I’m fortunate to fish a freestone stream which is virtually a “cutthroat only” fishery. Those dummies are always ready to go up on top and take a dry, at least starting shortly after the creek thaws out in early spring. From early April through mid November it is a succession of skwalas, salmonflies, golden stones, hoppers, October caddis and a few smaller stoneflies, caddis, midges, and mayflies.
From shortly after the creek becomes fishable until it freezes over ( the creek, that is ), there is no reason to fish a nymph, let alone a dropper off a hopper or any other dry. So once in a while when I’m reading some thread or other here on the BB, the question comes to me -
[b]Does it ever occur to you that if you did not use the dropper that the fishies might actually come up and take your hopper ??
I’ve fished drys in Colorado without any fish looking at it, and then attached a dropper and fished the same water with immediate strike results.
Consequently, I’m a firm believer that if they want a dry they’ll take it regardless of the dropper, but they can’t take a dropper if it’s not there.
That is a perfectly reasonable question, which I have never stated aloud but I think I started off with just a dry fly without much success and then added the dropper after reading about it. I can say I have caught considerably more fish on a drowned black ant than any dry fly and possibly more than on a single nypmph pattern that I could name. I figure its like Kroger, they have watermelon, cataloupes, and honeydew melons. They probably sell more watermelons and could fill up all the tables with just watermelons, but they sell a lot of the others because they are there.
I rarely fish a dropper off the hopper - the purist in me says if they won’t bite on the dry then too bad, the poor caster in me says it’s usually windy when hopper fishing is best and tangles are almost a guarantee if I add a dropper.
Many of my successes of fishing a dry-dropper combo gets the fish to take a look at the dry, refuse it then eat the dropper on his way back to his hole. Especially Grayling!
Typically, if I fish dries, I just fish dries, and don’t worry about the dropper. Though I will often times fish a pair, a larger fly and a smaller something that is difficult for me to see on the water heh. Did that once, and turned my head for a sec, looked back and my bigger dry was skating across the water and a fish then struck the skater… which was a caddis dry. To this day, that hookup, is probably one of my top 5.
When I’m fishing a hopper, I don’t use a dropper. But that’s because of weak casting skills. A dropper increases my chances of snarling things up and wasting time untangling things that could be used more productively with my hopper on the water. Your mileage may vary greatly.
In my case, whether I am on one of those “cutthroat only” creeks or not, I am almost always as much interested in how the fly I choose to fish will work as I am in catching fish. When I am fishing with one of my own original patterns, a new one or an older one ( which is most of the time ), the important thing is to see if it works as is, or maybe needs some tweeking.
So I tend to be adverse to droppers for hoppers or any other dry fly that I will be fishing.
One of the replies above suggests that the trout in particular rivers just don’t eat bugs on the surface so there is no point to fishing dries - it’s a nymph river, end of story. That may well be the case. But is it possible that the dry fly selection is the problem ?? Maybe instead of falling back on a proven nymph record, working with dries only until finding one or more that will work would be more rewarding ??
One of the replies above suggests that often times the fish refuse the dry and go for the nymph. Which makes me wonder if the fishies are actually refusing the dry, or just taking the opportunity to get the easier snack ?? If there were no dropper, maybe they wouldn’t refuse the dry. And if they did, maybe it would say something about the dry that is being used and the need to find one that is not so readily and often refused ??
A seemingly prevalent attitude is that the hopper / dry might catch a fish or two so why not use it. If catching one or two more fish is that important, then by all means it makes sense to do the hopper / dropper thing. But if it in fact only catches another fish or two, then why bother with the hopper / dry and the expense involved ?? Why not just use a thingamabobber ( or a cheaper homebrew indicator ), which costs not much and will last many times longer than any hopper / dry and is almost certainly cheaper in the long run, and less hassle in the short run ??
Sometimes they’ll take both! I once caught a fish, and when I landed him he had both my dry and my dropper in his mouth. I think he hit the nymph and kept coming right on up to take the dry.
I prefer not to use a dry/dropper combo but sometimes they are necessary. When the dry fly, after trying a number of them, will not take a fish but I see fish at or near the surface, then it is dry/dropper time. The dropper can either have a bead head and be acting like a rising nymph or no weight and be like an emerger real close to the surface. If that still doesn’t do the job then it is nymphing time, down deep where the fish are actually feeding and I bring out my nymphing rig.
What ever it takes to catch a fish, dry or dry/dropper or deep nymphing or streamers or…
John, in terrestrial season if they are not taking hoppers I switch over to ants. If they aren’t taking ants then, I’ll switch over to a thingamabobber and whatever my seine net suggests they may be eating that day. Or, if they are taking at or near the surface, I’ll try to match that.
