Discovery or Rediscovery

[Rocco 0]

A recent article in one of the fly fishing mags by Matt Supinski, a knowledgeable guide in MI with many good articles on the salmon and steelhead fishing there behind him, discusses a fairly recent awakening to the fact that spring run Great Lakes steelhead actively feed on nymphs and even emergers during warm day hatches. He cites an earlier 1991 article by Dick Pobst, another very adept expert on local waters, to the same effect.

 

What struck me is that nymph fishing these waters has been going on since at least the 1960s when I first got interested in the sport. The Michigan Wiggle hex pattern -- a trim wool or chenille wool body palmered with furnace hackle, with a squirrel tail clump tied down full length over the top as a shellback and tail -- was in vogue at least as far back the fifties and probably caught as many steelhead overtime as any other single pattern -- including the ubiquitous eggs. Hare's ears were also widely used then. The older denizens of the Pere Marquette landed many steelies on small -- #8-10 -- winter stone flies patterns which were nothing more than a thin black wool body counter-wound with silver tinsel and a sparse black hen hackle at the eye. )

 

I do not want to imply that Mr. Supinski with all his experience either is unaware of the earlier uses of the nymph or was repackaging old wine in new bottles for no good reason. Editors of such publications have a formula for success -- one feature of which is a heavy dash of new discovery glitter to keep up interest in old timers and beguile the newbees to the sport. The writing game has always been rife with similar behavior -- witness, Kipling's "When Omer smote his boomin lyre".

 

Rocco

 

 

[Bryon Anderson 0]

Even after only 15 or so years of reading fly fishing publications, I have noticed that they regularly recycle out-of-fashion flies and techniques as "new discoveries". Witness the recent rebirth of short-line nymphing as "Czech Nymphing". When I first started fly fishing Lake Erie tribs in Ohio in 1997, the hot fly was the egg-sucking leech, which is just a woolly bugger with a ball of egg yarn for a head. That went out of fashion shortly after (although I'm sure they've been quietly used by many, if not most Great Lakes steelheaders ever since). Two years ago on the Pere Marquette, I was handed one by an angler in his 20's who clearly thought it was the Next Big Thing. Supinski is an interesting guy. For a while he had a bit of a checkered reputation here for doing things like adding scent to egg flies to catch steelhead. Perhaps he sees plain old nymphing for steelhead as a return to more "pure" methods.

[Piker20 0]

Plenty of summer Atlantic salmon are hooked in UK on nymphs, or folk trout fishing by accident but find someone deliberately nymphing for salmon is much rarer. I've tied a box of nymphs just for low water atlantics and this year hope to fish deliberately upstream nymphing.