THE LATEST NEWS and advice on fly fishing, fly fishing gear, fly fishing trips, and fly fishing books and media.Fishing Flies: Eyes on the Drys
One of the best bits of advice given to me as I was learning to fly fish for trout came in the form of a question: "Why don't you use a fly you can see?" Mind you, this was on what was known as a "technical" stream, where the fish were feeding on a specific (dark) insect. It certainly didn't occur to me that there was more to hooking these fish than presenting them with their food du jour. That much, I thought, I knew. But the casts were long, the wading deep, and I wasn't really able to see my tiny fly at all -- I just thought I knew where it was.
Turns out I didn't. Tying on a pattern with a small white post showed me that the fly was taking on drag much earlier than I had imagined. The change was made, the fish began biting, and I had absorbed an important lesson in dry fly selection.
This week on MidCurrent Rick Kustich writes about Hi-Viz patterns and why they work in "Eyes on the Drys." As Kustich, author of Fly Fishing for Great Lakes Steelhead and other books notes, "The challenge is to produce flies you can see from a distance, but without compromising their realistic appearance."
