FLYMPH FORUM

Hello Everyone- It's been a few months since I last posted here but have had a wonderful summer fishing the streams of northeastern Iowa. I've come across a sort of issue, however. After finding some confidence in spiders at my nearest stream which is often no more than 3-4ft deep. Lots of riffles and quick runs- perfect for spiders. The last few times out, however, I've gone to a more elaborate stream with deeper riffles and pools- perfect for weighted nymphs. Problem is is that I've lost my confidence in spiders at that depth. I've tied some spiders up with beads just distal to the hackle but feel like this is a something Nemes would not agree with. How do y'all handle deeper waters? Is there a certain depth that you typically don't go below when targeting trout with sub-surface spiders? Looking forward to more thoughtful discussion.

Personally, I only fish the depths between bottom bouncing and the surface.
I love these questions, for every answer you get- you get another idea! All of them worthy of consideration and it is how we learn from each other.

Firstly- loosing confidence. Why? What aspect of this new water is putting you off? Is it clear enough to see the trout feeding at lower levels, or are you guessing they are down there because nothing is breaking the surface?
New water like this causes me problems if I cannot figure out (see) where the trout are sitting, or where in the water they are in regard to level. You have to study the run/pool and decide where best to cast your flies, then explore depth variations.

To "get down" quickly there are a few ways you can add weight to your patterns. Heavier hook wire gauges, lead under-wraps, beads (as you have tried), wire bodies. Or (if it is legal to do so) you can tandem your soft hackle spider tied off the bend of a heavy bead head nymph pattern, ah-la NZ style. Tie the heavy bead head on the end of your tippet as per a single fly rig, then knot a short section (6-18") of tippet to the bend of that fly, then tie your spider to the end of this extra tippet.
Gets the spider down quickly and your bead head not only is a working fly to get you to depth, it is also a second chance fly that will let you know if they are more interested in the nymph pattern rather than the spider.
Using a bead head with a bit of flash in it can act as an attractor to your spider. The "flash" of the nymph gives a visual trigger that causes the trout to see your spider trailing along behind it.

Try a more upstream casting approach. Casting upstream rather than across and down allows the fly/flies to sink to the required depth before they swing and lift. Use flurocarbon leaders (or at least fluro tippets), they sink better than mono.

Then there is always good old split shot, bit truer to Nemes style, but still shunned by some. Split shot is good in the respect it can easily be added/taken away from the cast, moved to different positions on the leader, less prone to snagging than a working fly- but some folk get hung up on using lead in waterways. Then you can look at tungsten putty, which can be used in much the same way as split shot.

Do not give up on spiders as such, they work from the bottom to the top of the water column- just try a few new ideas and approaches as to how you use them and the confidence should return.

Thank you. My interest in soft hackles is not superficial. I'll get back to them, likely NZ-style as you mentioned. I've just been having great luck with beadhead nymphs.

Nothing wrong with using bead head nymphs if they are working- better than going home skunked!
Sometimes it is a "horses for courses" thing and one style of fly will work better than others at any given time, but..... I will add another part to the equation.
I have found over here, that brown trout in particular can be very subtle in their takes on the unweighted soft hackle and if you miss that take, they will spit it out quick as look at you, deciding very quickly what is food and what isn't.
I find in deeper, wider and faster water often I cannot wade as far as I would like and have to make a longer cast to get the flies where I want them. Often this leads to line being on the surface of faster water between myself and where the flies are- in essence, I loose touch with my fly/flies. Mends and such can lead to slack in the system and often I wonder if I miss these subtle strikes as they do not transmit back to me.
Depending on turbulence and velocity of the water, your leader can be doing all kind of "dances" under the water and not laying true to the fly line with an unweighted fly- again lending itself to missed takes.
A bead head nymph tends to keep the leader straighter and "feed" more information back through the line (in my hands anyhow), but I also feel a surface indicator helps. With a floating yarn indicator- if it stops, ducks, heads upstream or deviates in any way- I lift. Sure I strike a lot of nothings- but I also hook a few I did not feel through the line.
Not sure which type of trout you are targeting or how your local trout behave compared to mine, but a big brown feeding near the bottom does not move far off station here to catch a nymph over here (I have often sat and watched them from a high bank while they are feeding deep in clear water) and the takes are subtle- like someone standing behind you and just touching your shirt sleeve type of subtle!
One of the main reasons I still like fibreglass rods for wet fly fishing, I can feel those wee touches better with glass than I can with most graphite.

I like the NZ style, but then I am bias! NZ style with a bead head PT and a Pogo Nymph soft hackle is the set-up I use most of here.

This forum is probably last place on Earth to write this, but... who cares what Nemes would say?!?

