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Dark Art or mere Floatfishing? The Americans have turned the traditional wet fly fishing of the North and the West and the upstream work of Skues and Sawyer into the latter.
Classic Tuesday Tip: How to Detect Strikes When Nymph Fishing | Orvis News
Now, I have used strike indicators. I have a large, multi-partitioned plastic box full of them - home-turned and painted styrene and balsa, pinches or great bunches of hydrophobic siliconized polypropylene yarn, plus shop-boughts etc etc - but don't much like them: "I might as well be trotting, which I can do on any old river close to home...".
But a strike-indicator did once catch me a monster, though.
I was fishing a size-8 LS, sandy-coloured Stonefly nymph for sea-trout in Clarkson Country, Tierra del Fuego, where the gales often make the "twitch of the end of your line" indication of a take impossible.
I had a bright-yellow yarn indicator on my leader about 4 feet up from my heavily weighted home-tied fly; I had had a fish of seven pounds a bit earlier from one pool, then moved upstream to the best pool on the 18-mile-long fishery, Humphreys Pool.
So I made my upstream cast into the almost daily downstream gale and let the ensemble drift down towards me, then come level, then trickle downstream with me feeding fly line to it by sharply raising the rod tip a few inches so that that the several yards of line I had stripped off the reel and lying in the shallows at my feet got gradually fed into the river, so avoiding fish-scaring "drag".
Then up came a huge head in the middle of the pool and ate my strike indicator.
Hmm.
A bankside tackle re-jig followed.
I re-tied the strike indicator on a leader dropper and put a little size-12 Salmon Double in the middle of its polypropylene Afro.
Out the tackle went.
Rise to the yarn indicator, lift from me, fish on.
17-pound fresh-run hen.
"That's better ... one on the dry fly...".
Many more followed.
Classic Tuesday Tip: How to Detect Strikes When Nymph Fishing | Orvis News
Now, I have used strike indicators. I have a large, multi-partitioned plastic box full of them - home-turned and painted styrene and balsa, pinches or great bunches of hydrophobic siliconized polypropylene yarn, plus shop-boughts etc etc - but don't much like them: "I might as well be trotting, which I can do on any old river close to home...".
But a strike-indicator did once catch me a monster, though.
I was fishing a size-8 LS, sandy-coloured Stonefly nymph for sea-trout in Clarkson Country, Tierra del Fuego, where the gales often make the "twitch of the end of your line" indication of a take impossible.
I had a bright-yellow yarn indicator on my leader about 4 feet up from my heavily weighted home-tied fly; I had had a fish of seven pounds a bit earlier from one pool, then moved upstream to the best pool on the 18-mile-long fishery, Humphreys Pool.
So I made my upstream cast into the almost daily downstream gale and let the ensemble drift down towards me, then come level, then trickle downstream with me feeding fly line to it by sharply raising the rod tip a few inches so that that the several yards of line I had stripped off the reel and lying in the shallows at my feet got gradually fed into the river, so avoiding fish-scaring "drag".
Then up came a huge head in the middle of the pool and ate my strike indicator.
Hmm.
A bankside tackle re-jig followed.
I re-tied the strike indicator on a leader dropper and put a little size-12 Salmon Double in the middle of its polypropylene Afro.
Out the tackle went.
Rise to the yarn indicator, lift from me, fish on.
17-pound fresh-run hen.
"That's better ... one on the dry fly...".
Many more followed.
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