Sub-Surface Flies

[Lotech Joe 0]

I'm wondering what everyone's favorite sub-surface fly is for Crappie and Bluegill.

 

[ditz2 0]

Two different animals.......a smaller minnow type fly that will sink to the depths you fish in white and silver and maybe even a little pink for crappie. A lightly weighted nymph fly, soft hackle for sunfish. Any thing buggy should work from unweighted to heavy weighted to really get down. I like Blind Squirrels and many other kinds of fish will also eat them. You never know what you will catch.

[Blackwater Virgil 0]

For crappie, I like little streamers with a good dose of silver and/or flash material mixed with marabou. Add in some bead chain or other weighted eyes, and you've generally got a winner. I like white with a little red - often just red thread to tie in the head and/or bead chain or other eyes. They tend to like slower retrieves often, though when they're feeling frisky they'll take some faster moving stuff. You've just got to figure it out each day you go out.

 

For bream, I really like floating bugs and poppers and sliders. Sliders often work better than poppers in sheltered waters, but when they're not really hitting, the poppers can sometimes stimulate a hit when the sliders and rubber bugs aren't tempting enough. I think they often, if not usually, hit slow sinking "bug" and nymph immitations best. When it comes to shellcrackers, they mainly eat crustaceans and nymphs, and flies that imitate those do best on them, at least in my experience. Again, it varies from day to day what they want to be stimulated enough to strike, and it's a matter of figuring it out and trying stuff until you find the right combination that particular day on those particular fish. It's a whole lot of fun, though, and THAT is why we're fishing anyway, isn't it?

[FlaFly 0]

Haven't gotten to use my crappie streamers yet, but lots of guys said purple or black is good. I can't vouch for it, but I started a thread a couple of months back about this topic and got some good feedback... you might look that up. When I was a kid, I always caught crappie with minnows, so any minnow substitute should work.

 

For bluegills, you might try Bully's Spider.... everyone raves about that one. Whether you use additional weight, and how much, depends on how deep you want to fish and how fast you want it to sink. In Florida, deep means about 4 feet, so we can just rely on the weight of the hook. You can also try a wooly bugger and let it sink (again some people wrap the hook with lead to make it sink faster/deeper).