...and another one - soft hackles/spiders/flymphs are so simple, proven, effective and fine sort of flies, that soft hackles/spiders/flymphs really don't need cult to be made out of them. That raise the question - who really need that cult and why?

Soft hackles/spiders/flymphs generally don't reach depths easy or quickly. If fish isn't in reachable depth or doesn't rise enough to take soft hackles/spiders/flymphs, than go deeper with nymph or split shot.

This kind of dilemma is not strange to fly fishing community - there are dry fly purists, there are some thoughts that indicator is a bobber and those who use it is some kind of lower race... To me, all this artificial dilemma look just futile. To me, there is true question - are catch with dry flies of less importance or satisfaction than catch with flymph (or nymph)?

Two centuries ago, when there were a lot more fish in streams and rivers, maybe was easier to fish only with soft hackles/spiders/flymphs and not to use any other sort of flies. It is enough to read comment, mentioned in the story of Greenwell's Glory origin - 15 pounds of trout in bag and some more fish in Mr.Greenwell's pocket... or just take a look at Mr.Leinsenring:


(Almost) Nobody practiced catch and release because nobody thought that there was need to do so. Nowdays, condition is changed and one could modify fishing methods... or fish just with soft hackles/spiders/flymphs and enjoy, regardless...

Until quite recently, fly fishing was pretty much a near surface game. With the tackle available before the mid 20 century it was too just hard to fish at real depth. Certainly, anglers did try different methods to get their flies to deeper levels and evidence that mentions these can be found in the early literature. In his 1865 "American Angler's Book" Thaddeus Norris gently chides a fellow angler for asking if he should add a couple split shot to his leader, and in 1932 Courteny Williams discusses flies with glass or metal bead heads. In most cases though, when they had to fish really deep, the old timers fished bait! The object was to catch fish and that's what they did! Both Stewart and Edmonds & Lee, as well as most other 19th and early 20th century authors, give instructions for worm, minnow, and other live bait techniques. Even Frederick Halford, that epitome of the fly fishing "purist" began his angling career fishing with bait on the River Thames!

In my opinion, the introduction of the bead head fly is one of the most game changing innovations in the history of fly fishing. Suddenly it became easy to reach depths that were almost impossible without the use of split shot, heavily weighted streamers or weighted lines. The bead head fly and a long light tippet gives the modern angler an advantage that would have astounded our predecessors.

I know from personal conversations with Syl Nemes that he was offended by the addition of beads to soft hackle flies. We can only speculate what Leisenring and Hidy would have thought. Just look at what Frank Sawyer went through to get his Pheasant Tail nymph accepted. Weighted trout flies were certainly frowned upon by most fly fishers until just a few years ago. But does it really matter what they thought, or if we use weighted flies today? That's a question that every angler must answer for himself and one I'm not going to take a stand on! Suffice to say I do carry bead head flies in my box (but in a hidden compartment.....). At the risk of taking some flack, I will stick my neck out and say that when one adds a bead head to a spider, it is no longer technically a spider but rather a bead head "nymph", or what ever we might want to call it. A spider (or soft hackle, or flymph), is by definition a fly designed to fish just under the water's surface and not on the bottom of the river.
In the older literature one will often see the term "rise" rather than "strike" or "hit" used to describe a trout taking the fly. This is because in many/most cases the flies were fished so close to the surface that the take was visual, just as in dry fly fishing. And remember too that originally spiders were tied to imitate hatching or drowned adult insects rather than nymphs.

To the question of ideal water depth. In my own experience I have successfully fished spiders in water that barely would cover my ankles, in pools that could drown a horse, and everything in between. What I consider ideal spider water has much more to do with current speed than actual depth. While I can't give a foot-per-second recommendation, what I want is enough current speed to let me manipulate my line and leader to present my flies just under the surface, and to activate the soft, mobile hackles of the flies. To "make the flies deadly" to quote JL. Trout will move a lot further for a fly, especially subsurface, than we might think and I have often seen fish in clear water come up from a considerable depth to take a spider. I have also gotten into the habit of striking when I see a rise, or any disturbance, anywhere near where I think my flies might be. More times than not, a lift of the rod is greeted by the tug of a well hooked trout

Although my understanding pretty much follows what John said -- I seldom fish wet much below the top foot or so of the column -- it leaves me wondering about something else. How does this reconcile with Leisenring's description of what we now call "the lift"? He wrote:

The fly sinks to the bottom, progressing naturally as I follow it with my rod ...
The fly comes straight down to him bumpety-bump over the gravel and stones along the bottom with the current.

Those two sentence have caused me confusion for years. Was he only fishing in shallow water or was he really fishing wet flies deep? I fish wet upstream frequently, and often in slow pools, but they never go bumpety-bump -- or even sink to bottom.

