Trout Nymphs & Streamers

In my part of the country, the most anticipated annual event among trout fishers is the late-spring emergence of the pale yellow mayflies commonly known as "sulfurs." Once these bugs start popping, local anglers can look forward to a month of reliable after-dinner action. The daily buffet of mayflies is so rich that even the largest trout shove their way into the chow line.

Most of my friends prepare for the festivities by sitting down at their fly-tying vises and cranking out dozens of dry flies with glossy dun hackles or upright wings of buoyant deer hair, but I wade to a different drummer. I get ready for the sulfur hatch by filling my fly boxes with artificial nymphs and emerger patterns designed to imitate the shape and posture of the insects as they begin to sprout wings and swim from the gravel bottom to the riffled surface of my favorite creek.

You can bet that ratio holds true for most aquatic insect hatches in most trout waters throughout the country.

Don't take literally that famous dictum about 90 percent of a trout's diet consisting of subsurface fare. Montana's Bighorn River and the West Branch of the Delaware in New York and Pennsylvania are two of many fertile rivers where big trout frequently stuff themselves on floating insects. However, it is safe to say that most trout in most streams take a substantial majority of their meals down under. Knowing this, any angler who does not become proficient at using nymphs and streamer patterns is plain foolish. Fortunately, these skills are easy to acquire with a little practice, and what fisherman doesn't love to practice?

Over the years I've taught several friends how to fly-fish. Because each of those anglers had done a bit of bait-fishing, I broke them in with nymphs rather than dry flies. All of them made an easy transition to the long rod.

To my line is attached a 9- to 12-foot leader (the larger or clearer the stream the longer the leader) that is tapered down to a 4X or 5X tippet. If the law permits, I pinch from one to three BB split shot on the leader about 18 inches above the fly. In the few places where weighted leaders are forbidden, I use weighted flies, although I'd rather add weight to the leader because it is easier to add or remove a sinker than to keep changing flies until I find one that scrapes the bottom in a given pool.

For many years I caught a satisfying number of fish by simply watching the end of my line, but for the last decade or so I've relied on foam or putty strike indicators to detect the grab. I would never go back to my old ways. A properly placed strike indicator will wiggle whenever the fly stops and thus alert you to many trout that you would otherwise miss. I put mine about 1 1/2 times as many feet up the leader as the water is deep. For example, in water that is 4 feet deep, the indicator should be attached about six feet up the line.

Casts, for the most part, should be short, no more than 30 feet. They're directed straight upstream or up and across, and as the fly and indicator drift down I raise the rod tip and take in slack to reduce drag and facilitate a quick strike. My line is flipped, or "mended," upstream as necessary to keep things moving along at current speed. Do you see the similarities to bait-fishing?

If the indicator dives, darts upstream, moves sideways or even pauses in its downstream ride, I raise the rod with a quick movement of my forearm, as if I were drawing back a hammer to drive a nail. No fish, no problem. When I come up empty, I just lower the rod and finish out the drift. After a few sessions of such fishing, most anglers can actually anticipate strikes at certain points in the drift. In my experience, most hits come just after the fly has hit bottom and starts downstream, or just as the drift has ended and the fly starts to rise up in the water column, like a live nymph making its ascent to the surface during a hatch.

The Hare's Ear is a favorite of countless nymph-fishers, but its recipe varies. My version has a small clump of webby brown hackle fibers for a tail and a body made of fur clipped from the snout and ears of a European hare. I like a dark gray-brown mix of fur. The abdomen, or rear half, of the nymph is ribbed with several turns of fine oval gold wire. I make a humped wing case from a strip of dark-gray duck primary feather. The nymph's "legs" are made by using a needle to pick out a few guard hairs from the dubbed thorax.

The beauty of the Hare's Ear is that it looks a little like many small creatures trout favor and is a reasonable facsimile of a mayfly or stone fly nymph. If you squint really hard, it also resembles a scud (freshwater shrimp), a crane fly larva or even a caddis larva crawling around in a sand-and-gravel case.

Hare's Ear nymphs should not be tied too neatly. In fact, the more they've been chewed on, the better they seem to work. I generally fish mine near the bottom with a split shot or two on the leader, but other anglers also use unweighted Hare's Ears, sans the gold rib, to imitate emergent mayflies that are drifting in the surface film.

The peeking caddis I use makes a lifelike imitation of a larva bouncing along the river bottom with its case intact. It's fashioned by wrapping a "case" of spiky gray squirrel body fur with a few bits of tinsel mixed in. The case covers about two-thirds of the hook shank. Next, I tie a short larva body of bright green or tan fur, add a short head of black fur, and then finish with a few grouse or guinea hen-feather fibers to represent tucked-up insect legs.

Peeking caddis nymphs, like the Hare's Ear, work very well in swift water, but they also produce strikes when they're allowed to settle on the bottom of a deep, slow pool and retrieved at a crawl. Watch the bottom in such a pool some time and you'll notice that real caddis creep around like that. Mimicking that snail's pace will take some practice and determination on your part.

