fishing soft hackles

[djmyers 0]

When you are fishing soft hackles, how do you decide colors/patterns? Do they work any time of year, or do they need to coincide with the current hatch?

[rockworm 0]

Soft hackles are excellent representations of emerging caddisflies. If you know what caddis are emerging you can easily find a soft hackle wet to match its size and colouration. That being said, they also make great searching flies. If there is no obvious hatch on I will usually cast a Stewart Spider upstream and let it dead-drift past me.

[Sagittarius62 0]

While the masters of the soft hackle, were and are, often targeting a specific insect with their imitations, I find that they are very effective when nothing in particular is happening. a small variety of colors, and sizes are usually sufficient to raise a good number of fish.An Altoids tin with a variety of silk and fur bodied flies is most often all I carry, and all I need. We are talking here about nutrient poor, freestone streams for the most part here. Other types of trout water are quite different I'm sure.

[Old Hat 0]

Soft hackles play on a trout's trigger response and less on imitation of an individual insect. They are simple patterns that are tied for specific hatches or as attractors. The idea is that the fish doesn't really investigate the fly but instead strikes the fly due to environmental and physical cues. Soft hackles make use of color, size, and movement...arguably the most important triggers. The soft hackle moves readily in the water and the movement can be manipulated by how the fly is fished to mimic what is going on during a specific hatch. Is it a cripple in the waters' film, is it an emerger, is it an insect diving to lay eggs, is it a fry darting about in the edge shallows? They are generalized patterns where one pattern can become many different food sources based on how it is presented to the fish. Many swing soft hackles, but there an abundance of techniques that one can use to present soft hackles. The Stewart spiders and your basic partridge and thread varieties can an often were fished very much like dry flies. They are very light patterns and with a light landing will float for quite some time on the water's surface. A little tug and they dip under. I've skipped Stewart spiders like an egg laying caddis with quite a bit of luck. Add a thorax of fur and now you have a great emerger pattern that will ride just under the surface or a cripple struggling to escape a shell. Add a fur body and now you have a nymph/emerger that rides a little deeper, with a little ostrich or peacock in the front and now it's a caddis emerger fish it deeper and it a free living caddis larvae.

 

There is research I read years ago while in school that noted that at the emergent stage of leaving the shuck, aquatic insects have the highest amount of digestable nutrition available to feeding trout. This happens in the water layer where most of your soft hackles are fished. Whether fish are genetically attune to this or not, I have no idea, but in terms of natural selection feeding on emergers seems to make sense nutritionally, energetically and for protective reasons for fish.

 

There is always something going on in the water in terms of insect activity, whether we can see it or not, and soft hackles are great for searching out what is happening.

 

The great thing about soft hackles is you don't have to have a ton of them and spend some time fishing with them and figuring out how to present them and they will make you a better more observant fisher. Not much to the flies but a lot in the techniques of fishing them.

 

Leisenring and Hidy had some great ideas as to trout triggers, insect appearance and how to tie to acheive that appearance that they describe in The Art of Tying the Wet Fly and Fishing the Flymph that....well....one could write a book on.

[Soft-hackle 0]

Wingless Wet Fly Forum

 

We've been having some problems, but the forum is up and running. It has one of the best collection of tiers and fishermen of these flies around. Come over and sign up, you won't be disappointed. If you have any problems, let me know.

 

Mark

[twohearted 0]

There is research I read years ago while in school that noted that at the emergent stage of leaving the shuck, aquatic insects have the highest amount of digestable nutrition available to feeding trout. This happens in the water layer where most of your soft hackles are fished. Whether fish are genetically attune to this or not, I have no idea,

 

Jees! Calorie counting trout. No wonder I can't catch'em.

 

My guess is energy budget. Easy for the fish to catch=less energy used.

 

Seroiously Hat. Well put. Easy to tie, fun to fish (many ways), and almost hard to not catch fish with them. Not to mention you could tie a metric ton of them in an hour of every color size and shape imaginable.

[Slate_Drake_9 0]

I love to fish them because you can't go wrong with presentation.

 

They were the first wooly bugger.

[Whiskey Creek 0]

When you are fishing soft hackles, how do you decide colors/patterns? Do they work any time of year, or do they need to coincide with the current hatch?

 

Hi,

 

I've been keeping it real simple with soft-hackles, fish mainly peacock body and partridge or starling hackle depending on hook size. Besides peacock, pheasant tail.

 

Good luck,

 

John

[Trumpy 0]

When you are fishing soft hackles, how do you decide colors/patterns? Do they work any time of year, or do they need to coincide with the current hatch?

 

DJMeyers,

 

John has it right, keep it simple.

3 Colors in two sizes:

 

1. Olive green body/Partridge hackle

2. Orange floss body/Brown hen hackle

3. See the two above

 

Very effective attractor flies, fish them any way at all, they are dynamite!

 

I've found a pinch of dark fur tied in as thorax seems to increase the appeal.

HTH Dave