A case for fishing dry flies
A few days ago, the trout were rising to midges. I could go into the details of which river, water temperature, weather, and everything else that goes into a day of fly fishing, but for now it’s enough to just know trout were rising and I was there to catch them on a dry fly.
Over the past few years, I’ve found myself gravitating more toward fishing dry flies. It’s not that I don’t fish nymphs anymore, but I do fish them less and in more simple ways. I often just suspend a beadhead nymph from my dry fly and leave it at that.
I also like pounding the banks with a streamer when I’m floating a river, but in the summer I’m the first to switch to a grasshopper fly pattern, which is a dry fly, in the afternoon. Also, if trout are rising, I always ask the guy on the oars to pull up on a gravel bar or the bank so I can match a dry fly pattern to what’s hatching.
Like many fly fishers I started off fishing dry flies. At the time, we accepted that fly fishing meant dry fly fishing. Fishing a “floating fly” required you to develop all the basic fly fishing skills: casting, mending the fly line, matching the hatch, and slack line casts for drag-free drifts.
My mentors took me to Sawhill Ponds where we fished dry flies to bluegills because they were more forgiving when I made a clumsy beginner’s cast or disturbed the water in some other way. The plan was that I’d eventually graduate to catching trout on a dry fly. I did catch a trout on a dry fly, too, but not before I caught my first Colorado trout on a wet fly, which I found out later was part of an earlier generation’s idea of fly fishing. Currently fishing wet flies is experiencing a revival of interest in the Rocky Mountains.
What came next for me was nymph fishing and all the subsurface intricacies that go with it. I fished the South Platte River in those days and still consider it my home water today. Nymph fishing was on everybody’s radar by then and the South Platte, being a tailwater, provided clear water where you could spot and stalk trout feeding below the surface and target them with your nymph imitation. I spent a lot of time in Cheesman Canyon and the Deckers area and developed a high level of skill at catching trout on nymphs. That skill propelled me into a fishing guide career that lasted 20 years. Along the way, I was one of several outdoor writers who helped popularize new techniques for nymphing.
The older dry fly fishers said nymphing was nothing more than bait fishing. We accused them of being “dry fly purists” who thought the only legitimate way to catch a trout was to cast a floating fly upstream to a rising trout.
In the kind of full circle that often occurs when you passionately pursue anything for most of your life, I find myself wanting to go back to the simplicity of fishing a single dry fly. I know I’d catch more and larger trout if I fished nymphs or streamers, but catching lots of trout and larger trout isn’t as important to me as it used to be. I still like catching the occasional large fish, but I can do that on a dry fly.
Fishing a dry fly is as elemental as it gets. With luck you’re on the water when there’s a hatch and the trout are rising to take the emerging aquatic insects off the surface. If the trout aren’t rising you find yourself “reading the water” in search of features like the seams between faster and slower moving water. When you fish that seam with an attractor dry fly a trout may come out of nowhere and attack the fly. You see it all right there in front of you. You don’t need to “detect” the strike.
Now, consider when a trout does rise to a hatch of insects. It’s efficacy, poetry, and elegance. I fished a midge hatch once where I saw a trout come up in a backwater. It was a barely discernable rise where the trout came up softly, took the midge pupa, and then slid straight down below the surface again. The rise hardly marred the water at all! For what it’s worth, it was a large trout, too. I didn’t catch that trout, but I regret not applauding after its performance.
Fishing dry flies removes all the clutter from a day of fishing for me. I still like tying flies and carry a lot of fly boxes when I fish, but I’m working toward a day when I carry a single box of flies and my fly rod. Sure, there will be a few nymph patterns, some wet flies, and maybe a couple of streamers, but I envision the box to contain mostly dry flies. When I fish those dry flies, I may catch a few less trout, but I’ll catch them the way I want to catch them.
It’s that simple