It is not so much my casting skills as the type A personality I try to overcome by fishing moving waters. The type A Mr. Hyde comes out when I am sitting on the bank trying to unsnarl a dropper that has gone wrong.
It is maybe my favorite combination when I go on droppers…foam hopper/ sunken ant; foam hopper/ pheasant tail nymph (tied on scud hooks); foam hopper/ Partridge & Orange.
And yes, several times I got to see the fish coming for the hopper (curiosity?), refusing it and then taking the second fly. If I have to say, 50%-50% is the success of each fly.
If I am floating a river and I cast the dropper close to the (many) willows which flexible branches are resting on the slow current, is usual that 90% of the attacks are for the sunken fly. In that case I have a hard work trying to avoid that the hopper finishes hanging on the trees.
Being the non-purist type, I will do what it takes to catch fish(But still fly fishing). During any hatch, I will put a dry with some type of nymph or emerger depending on where the hatch is progressing at. I do get tangles, but I would get tangles with no fly attached. Increasing your odds IMHO is not cheating, it is just using your detective skills to catch fish.
… question, as much as a dry / dropper question, I guess.
When it comes to hoppers, I’ve only been fishing them regularly the past four years. And I have never used a dropper on one. Part of it is the water I fish, part of it is the pattern I fish, and part of it is the fish I fish. Others definitely have a wide variety of combinations of those factors to deal with.
I do wonder, on the issue of refusals, how many refusals are the result of presentation issues which the angler can not detect but which do put the fishies off ?? So it is not a matter of the fish refusing the fly, but the way it is presented. That occurs to me when I am fishing a pattern that very few fish refuse and then one does refuse it. If it isn’t the fly, and it doesn’t seem likely it is the fish, then it must be me.
Beyond hoppers without droppers, I have used dry / dropper combinations for fishing mayfly hatches - usually starting with a combination until the fishies show a distinct preference for one or the other, and then going only with the prefered form. Sometimes, when it is close to 50/50, I’ll just stay with the combination.
But even in the mayfly dry / dropper situation, the original question is still pertinent. There was one small tailwater in central Idaho that I always thought of as primarily a nymph fishery for mayflies because I just didn’t do well with dries. Then I happened to come up with a slightly different BWO pattern and decided to give it a go one day on that river. It was lights out dry fly fishing from then on. No droppers needed or welcome.
Yesterday, I was going to experiment by fishing a dropper off my hopper. But when I looked in my nymph box, it was such a shambles that I didn’t see a fly that I would use where I was going to be fishing. So that experiment will have to wait for another day. As it turned out, the fishing was really slow and the refusals were virtually nil - it would have been a shame to distract any of the fishies I did catch with something hanging off the bend of the hook. :roll:
As to casting woes, the trick with a popper/dropper combo is a big loop. I’m no whiz but I have regularly fished popper/double droppers and occasionally popper/triple droppers. On one particular water that produces great with a triple, the trailing dropper is six feet from the popper. If you have a tight loop (as often recommended for good casting) you are almost guaranteed to have one of your droppers catch up with the popper and disaster happens. A big loop also means you’re not going to cast 80 feet.
Here’s a hint, make your backcast at a 45-60 degree angle. A trailing dropper loves to tag your ear, or neck or you get the point…or you will.
Another hint, when your line hits the water, the popper and each dropper should make a ripple. If you don’t see as many ripples as you have droppers, you have a problem.
Yet another hint, the more droppers you have or the longer the tippet on the droppers, the stiffer you want the tippet to be. Because warm water fish are not particularly line shy, this makes it easy. But if you are in a stream with spooky trout, having that last dropper on 7x may be inviting issues. The solution on that trout stream is have shorter tippet for the dropper.
The follow up question, of course, is - [b]Does the fact you have a dropper on cause presentation issues because the dropper is dragging the dry in a way that causes the fish to refuse the dry, and opt for the dropper instead of taking the dry ??
[/b]By eliminating the dropper, maybe that 50-50 ratio between the dry and the dropper would be 95% takes on the dry with only 5% refusals ( excluding obvious presentation problems clearly caused by the angler ).
I fish a dry dropper probably 90 percent of the time, the fact is down here in the North Island most of the time the fish are nymphing, they are feeding on Nymphs so I try to give them what they want. The only time I fish a dry only (outside cicada season) is on the rare occasion that I find a good fish constantly rising to an obvious hatch, even then the fish most often prefer an emerger over a dry.
We do not realy have the hatches that you guys get so the fish do not lock into a certain food type, except for about 6 weeks in late summer when the fish on some of the streams go mad for Cicada’s.
All the best.
Mike