Nat Greene Flyfishers    December 2008

Please join all of us at Nat Greene Fly Fisher's Annual Holiday Social from 7:00pm to 9:00pm on Tuesday December 9, 2008 at the Leonard Recreation Center, 6324 Ballinger Road, Greensboro.   Food and beverages will be provided. We will have a running loop of fishing pictures from club members highlighting the fish that they fooled into eating their mix of beads, glue, and feathers during 2008.  If you would like your photos to be included this year, please email your pictures to David Dow at addow@bellsouth.net.   All are welcome.

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Some Thoughts On Fishing A Streamer Fly

Over the years I have had the good fortune to live and fish in different places. I added different skills to my fly fishing repertoire in each location. In western Massachusetts I poured over geological survey maps in search of backcountry streams and beaver ponds. I learned to nymph from masters of the craft during my graduate work in central Pennsylvania. My father, who merely switched from worms to a nymph on the end of his leader, especially liked short line nymphing in which he literally felt the fly bounce along the bottom and struck to any interruption in the drift. I picked up curve casting from Doug Swisher. His understanding of how to control drag dramatically improved my success with a dry. I still enjoy the long drag-free drift of a dry fly interrupted by a spotted snout.

But in the beginning, I was a novice growing up in Connecticut slinging streamers. These were of the most basic sort, made of bucktail wings tied over a tinsel body. I fished a lot of bucktails because the materials were readily available and inexpensive. I also didn’t need to know what I was doing. Some fool fish, what A.J. McClane used to call ‘the village idiot,’ would impale itself on the fly. My technique was as basic as it gets: cast across stream, let the fly swing and retrieve it in short pulls and pauses. Take a few steps downstream and repeat.

Over time I switched to dries and nymphs. Baitfish imitations resided in a seldom used page in my flybook. Then the Woolly Bugger hit the fan and everyone went nuts over it. Previous streamers had to be actively manipulated by the angler. I didn’t understand what the Bugger was supposed to represent except that whatever it was, it was alive. Between the pulsating body hackle and the delicate marabou tail fibers, the thing looked animated just resting on the bottom. In fact, one of the best ways I found to fish it was dead drifting it through a likely lie. The fish went crazy over the thing. So like everyone else, I stashed a few buggers in my vest. I found a black bugger was an ace-in-the-hole when the stream turned brown after a rain.

A totally new style of fly appeared in the late 1980’s from the creative mind of a former meat cutter in Middletown, PA. This place is infamously known as home of Three Mile Island. I guess the radiation got around because a fly with bucktail above and below the hook shank, no body and with what looked like two lead shot soldered together was a mutant for sure. And there was a bit of synthetic (ugh!) flashy stuff tied in there as well. What the heck was this thing?

This ‘thing’ turned out to be the ‘Clouser Deep Minnow,’ ‘Clouser minnow’ or just plain‘Clouser’ for short. The derision initially hurled at this fly and its creator should have been a red flag. There was so much criticism I should have realized (1) the ego of conventional wisdom about fly design was sorely bruised and (2) the subconscious jealousy of not having thought of it first was epidemic. At least Bob Clouser published how to tie and fish the fly. It wasn’t as though he was hiding it or patented it, as the creator of the McMurray Ant had done. I have caught trout, bass, stripers, American and hickory shad, false albacore, bluefish and four species of Pacific salmon on various versions of the Clouser. I regard it as one fly not to leave home without.

After years of fishing, observation and discussion, I have concluded the secret to getting strikes on a streamer fly is the action of the retrieve. I know this comes as a complete surprise to you but let me elaborate. I have developed four basic approaches to fishing a streamer, and all mimic the behavior of an unlucky bait fish. Bear in mind that a healthy prey item will do whatever it can to avoid being eaten whereas an injured bait fish cannot.

To visualize the first scenario, picture a small school of bait fish along the bank of a lake or river. Suddenly, silver-sided bait is flying everywhere to escape the sudden arrival of a hungry predator. Almost everyone has seen this happen in saltwater when bluefish or false albacore attack a bait ball. Stuff starts flying everywhere and it seems you could catch a fish on the kitchen sink if you could get it into the melee fast enough. I have seen this activity many times against the shores of the James and Shenandoah Rivers when a smallmouth crashes into a school of minnows in the shallows. In all of these instances, the real bait is swimming as fast as it can to get the H--- out of there. So a slow to mildly paced retrieve will not imitate what the real menu items are doing. Strip fast and make your fly act panicked. Anthony Hipps calls this rapid retrieve “a panic strip.”

On the other hand, when a baitfish is injured it may swim in circles, sink slowly or otherwise not swim in a normal fashion. So making your fly act injured is the basis of my second approach. The dead and injured are often the preferred targets of larger fish that have learned to minimize expenditure of energy when feeding. Bait acting out of the ordinary doesn’t last long. This, I believe, is the forte of the Clouser minnow. When stripped, the fly acts like any other, but pause between strips and the fly nosedives like something is seriously wrong with it. I think the “what’s wrong this picture” aspect of the Clouser is the key to its success. It triggers some kind of reaction in the predator’s mind. I vary the length and speed of the strip until I find what works, and sometimes considerable effort is put into finding the right combination. If you fish with a partner you can arrive at the winning combination faster if each of you uses a different retrieve until someone hits on what works.

