goofnoff

After looking at the various ways to rig nymphs I think I'll try the Kelly Galloup drop shot set up which you can see on U-Tube. Of course what will happen is that I'll see a trout rise and lose all interest in nymphs immediately. Sixty years of habit is hard to break.

you still cast a fly line when making a 30' cast or longer when using the mono rig. So does it only become fly fishing when cast a fly line? Tenkara is fix line fly fishing using the same type of rig as the mono rig. What makes that fly fishing and not the mono rig? I agree if you're using a 30 ft leader and actually using the weight of the fly line to cast you are fly fishing, and probably a much better caster then I am, however if your spool is loaded with heavy wet mono and you are over head casting using a weight to carry the fly and line like you would with a spinning rig is it really fly fishing? We've turned nymphs into jigs. I've done a lot of jigging for smallies and walleyes, but not trout. I'e always thought that IN GENERAL the jig is the best rig for catching fish. Tying flies on jig heads is nothing new. But I see jigs for trout have become all the rage. I'm not sure whether you use a fly rod or soinnig rod for delivery makes much difference. There are a lot of people who think streamers are a lure not a fly.

I read somewhere that mom & pop fly shops had the highest failure rate of any small business. Archery shops had to run a close second. Tough to compete with the mail order guys................. Your experience at Hardy was interesting. For snooty stores in the US, Thomas and Thomas in Mass. had to be the worst I ever saw. You needed an appointment and agree to spend a certain amount to get in.

If you're going to start insulting people, then this thread will need to be closed. What you call " ... naive and complacent ... " isn't. We just don't want to talk about it here. This is a place of respite from the battles of daily life. Please. Exactly Jalberts I',m as political as they get and I am disgusted by the Administration's war on the environment. But if we start political discussions in this forum that is all it will be I was once deeply involved through TU in the fight to stop a limestone quarry being dug on Penn's Creek. But let's not it in this forum.

What? I don't get this comment at all. How does maintaining specialized fishing methods help degrade the environment? A kid casting a bubble and fly with spinning gear is spin fishing, not fly fishing. I hope he catches some fish, but it's not fly fishing. How does that attitude contribute to pollution or environmental destruction? It's not that any of us denigrate other forms of fishing ... just quit trying to merge them with fly fishing. Or, as Poopdeck put it, "I can't understand the need for shoehorning one method into another method ... " When TU started it was about preserving trout habitat for all trout fisherman, bait,spin, whatever. They drove the bait and spin fishermen out of TU. The poster was making the point that the more trout fisherman we have loving the rivers the more political pressure there will be to preserve the water. Without the water none of us will have any fishing except you rich guys who can afford Patagonia and New Zealand or private Western water. When I was a kid there were forty name trout streams in Onondaga County that supported trout populations. You get that when you live in a place where you get over 120 inches of snow in the winter and plenty of rain the rest of the year. Most of that is gone now to urban sprawl and over intensive agriculture. Sediment is hell on trout streams. Most serious fly fisherman in now make the long drive to the Catskills to fish. I think we should save further political discussions for another board. Seriously.

If there is anything I don't think fly fishermen are infected by it's group think. However, when you try a number of methods against each other, under relatively controlled conditions, and one method continuously produces more and bigger fish, you'll get some interest. The key is are you having fun. I'll bet a lot of guys here experiment with new patterns even though they know they could catch a lot of trout with their old standbys.

Most of my trout fishing experience has been dry fly fishing. I only use really long leaders in places like the Beaverkill where long casts over multiple currents are the rule. I think overly light tippets are to often used. For a lot of fishing I use 6' leaders. For bass poppers I use three to three and a half feet of stiff level mono. The more I research this, the more I think I like the Galloup drop shot rig. One place I can see for long mono.

I have always enjoyed reading about the history of fly fishing. I ran across this documentary on the House of Hardy. It's great for history buffs. They showed an auction where a vintage Hardy salmon reel goes for 13500 pounds.

That's how I see it. At one time the only man made thing on a fly was the hook. It all had to be natural materials or it was a lure. Within the fish and game laws we set our own parameters.

I used the combination of Cortland Dry-R-Fly and Gink for years and they worked very well. Then I tried Loon desiccant and liked it better than the Cortland. Currently, I use Orvis Shake-n-Float. Lot of things recommended here I never thought of. I'm going to try some of them.

Quarter ounce would be a bit heavy. A sixteenth ounce and down is the usual prescription.

Do you fish nymphs or streamers? If So how do you present them? Several people have expressed the same opinion.

Thanks for the info SC. Great article. The idea of short line fishing isn't new. I can remember reading an article years ago where the writer said he couldn't imagine a worse torture than fishing with your arm over your head all day. The bait fisherman of my youth fished worms and minnows with fly rods. The game was always figuring out how to work a pool without spooking the fish. I learned early on that the only advantage of bait over flies is trout will hold onto bait. I think with nymphs presentation is 95% of the game. In 1967,Joe Brooks did a USO presentation at Rhein Main AFB in Frankfurt. One of my buddies got a couple of his German friends to give us a ride to the show. I asked Brooks how he presented nymphs. Brooks said he rarely fished nymphs and then he fished them like wet flies, or with the Skues method.

Before fist fights start over this thread I've got to tell you a story. I knew a guy in Syracuse, which is where I'm from, who was part owner of a fly shop, Now this guy had a degree in food science from Cornell. His first job out of college was going around the wineries in the Finger Lakes testing the wines. He gave that up to be a trout bum. His girlfriend was taking a PhD at Cornell in ichthyology. Her paper was on tumors in brown bullheads. She could not ever figure out why there was any difference in fishing for trout and bullheads. Things didn't work out for them. Point being I never knock the way another man fishes or what he fishes for as long as it isn't environmentally damaging and within the rules. Tell you another story. Back in the early 70's a guy wrote an article for Sports Afield about how to catch big trout. In the story he revealed every bait fishing technique of which I was aware and I knew most of them. His own favorite method was to go out at the crack of dawn with a Countdown Rapala. He'd find a spot where the the stream narrowed creating a heavy current. He'd fish where the current broke into a pool. He'd throw the Rapala straight upstream and crank it down a little faster than the current would push it. Said it was murder on big trout. He mentioned it was his favorite way to fish the Battenkill. A couple of years later I was fishing the Battenkill for the first time in my life when here comes a couple of guys in a canoe. When they got opposite me they asked if I wanted some Rapalas. They'd been picking them off trees and they didn't fish. Later I heard the locals called it the Rapala Hatch. The writer of that story became the editor of Fly Fisherman magazine. The reason I bring this up is a few years later Fly Fisherman had an article on streamer fishing. The author said the deadliest way to fish a streamer, and his favorite streamer was a Wooly Bugger, was to throw the Bugger straight upstream, stick the rod tip into the bottom and strip straight own stream. I've never tried it but I might with a mono rig. Leonard Wright wrote Fishing the Dry Fly as a Living Insect". He developed his "sudden inch" technique because he hated nymph fishing. The sudden inchwould raise trout when no hatch was on. His problem with nymph fishing was the concentration required to be good at upstream nymphing. There is a lot of ways to catch a trout. Because one or the other is not to your taste, it doesn't make it wrong. Tight lines

I must have missed something. Who is trolling?