Conjecture?

[Roadkill]

redietz

An OC flymph is my favorite fly but near dark when big trout are smashing caddis flitting across the surface I trade it in for my adult dry fly hackled pattern that can be skated rather than grease up my flymph. At this stage in life I for one will continue to tie flies and fish them for various stages of insect life. I won't sink my dry flies in the water column and expect them to perform as well as my flymphs imitating insects swimming well underwater.

If a fly and method work for me I don't care if it is just conjecture or really true. Takes us back to that existential thread and Descartes I think therefore I am I flyfish therefore I am. Maybe I fish in Castenada's Separate Reality.

[redietz]

... rather than grease up my flymph.

I OTOH, catch a significant number of fish doing just that.

I won't sink my dry flies in the water column and expect them to perform as well as my flymphs imitating insects swimming well underwater.

I do that, too. You really should try a sunken Elk Hair Caddis sometime.

If a fly and method work for me I don't care if it is just conjecture or really true.

Exactly. Except I now leave out the conjecture altogether. If a fly and method work for me, I don't care why.

[hankaye]

Soft-Hackle, Return Howdy;

I appoligise if I came across as a bit 'flip' earlier. I haven't had what everyone here has refered to as "Home Waters". I've bounced all over the face of America. Being new to fly fishing I'm not used to looking at the "Buggy Side" of life in a stream, pond or lake. I have been a spin and casting fisher.
Used REDACTED (begins with B ends with T).
I've done a bunch of Saltwater (Surfcasting), Some River, Eastern and Southern. Mostly farm ponds. I mostly prefered to persue Crappie and other panfish. Biggest question was ... Chartruse and what are the colors of the day. Next was what depth.
So, that being said, here I am in The Land of TROUT! I know I've got things to learn an sometimes I I use a glib tongue instead of keeping my mouth shut and listening (LEARNING). My skills at BUG ID are House fly and Mosquito, said that before somewhere else on the forum. I DO realize that I have a lot of work to do and a lot to learn.
Please bear with me (for those on the right hand side of the Alantic and those 'Downunder' That does NOT mean get naked), while I thrash around in the water and have some fun learning this form of fishing. I mean stalk quietly a stealthy like so as to not spook the quarry.
hank


Edit for redaction.

[Roadkill]

redietz

To each his own.

I have fished greased soft hackles and flymphs and sunken EHC flies and caught plenty of fish. I look for underwater egg laying adult activity to mimic but I might prefer to fish a leadwing coachman or other classic wet if i have one than to drown a suitable caddis dry. I just prefer to use flies or materials that I think are more suitable for certain tasks and behaviors. I have made and successfully fished a steel wool nymph as a dry fly but it is hardly my first choice of dry fly dubbing.

I just think that more experience you have on the water and with insects takes more of the guesswork out of the equation. As I understand "conjecture" it involes guesswork not an observabe basis for a decision. When I land a first fish of the day with a mouth full of red bloodworms It is not mere conjecture that I am going to try a bloodworm dropper. Even a novice flyfisher might try something red at that point.

I just think that it is inconguous to imply that certain stages of insect development have no observable basis for use and are thus a mere conjecture on a site devoted to flymphs. As I recall Hidy coined the term for a specific stage of insect Flymph-No longer a nymph but not yet fly. My predominant use of flymphs is as an emerger. As it has been said many times before it is easier to fish the wrong fly in the right mannner and catch fish than to fish the right fly in the wrong manner and be successful. IMO it is more productive to fish the right fly in the right manner for selective trout.

[redietz]

Roadkill -

I think we're probably about 99% in agreement, especially about experience, but I've been tweaking you a bit.

And although I agree about the "right fly" I think goes as much to presentation as anything; as I said, I've yet to be able to float a beadhead. Some flies are going to make the right presentation that much harder (or easier.)

I'm all in favor of using a fly for it's intended purpose, but the narrower that purpose, the less generally useful that fly will be. The more widely applicable the fly, the more likely it is to cover whatever it is the fish are focusing on.

