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Figuring out this nymphing thing
I had a chance to get to a nearby step-across stream for about an hour early Saturday morning, while the wife and kids were still asleep. This was my first fishing trip to this type of stream since the vegetation started growing again, as I've been distracted by warmwater fishing.
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Inspired by the latest Orvis podcast, I decided that I was going to fish nymphs and refrain from using dry flies. I started off with a pheasant tail nymph about 2 feet above a hare's ear nypmh. Both were heavily weighted with several layers of lead-free wire wrapped around the hook before tying the rest of the pattern. It didn't take long before I hooked a wild brook trout, but I realized he was foul hooked by the lower nymph. Soon after that, I broke off the hare's ear in an overhead tree due to a missed hookset, and I tried just the PTN for a while, but I didn't get a single bite.
I realized that something had to change or I was going home fishless, and I almost tied on a dry. Instead, I shortened my leader to about 7 feet and tied on a new hare's ear. After several minutes of bites but no hookups, I tried different drift techniques, from keeping the line tight to letting it go completely slack. Finally something clicked, and I started getting hookups. I found that when I kept all of the line off the water, but some slack in the leader, and moved the rod to stay ahead of the nymph through the pool, I got a bite almost every time. With a well-timed strike, I would get a corresponding fish as well, except when the bite was from fry that were too small to hook. The technique was nothing new, and has been described by many, but it never clicked with me until then. I think this is similar to some of the Euro-nymphing techniques that are so popular. By time to leave, I had caught 6 fish in a little over an hour, and I made it home before time for breakfast. All fish were returned safely to the water.
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Here are some of the things I learned:- The line has to have just the right amount of slack. Not completely slack and coiled over, or bites will go undetected and fish will rarely hook themselves, and not tight because that will pull the nymph up off the bottom and bites will rarely come. Leading the nypmh with the rod tip can help prevent snagging bottom and allow for consistent tension throughout the drift. I haven't figured out how to apply this technique when the pool is more than a rod length away... maybe that's where the strike indicator comes in to play?
- A short leader is perfectly fine, and much easier to manage in a brushy stream. Trying for stealth, I had always used 9' or longer leaders in the past, and been frustrated by tangles, hooking branches, poor accuracy, etc. Stealthy yes, but unproductive.
- The bow-and-arrow cast is an excellent way to fish a small stream.
- Strike indicators are not necessary, and may make the whole rig more difficult to handle in tight quarters.
- Just becuase the fish are scrambling around the pool does not necessarily mean they are spooked. On two different pools, I caught two brook trout in each, despite seeing the fish move around before the first cast, and being practically at the water's edge for landing and unhooking the first one. Stealth was not nearly as important as I'd expected based on past experience. This lesson may not remain valid later in the season when the water is lower.
- The teeth on brook trout can get caught on the dubbing of a fly and make you think it's hooked when it's really not. During several unhookings, the hookpoint was clearly out of the fish's mouth, but the fly was still stuck. By the end of fishing, there wasn't much dubbing left on the nymph. You can see some exposed wire wraps on the nymph in the mouth of my fish in the picture.
