Weighty or not….
I was just tying a few flies ready for the grayling and had knocked up a couple of blue winged olive nymphs. They are nothing really special but as I was tying them I thought of the hatch Champo and I witnessed a little earlier in the year. It was interesting as his dun pattern was completely outfished by my scruffy, I mean really scruffy klink which caught the fish as they were picking off the flies as they emerged. It was probably the case that my fly just caught the hatch at the early stage but it made us laugh anyway. It in turn got me thinking about a similar hatch Ray and I fished through on the Frying Pan a couple of years back. He was actually fishing an unweighted emerger pattern and was happily picking up fish. When I got back I tied up a few and never really got round to using them but the time with Champo brought them back to my mind again. The reason for this is that when I fish nymphs, as a whole, I fish them with a bead head. Nothing clever behind it just that if there are no risers theres a good chance the fish will be sitting down on the bottom waiting for something to happen. All the bead does is get me down to them a bit quicker. What about the time when the hatch is starting to get going though and the fish already aware of the flies ascending to the surface and starting to get interested? A bead head below the dry would work just fine but for real, just sub-surface presentation when we are starting to see them bulge below the surface would an unweighted nymph do a good job? I’ve played with it a bit this year and seems to be a pretty fair bet. I know its not new or revolutionary but how often are you using a weighted nymph compared to unweighted and what is the ratio of weighted nymphs in your fly box? I’d be really interested to know? If you catch a BWO hatch hang an unweighted fly off the back and see what happens. I tie mine in a variety of shades from hares ear to light olive to darker olive with a wire rib. The only thing I add is either a black wing case from a pheasant tail or just some black dubbing. When a nymph is about to emerge the wingcase is a lot darker in colour. Do the fish know? I don’t really know but it is a nice, neat way of finishing things off. As I mentioned before Ray is a huge fan of this and will often fish a really lightly ginked up pheasant tail and he puts it to good effect HERE.
Spookily enough I have jusy got off the phone with Champo and we had just had a discussion about it and we are going to play with unweighted nymphs a bit more next year!
Mark is really getting the hots for fly fishing for pike now the river season is over and has been creeping up to Chew on a regular basis. The man knows more about pike than most of us ever will! Anyway, I thought I’d pop this piccie up of him when we both went a few weeks back. The rain and wind had driven the trout anglers off of the water at lunchtime but there were two idiots that stuck it out… Fair weather fishermen?….Never!
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