scenarios, the Orvis rod repair department inevitably finds that the angler was either fishing a Clouser Minnow or a big glob of split shot.
Trying to get the fly line out of the rod by pulling straight down on it is a fast track to a broken rod.
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How to find leaks in your waders and how to patch them
YOUR WADERS WILL EVENTUALLY DEVELOP LEAKS. MOST leaks are easy to find and repair. The resulting patches give the waders character, and you’ll avoid being tagged as a rookie. Of course, the surest way to find leaks is to fill the waders with water and see where it leaks out, but not only is this a major project and a major pain, the weight of all that water inside a pair of waders can put additional stress on the seams.
The first thing I try is to run a strong flashlight inside the suspected area in a dark room. Leaks show up as bright specks of light, and it’s then easy to mark them with a marking pen. This works fine for wear spots and punctures, but seam leaks won’t show up. For seam leaks, you can try holding the waders underwater in a bathtub and constricting the open part of the waders with hand pressure so you compress air against the seam. You can also try blowing up the waders with a shop vacuum that has a reversing feature. I’ve often used the vacuum-cleaner method after brushing the waders with a combination of dishwashing soap and water, because the leaks will show up as bubbles emanating from the seam.
Once you find a leak, clean the area with rubbing alcohol and let it dry. The best material for patching waders is special glue called Aquaseal that works on nylon, rubber, or polyester fabrics. For small punctures, seam leaks, or wear spots you simply brush some on and let it dry overnight. For large tears, you might have to apply the Aquaseal first, then slap a piece of old discarded wader fabric (many waders come with a piece of material for patching) over the tear, and then coat the surface of the patch, allowing some overlap. I’ve found that repairs using Aquaseal will outlast the rest of the wader, and I’ve never found glue that works as well.
You can patch your waders on the inside or the outside. The inside is neater and the patch is less subject to abrasion. But patching on the outside makes you look cool.
In the Canyon
PART X
Advanced
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How to fish small dry flies
MOST FLY FISHERS REGARD FISHING SMALL DRY FLIES WITH the same enthusiasm as preparing income tax records. An enlightened minority relishes the opportunity because they know trout are less suspicious of artificial flies smaller than size 20, and since the fish have to eat a lot of the tiny stuff before getting full, there are more chances to fool them.
Don’t let the thought of light tippets scare you away. Modern nylon and fluorocarbon tippets in 6X and 7X diameters are very strong, and can easily handle trout of twenty inches if you play the fish with a light touch. Small flies are more difficult to thread, but tying one on is not a major project as long as you are prepared with a pair of 4X or 5X reading glasses and/or a tool for threading small flies, of which there are dozens on the market.
These tiny flies are perfectly capable of hooking and holding large trout.
Seeing a small fly in the comfort of your own hands is not the same as seeing one fifty feet way in dim light. What most anglers don’t realize is that even people who fish tiny flies all the time have just as much trouble as you do seeing a size 22 Griffith’s Gnat on the water. They compensate by estimating where the fly is on the water, and when a fish rises anywhere near where they suspect their fly is drifting, they gently tighten up on the line. This seldom spooks a rising fish, and it takes very little pressure to set the hook with a small dry.
You can also fish a tiny fly as a dropper behind a bigger fly to help track its progress. Tie on a size 14 Parachute Adams, then tie a twenty-inch piece of 6X tippet to the bend of the bigger hook and the tiny fly of your choice on the end of this dropper. Or you can add a very tiny strike indicator or a piece of strike putty to your tippet—there is no law stating that strike indicators may only be used with nymphs.
Hooking fish with tiny flies is no problem, as penetration of the jaw is easy and once the hook is set it’s very hard to dislodge it.You can take this on faith or you can stick a size 24 Blue Wing Olive into the tip of your thumb (similar to a trout jaw) and see how easy it is to dislodge.
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Taking better fish pictures
WANT BETTER-LOOKING FISH PICTURES? KEEP YOUR FISH in the water. The color and movement of the water add drama and maintain the color of a fish better, plus it’s better for catch-and-release fishing. And there is nothing more boring than a fish held at arms length out of the water in an unnatural pose, rather than half submerged in its environment. Whether it’s a tiny jewel of a brook trout sparkling above the streambed or a giant tarpon held alongside a boat, I guarantee your pictures will be more interesting to you and your friends.