My third nymph arguably is not a nymph at all, because it imitates a nymph that's trying to fulfill its biological imperative of turning into a winged dun. Picture the mayfly of your choice swimming toward the surface as it drifts downstream, wings just starting to sprout. That's what a snowshoe emerger is supposed to look like to a hungry trout.

To make it, construct a tail consisting of three pheasant center-feather fibers or a small clump of wood duck flank fibers. Next, build a slender, fuzzy body of seal fur or something like it in rusty brown, dark brown, gray or tan. My favorite is rusty brown.

I happen to have a small stash of seal's fur left over from the good old days before Bridget Bardot and her animal-protection cronies made the stuff impossible to get. You or your local fly-tying connection will probably have to substitute goat or some kind of synthetic fur in place of the glossy, spiky seal fibers.

Anyway, when you've covered about 70 percent of the hook shank with fur, take a tiny swatch of natural off-white or dun-dyed guard hairs from the underside of a snowshoe hare's foot and tie it in by the butt ends to form a stubby "wing" on your fly. Add a bit more body fur in front of the wing and then tie in several short pheasant or wood duck fibers for legs.

The snowshoe emerger can be fished on a dead drift without weight when trout are rising steadily, or with a small split shot prior to the onset of a heavy hatch. In either case, let it hang in the current for a couple of seconds at the end of each drift. That's when you're most apt to get a ripping strike on this particular fly.

I must admit I was not always much of a streamer-fisherman. Why bother, I figured, since I regularly caught good-sized trout on nymphs? That attitude vanished one rainy day when the water took on a milk-chocolate hue and my nymphs suddenly stopped producing. On impulse, I tied on a big streamer and began working it through the head of a deep pool. Bang! A 15-inch brown engulfed the fly. A few minutes later I was connected to a 16-inch rainbow, and by the end of that afternoon I'd hooked a dozen trout between 12 and 18 inches long, all on the same bedraggled fly.

Since then I've experimented frequently with streamers. In my opinion, these long-bodied flies can take trout at any time, but they truly shine in two circumstances. One, as indicated above, is when a storm has raised and roiled a river. The other opportunity arises whenever you are on the water between dusk and dawn. These are the periods when the biggest fish in your home waters are on the prowl, and large trout like to take their meals a mouthful at a time.

There are many ways to work a streamer. My favorite method begins with a cast aimed up and across. I normally use a floating line and a 9-foot leader, but you might try a sink-tip and a 4-foot leader if you're fishing a wide, slow-flowing river. In either case, let the fly sink for a second or two and then start an erratic retrieve. Try to make the fly swim down and back across toward you and use short upstream or downstream mends to slow or speed up its motion. Remember, live minnows are more apt to be hugging the bottom than struggling at the surface, so keep your fly as deep as possible.

Generally I make several casts to one spot and then move downstream a couple of steps and do it all over again until I've covered the entire pool.

You can fish bucktails and streamers down and across or even straight downstream, but if you do so let them drift back after every couple of pulls to mimic a tired, struggling fish.

I'd have a hard time settling on any three favorite streamer flies but no trouble at all picking just one. My pet streamer is the Woolly Bugger. A Bugger, with its puffy marabou tail and palmered hackle, looks like nothing in nature but comes alive when it's twitched crosscurrent.

A Woolly Bugger is made by lashing a big clump of marabou just ahead of the hook bend and then palmering a webby saddle hackle over a chenille body. I like mine with black marabou and black hackle wound over dark olive chenille. Some anglers do well on sunny days with a white tail and body wound with red hackle.

Buggers work best when a small split shot is pinched on the leader a mere half-inch from the hook eye. This clumsy assembly is cast as gracefully as possible and retrieved back across the stream in short, jigging hops. If you do it right, it looks more like a retreating crawfish than anything else but will also pass for a food-grubbing minnow or a wriggling leech.

My second-favorite streamer would be either a Muddler Minnow or a Black Ghost.

Everybody recognizes the Muddler, with its clipped-deer-hair head and turkey feather wings, but many have forgotten how it originated more than half a century ago. The legendary Dan Gapen created the fly to imitate the sculpins that filled the bellies of big Canadian brook trout. The Muddler is most effective when it's tied with weight on the shank and jerked slowly along the rocky bottoms where sculpins hang out.

The Black Ghost, with its long white-feather wing, black-floss body and silver ribbing, was originally fished in Maine as a smelt imitation, but it bears a strong resemblance to many different minnows when it's wet. The white shows up well in clear water and makes the fly a logical searching pattern on bright summer days. Often, nice trout will make a half-hearted pass at a Black Ghost and then engulf a nymph that's drifted down their feeding lane a few minutes later, so consider using a nymph dropper (where legal).

If the flies described here don't help you take that big trout you spotted last summer, don't blame the lures. Take some time to learn how to tie and fish underwater flies and then hang on!