One fly that I was very successful with last season (and it's technically relevant to the forum, since it was originally a wet fly, and it's certainly wingless) was the Renegade. It worked during midge hatches, baetis hatches and spinner falls, when I was expecting ants to be the ticket, and during some caddis hatches. These are very specific situations that ten years ago I would have fished with specific flies for each situation. If I had been successful during the morning with an exact baetis dun imitation, that same fly wouldn't have worked during the spinner fall later in the day. I'm talking about heavily pressured waters here; just any old "attractor" wouldn't have worked.

It was designed to work either wet or dry, so I was never fishing it beyond its "design parameters", but I could cast it upstream and fish it dry until it was downstream of me, and then tug it under and continue to fish it as a wet. (It also skates nicely, btw.) This allows me to cover multiple "stages" of an insect in a single cast. Why does it work during those specific conditions? Darned if I know.

From what I've been reading lately, many of the older "wet" flies were designed to float -- horsehair doesn't sink. It's not at all absurd to float a spider; I can't think of a better cripple.

[Roadkill]

redietz
We are 99% in agreement but the semantic discussion is great even coast to coast and would even be better at waters edge after a good day over the fish. Renegades have been a favorite of mine in fly boxes (and tin Bandaid or Prince Albert cans) for over 50 years. They fit right into my continum with Buzz Hackles, Griffith's Gnats, Grey & Brown Hackle Peacocks....

PS-just stack more deerhair behind that bead.

[Otter]

Thats a lot of conjecture Mark, to conjecture that we may be conjecturing

Regarding total selectivity, I believe that it happens more often than some believe but a lot less often than others would have you believe - I fall into the camp of the lazy angler in these situations, I am happy with my successes in general and when faced with a situation where the trout "appear" to be in totally selective mode and that I am failing to catch them I try what I can but don't get all paraonoid if I don't crack the code, I know the impasse is only temporary and the trout will in due course revert to being more sociable. Time and a wee bit of thought and enquiry and experience will often allow you increase your successes in such situations.


In the words of Hannibal from that silly TV series the A-Team from many years ago " I love it when a plan comes to-gether" - My conjecture is that each trout we catch is a lucky strike, but that our experience level and how much thought and concentration we apply whilst fishing will have a strong bearing on how lucky we are. With experience, in general we are more likely to present the right fly, in the right way at the right time with confidence - its all a percentage game. Sometimes you need to get everything 100% correct, other times 75% will yield a trout.

Mark is dead right though in his analysis, at times the angler that is precise in the what where and when may be matched by another angler less precise, at times the less precise angler may outfish the precise angler, and vice versa. My conjecture though is that the precise angler is long term more likely to succeed. My basis for this is conjecture that the precise angler will waste less time during a hatch doing the wrong thing

[michaelgmcgraw]

Yeah! What Otter said!

[Roadkill]

Otter,

Very well said!

And I too tend to be a lazy angler on my home waters. But I also want to crack the code at times especially if I am hundreds of miles from home spending one day or even a few hours on famous waters that I may only see once in my lifetime. If I get frustrated seeing big fish feeding selectively on who knows what and guides and fisherman are leaving in frustration for another day, I don't just give up. I dig deep into the bag of tricks (or vest ) that memory and 50+ years of experience have given me and give it my best shot. Sometimes you get to find a clue along with another stubborn old salt. Sometimes you can be inspired by a newby who doesn't know what fly he is fishing or what he did right but that there is this bug that looks like this....

I enjoy learning something every time I go fishing or sit on either side of a tying table at a show. That is what keeps me going in flyfishing and sometimes trying hard for that thrill of victory. For me there is no agony of defeat, no rod thrown in the river or broken with a vow never to fish again as has been seen on some waters. Mark is right that it is a question that can never be perfectly solved but I sure do enjoy the Quest.

[redietz]

redietz
... but the semantic discussion is great even coast to coast and would even be better at waters edge after a good day over the fish. Renegades have been a favorite of mine in fly boxes (and tin Bandaid or Prince Albert cans) for over 50 years.

I'd love to have stream side discussions with almost everyone on this board -- and I can't say that about most boards that I follow.

I thought of something about the Renegade that is quite relevant to this discussion: I quit fishing them 20 years ago because I didn't know what they were supposed to represent. Never mind that they worked; they didn't fit into my theories, and therefore anytime I caught a fish on one it was just luck, not skill on my part. I'm not sure whether my current downplaying of theory let them back into my fly box or it I've just developed broader theories ...