General spider use

[Stephen]

Mike,

I have always appreciated your fine work and research, this being no exception.

Still waiting to hear that there is a book in the works.

[John Dunn]

Sir I have been reading your posts outstanding , If one would read your posts and could remember half of the information ,one would still become a better fisherman.

A devoted reader.
Thank you Mike

John Dunn

[brian ramsey]

Mike,

All we can find here in the states is about 10-11 foots rods and stiff pool cues, at that. With my spider fishing techniques, I just been using traditional upstream tactics, which is deadly to say the least. Have you ever used down and across, dead drift, but still in contact with the point fly?..maybe a figure-8 retrieve?; methods with like an intermediate sink line? I would think the silk lines used by Stewart and Ballie were a kind-of intermediate sink...sort-of, right? and what about leader lengths? Some U.K. anglers are using extremily long leaders. Sorry about all the questions...it's just such a wonderful way to catch trout. What scares many American anglers is leader length because of all the wind we have.
I really enjoy your posts, too. I really appreciate you taking the time to help us all out to these techniques, they are cheerished by us all. We don't have the local resources to this information that is nearly 100s of years old. Is there any books on technical spider fishing? We should also talk about your grayling techniques, too sometime...grayling in europe sound tough.

Tight Loops,
Brian

[Ruard]

Mike,

We don't have the local resources to this information that is nearly 100s of years old. Is there any books on technical spider fishing?

Tight Loops,
Brian

The information that I have found is not 100 year old but perhaps of some use for you. In A handbook of north country Trout Flies of Roger Fogg are 22 pages with how to fish a wet fly. Oliver Edwards has a DVD : Wet Fly fishing on Rivers. He shows how you could fish upstream like Stewart did. I think that the polypropylene line is very useful for that kind of fishing, but have never tried it: no rivers here in Holland!! But he shows also downstream and cross fishing.

About long english leaders: mostly they use leaders of 20 feet only when they fish from a boat on a lake. You have plenty of room and always the wind behind!!

[planettrout]

I have been using Spiders since 1976. Here is a story about their use on Hot Creek, CA in the Eastern Sierras...

http://planettrout.wordpress.com/2008/04/16/the-spider/

PT/TB