I've attempted a couple responses here but erased the draft as the ramblings become contradictory. You shouldn't expect anything different from me, but I wanted to offer something helpful. I should preface by saying two things, I'm likely to continue fishing spiders and soft-hackles at times and in places where I know they are not the most effect way to connect. Partly to explore the edges of their efficacy and partly for the pleasure of surprising myself when fish behave in ways they normally wouldn't. Some weird sense of something to prove. I also have to fish a times when catching is never optimal so I push forward with flies and techniques that offer my best chances for connecting. Soft-hackles have proven to give me my favorite days on the water.

That being said, I, like Bob D rarely find myself drifting soft-hackles below 1-2 feet at the most. Most often in the top inches, but I do like to put a very lively offering in front of fish holding a little lower when I can, or offer a bit of bling and action to bring them up a bit. Meet them half-way if that is possible. Some good suggestions have been offered in terms of solutions: flouro sinks faster, skimpy trailing soft-hackles, casting up-stream, heavier hooks, etc. I never get to fish big water where trout are stacked in pools or responding to significant hatches (not yet). It's more like hunting specific targets. It might help to hear more about the nature of the river you're talking about in particular, or season, or hatches. It all depends on those factors. Again, given that most of the stretches I fish are only waste deep in high water, I can manage with a lighter set-up.

This fly has been my salvation when cast upstream and allowed to work through promising deeper holds. #14 Grouse and Amber 1250


And at times it's the little cousin in an #18: Partridge and Amber 1550


Anything required to drop lower for me and I'll tie on a beadhead Hares Ear Nymph or PTN and drop a small dark softy just above it. This has worked for me, but I typically find myself moving toward water that suits the presentations I prefer, not necessarily where the largest trout are holding.

It really depends on how much you want to invest in the SH flies and the techniques. They clearly have their limits, based on water conditions and even hatch characteristics, although I still find them the most versatile flies in my boxes. They have their time and place. Without knowing more about your river, hatch density, trout density, etc, I'm still willing to offer a suggestion when I should probably leave it alone. Cast a #12 or #14 BH-HEN upstream with a #16 Williams Favorite or other smallish spider dropped 4-5" off the leader about 14" above the nymph. It's foolish to make a recommendation with so little information, but I'd be surprised if it didn't produce for you.

BobD, I'm looking forward to hearing a nice discussion on your comment about the nature of flymphs based on JL's construction and the description of how JL fished them. It doesn't add up, or rather, there is a gap in the information offered.

With more information about the nature of your water, I'd be curious to hear more opinions on presentation and fly selection from people fishing such diverse water. Thanks for posting this, and welcome back.

w

"it leaves me wondering about something else. How does this reconcile with Leisenring's description of what we now call "the lift"?"

Bob, in regard to your above question, I've wondered the same thing for a long time too! My efforts at getting an un-weighted fly or flies to fish anywhere near the bottom have always been met with frustration. At first I just chalked it up to my own ineptitude but I believe it's really more physics than incompetence. Lightly weighted flies, in running water, just don't sink very deeply, especially when they are connected to tippet, leader, etc.

Observation leads me to believe that in most circumstances we are not fishing our flies anywhere nearly as deep as we think. (I'm talking specifically about un-weighted and lightly weighted sub-surface flies (spiders, Flymphs) and not heavily weighted flies, Czech, or other European style nymphs, which are an altogether different and unrelated subject.) Spiders, Soft Hackles, Flymphs and the like are for all intents and purposes, at least in my mind and experience, "near surface" flies!

The simple answer is the depth of water to best fish wets is where the fish are found. The hard part is figuring that out at times. Multiple fly casts with different depth flies can help you find that sweet spot. Matura mayfly covered things to try well.

I have for many years been capable of leaving flies on rocks, weeds, and branches on most stream bottoms as well as behind me in trees and up the bank as far as I can reach. One of the reasons I tie my own flies is I don't mind losing them at a few pennies on the dollar compared to shop flies. IMO many times if you aren't losing flies you are not fishing in the zone or trying for a difficult lie. As a winter steelheader if you can't tickle a fish on the bottom on the nose you aren't even in the game some cold water days.

I prefer not to weight most of my soft hackles and many times fish them with a Duncan loop so they are free to move on the tippet with subtle currents. I use a combination of things:
long thin leaders on floating lines; weighted tools flies including heavier hooks, bead heads, wire and lead wraps; sink tip lines; custom made tips of T14 or LLC line in 2.5, 5, 7.5 and 10 feet; and full sinking lines from intermediate to deep water express styles. Some insects begin their emergence from the stream bottoms or return under water to lay eggs and it helps to get a SH down to the naturals level to imitate them. Old time fishing guru Marv Taylor from Idaho summed up using fast sinking lines in lakes by saying would you rather spend your time fishing or counting down to the right depth.