Another fly with a built-in ‘injured’ action is Shenk’s white minnow. This is one of my favorite smallmouth flies. This fly has a white marabou tail and a body of rabbit fur spun in a dubbing loop and clipped to a minnow shape. The fur makes for a buoyant body so you have to wrap lead wire underneath to make it sink. Shenk’s recipe makes for a fly that can be darted, allowed to sink and stripped with a tail that wags in the predator’s face. The only shortcoming is that due to its natural buoyancy, it tends to settle slowly when not under tension. If I could make it dive (somewhat slower than a Clouser), I might be on to something. I think I can improve its action by adding a small amount of weight towards the front of the fly. This has become more of a challenging balancing act than I thought because it seems I have to account for the weight of the hook as well. I am looking for just enough weight to make it dive without overwhelming the action of the rest of the fly. Anyway, if I’m successful the fly will dive seductively at the conclusion of each strip. If you work out a successful tying method, let me know.

A third consideration is the size of the fly. Here are two contradictory pieces of advice: match the size of the prevelant baitfish or do whatever you want. I have found instances where size absolutely mattered like one afternoon on Lake Tillery. Anthony Hipps and I were literally surrounded by schools of largemouth and white bass chewing on clouds of minnows and we couldn’t buy a bass. They chased bait so close to the boat you could see them turn in pursuit of their prey. Quite by accident, I snagged a minnow with my artificial only to find our flies were too big. I switched to the smallest Zonker in my box and soon connected to a five pound largemouth. On the other extreme, fish might eat the biggest thing they could swallow. One day I had finished fishing a stream in central Pennsylvania and was back at the car putting away my gear when I was distracted by white flashes in the water. I found a fourteen inch brown with a ten inch sucker stuck headfirst in its mouth. The brown was rolling over and over trying to dislodge the sucker, whose white belly produced the odd flashes. It took almost half an hour but he finally expelled the sucker. I conclude from this that you can fish a really big fly and still find a willing taker. So fly selection might come down to whatever feels right on a given day.

I have found there are pyschological aspects to this sport I don’t experience in other aspects of fly fishing. I block everything else out while following the drift of a nymph and sometimes focus very hard fishing a dry fly. But fishing a streamer can find me talking to the fish, imploring him to ‘take it, take it.’ Anyone who has shared my boat on the Roanoke can testify to this. I feel psychologically in touch with the fly, bracing myself for the hit. In my mind’s eye I can see the fly swimming and diving throughout the retrieve. I can feel it pulsating against the current. This may admittedly be regarded as odd behavior but I feel, however much I am deluding myself, that I can induce the fish to whack the fly.

The final approach I use to fish a streamer is a good example of ‘psychological’ fishing. Sometimes I encounter a lie like an undercut bank or log jam that practically screams a big one lives there. In these situations I try to make the fly act injured and keep it in the strike zone as long as possible. I position myself to make the cast as well as keep the fly in the target area. Fishing from upstream and retrieving the fly followed by releasing some slack is a great way to keep the fraud in the fish’s face. I work the fly as long as possible in the hope of antagonizing the fish into striking. I have read of persons taking up to ten minutes to fish out a cast. This is great medicine if you can pull it off. This becomes a test of wills between me and the fish. The longer I can hold out, the better the method works.

I hope my experiences fishing a streamer fly can be of benefit to you. I realize I have only touched on some of the basics but these methods are derived from time on the water and been of immense benefit to me. Baitfish imitations lend an excitement to fly fishing unmatched by dry flies or nymphs. Fish suck in a dry or nymph but try to kill a streamer. There’s nothing subtle about it. And while most fish eat insects, larger critters want a piece of meat. So if you are after a big fish, give him a big fly. And when you want to cover a lot of water, a big fly cast in a systematic fashion is an efficient way to find any
fish willing to strike. As for me, it’s the only part of fly fishing that I get to talk to the fish. The discussions are admittedly basic but they don’t talk back and I always get the last word in. Many of us spend nearly all of our time astream fishing a nymphs or dry flies and neglect the sport offered by streamers. They can expand your skill set and maybe net you a bigger fish than you could imagine. So pack a few streamers and remember to use them. They just might give you a pleasant surprise.

Jim Brady

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Bob Clouser has been booked as the special guest speaker at Nat Greene Flyfisher's Spring Banquet and Seminar on Saturday, March 7, 2009 at the Heritage Hill Banquet Facility on N. Church Street (directions).  Our banquet is a family friendly event which includes dinner, cash bar, silent auctions, door prizes, and raffle items for the fly fisher and non-fisher alike.  The technical seminar will be held from 9:00 am to 2:00 pm.  The evening banquet will be held from 6:00 pm to 10:30 pm and will feature a presentation geared towards a general audience including non-fishing spouses and young fly fishers.   This years banquet will be catered by Brady Lutz with The Right Touch Catering .

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