Dry fly is perhaps the most enjoyable method of catching trout and grayling on a stream. It can also be highly effective. There is an often cited scientific fact that trout only take about 10% of their food on the surface and 90% beneath the surface. However this is a generalisation. At certain times most of the fish will be feeding on the surface. At other times fish are opportunists and will take a dry fly anyway. Small acidic moorland streams may be devoid of aquatic insects but support populations of small trout by surface feeding on terrestrials. A good fly fisher should never ignore dry fly as a method based on an often misused implication that more fish will be feeding on nymphs. Dry fly is extremely versatile and can be fished all over the river pool from the fast riffles at the head in the flats and slack bellies to the tails. It is a technique still widely used in competition fly fishing and I personally used it to become the English Rivers Champion in 1999.
The beauty of fishing dry fly lies in its apparent simplicity. However a good dry fly fisher really needs a good understanding of the surface feeding behaviour of trout.
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The book I recommend for those interested in learning more is Vincent Marinaro's "In the Ring of the Rise". This book revolutionised my fly fishing approach by vastly increasing my knowledge of how trout saw flies and more importantly how they fed on them. I witnessed first hand Marinaro's perfect descriptions of compound rises. Where the trout drifts under the fly carefully inspecting it. This simple website is not capable of distilling Marinaro's superb observations but here is an in a "nutshell" attempt. |
The rise form of a fish indicates where a trout engulfed a floating fly
but not where he lies in the stream. In deeper faster water that could
be several yards ahead of the rise form. A good dry fly fisher will
have a good intuition of where a trout lies in relation to its rise
form. It will always to some degree be upstream of the rise form.
Casting flies directly at rise forms often results in failure simply
because the fish didn't even see the dry fly. Not all trout rises are
the same. A simple rise is where a trout lifts off the bottom and
surfaces directly under the fly. But where trout are fished for on a
regular basis compound or complex rises are common. In this case the
trout gives the perfect impression of possessing intelligence. He rises
to the fly but stops and hovers perfectly beneath it apparently
inspecting it in detail. He may then either take the fly or refuse it.
During this maneuver the trout may travel several yards underneath the
fly and actually swivel and swim downstream (Grayling also follow flies
downstream).
But before we start preparing the Diploma list for
educated stream trout this behaviour can be explained by simple predator
avoidance. The trout is aware that some of the flies are out to get
him. He is much more likely looking for a positive trigger in the fly
(something that confirms it is alive) rather than deliberately avoiding
spectacular and realistic fly patterns. Marinaro knew this very well.
His anecdote on the trout of the back eddy is outstanding. He confronts
an old foe on a daily basis a trout living in a difficult lie in the
stream rising steadily throughout the day eating humble houseflies.
Everyday Marinaro casts to this uncatchable wise old fish. Everyday he
tips his cap in reverence to the wise trout and goes in search of his
more gullible cousins. Then one day inexplicably the trout engulfed
Marinaro's house fly imitation out of the blue. In itself that might be
an interesting but unremarkable story. What makes it a revelation was
Marinaro's insight and observation into why the trout took the
fly on that occasion after ignoring it countless times. He examined the
fly and noticed the dressing had come undone and 2 strands of feather
fibre were lose and blowing
against each other in the wind. It was a
Eureka moment. The artificial fly was inadvertently imitating the
continuous movements of the forelegs on the natural flies. That
movement of the flies legs was the trigger for this trout.
The
notion that trout may posses analytical intelligence can be dismissed
by Marinaro's own observations. On a few occasions a trout rises to a
fly and refuses it. Then after refusing the dry fly the trout appears
to change his mind and go back for it. Oddly and I have observed this
many times even if the fly is skating wildly and acting in a very
unnatural manner the trout will attempt to engulf the fly and will often
leave the water to do so. A trout that only seconds earlier was
examining a dead drift dry fly like Sherlock Holmes is leaping on a fly
skating wildly upstream?
This is purely behavioural and
represents the yin and yang of the trout in terms of predator or prey.
If we scare or spook a trout, the game is over, he will not take the
fly. He thinks himself the prey and avoids the predator first and
foremost. Trout that get eaten don't feed. Even if his prey senses are
aroused he appears to behave very cautiously and examines the fly. He
thinks better of it and refuses it. Then something clicks in the trouts
mind. His predatory senses become dominant, he sweeps round and makes a
beeline for the fly. Even though the fly is now behaving like no
natural insect he leaps on it.
As well as these revealing
insights into surface feeding behaviour of trout Marinaro looked at the
world from the trouts perspective. He deduced that the first thing the
trout saw of a mayfly was the tip of its wing (due to refraction of
light at the water surface). I took this to heart and tied a high CDC
mayfly pattern that to this day remains one of my "first on" flies on
the stream. With this in mind we will examine modern dry fly variations.