Why is it you seem to have extreme confidence with certain flies?

[Uncle Jesse]

Until the mid 1990's I primarily fished with spinning and casting tackle for bass. For years I would rarely use a spinner bait. I had read articles and in my head knew they worked. One day I was fishing a pond along side the Natchez Trace and tied on a spinner and left my tackle box in the car. I caught fish on the spinner and have used them ever since. Sometimes you have to let your head over rule your heart with lures and tackle. I plan to take the same approach this year with sink tip lines and streamers and see if I can find some larger fish.

[NJTroutbum]

I think it's a mix of things, that all come from confidence. How that confidence is developed though is another question. But once you have confidence in a pattern, you will stick with it when it's not catching "at the moment". You learn the right drift and how to handle that certain pattern better since you are spending more time with it.

[WarrenP]

I think it is because you will stick with your favorite pattern and fish it harder. In your head, you know that it is a pattern that you can always depend on to produce and if for some odd reason it is not producing at a particular time, you do not remove it and try another pattern. Instead, you keep fishing it and trying to determine why it is not producing. You may decide you are not allowing it to go deep enough, allowing it to go too deep, retrieving it to slowly, to fast or maybe start twitching the rod tip while fishing it, etc. Whatever you do, you do not take it off because you just know that it will produce as soon as you determine how to fish it.

Once we feel we have answered this great question, we need to answer why one of our "never fail" patterns, all of a sudden, stops producing no matter what we do.

[Rick Z]

I have patterns that work very well for me. But if they are not working after a short time I am trying other flies.
It may be that I concentrate a little more of the flies that I know work.
My best excuse is that the fish want to drive me nuts( my wife says a short putt).
I say those days are why it is called fishing and ot catching.

Rick

[Threedayweekend]

Most of my go to patterns have been given to me by more experienced fishermen or women that I have caught fish with very quickly with after being given the fly. Also most of them are some form of hopper or spider patterns.