Are trout flies just as effective as panfish flies?

Fishing Panfish & Warm Water
1

One of my favorite species to go after since I started fly fishing are brim/bluegill/panfish/sunfish or whatever you call them. Ounce-per-ounce they are great fighters.

Now, when I started I used the bluegill specific poppers and foam and woolly spiders, etc. and did fine. I later tried wet flies and patterns like hare’s ear nymphs and found them very effective.

I later thought, why not try established trout patterns of things that look like things panfish eat as well so I went on to try scuds, stimulators, humpys, griffth’s gnats, elk hair caddis, etc. and they catch just as many fish. I almost never head to a pond and not catch a bluegill, redbreast, greenie, rio grande, shellcracker or even largemouth on a trout fly I try.

Given that the flies created for trout have been designed and tested over decades to match or resemble the same sort of things that bluegill eat why do we try and keep a separate fly box with panfish specific flies? Could it be that all the places I fish for panfish, the fish don’t care and will eat anything I give them (not likely I think)?

Sorry, if this topic has come up before but the Search function isn’t returning any results older than April of this year.

2

Hey Chavez;

FYI, I catch the hell out of warmwater species on #8 Pheasant Tail Nymphs, Royal Wulff’s and Black Wooly Buggers.

Bluegill and Yellow Perch slam the PTN and LMB seem to savor the Royal Wulff.

Go figure; could it be we go with what we’re told is the standard for trout and the standard for panfish?

Experimenting with flyfishing is a blast, and a real education.

Jim

3

I think the species-specific mentality exists due to the move towards at least imitation flies, and even realistic flies when targeting trout. This is precipitated by the thought that trout are very selective feeders.

I was going say that any trout fly will work at some point on the pannies, but not all panfish flies will work for trout, thinking about the gaudy, flourescent colors we sometimes tend to use for warm water quarry.

But I’m going to change my mind already and say that even those gaudy panfish flies will work for trout. Yes, I do believe trout can be more selective in their feeding than panfish. But having recently gotten into tying the classic wet patterns (for panfish), it has become clear that even the trout like flashiness in their flies at times. The classic wets cover the color range from all drab brown in a fly to bright red, yellow, orange, and other colors with plenty of shiny tinsel.

So in short, your boxes may include some slightly more hatch-specific patterns for trout, but certainly (at the risk of offending the purists) the same box absolutely can be used for both warm and cold water situations.

4

Try an olive or black wooley bugger with dumbell eyes out on the bass. Hold on tight…

5

Chavez,

You wrote near the end:

“Could it be that all the places I fish for panfish, the fish don’t care and will eat anything I give them (not likely I think)?”

Actually, you’ve figured it out, sort of.

Most ‘bluegill flies’ are easy, quick ties. Things where you can put together a fly box full in an evening’s tying.

Not because these ‘work better’ than the more imitative trout flies, but because they work just as well.

Panfish like the bluegills, redears, whatever they are, are NOT trout. They do feed differently. Like all of the ‘sunfishes’, these fish are opportunistic predators, and you don’t need to ‘match’ anything for them to strike.

It’s the ‘presentation’ that matters. A bit of chenille wrapped around the hook will catch the same fish as a well tied GRHE as long as both are presented properly.

So, you can (and I ‘prefer’ to in most cases), use trout style flies to catch bluegills and such. I like tying the trout flies, and since I tie as a form of relaxation, I’m not too concerned, in most cases, about how long a fly takes to tie. I’ve been catching a lot of big bluegills lately on a #10 stonefly nymph that’s pretty relistic and takes quite some time to tie. This is in warmwater lakes in Arizona, though, so the 'gills here have never seen a stonefly…

But, many of the trout flies are fun to tie and the 'gills and occasional bass don’t seem to mind them.

They work just fine, but they don’t work ‘better’, nor worse, than the panfish specific flies that we see out there.

It’s the fisherman, not the equipment.

Good Luck!

Buddy

6

All fish pretty much eat out of the same refrigerator!! :slight_smile:

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chavez, as you’re raiding your “trout fly box” for bluegill fishing, don’t overlook those b*tch creek nymphs. Some days, they’re the ticket around here.

8

I once caught at least 30 bluegill on a size 12 Stimulator. I was amazed because I didn’t think their little mouths could open that wide. The action of the fly is important, make it look like it’s struggling.
Doug

9

Whew, somebody finally asked it! I’ve been thinking the same things ever since I started warm water fishing. I’ve been thinking more along the lines of bass though. I see all these brightly colored deer hair flies that look to me more like a gimmic than serious fly fishing. It seems there are more bass-specific flies than any other species. I’ve just recently started tying again a very long absence. I used to live in the Rockies so I tied only trout flies. Now I see so many other flies for warm water and I constantly ask myself “can’t I just tie the trout flies I was used to doing and still catch as many fish? Or do I need to learn a ton of new patterns?” I understand the need for deer hair and foam poppers, but I’m talking more about the subsurface flies. Can I catch as many warm water fish on buggers as I could with a diver or other bass fly?

10

I just came back from fishing a little park lake for an hour and probably caught about 15 greenies and red breasts on a size #14 foam beetle, #16 orange humpy, #16 elk hair caddis, and #16 PMD. I had to stick to dries mostly since there seemed to be an awful lot of subsurface algae for some reason. Otherwise, I know a #14 olive hare’s ear would have generated more numbers.

11

The first year I learned to fly fish, I would go to a a local stream that was heavily stocked with trout. My intention was to catch trout, not bluegills. There were so many bluegills in this stream that not mater what trout fly I would cast, they were always there to pounce on it. It actually became annoying because I saw it as an interruption to my trout fishing.

Now when fishing for bluegills and rock bass, I use traditional panfish flys because I (mistakenly??) have the notion that (for surface flys at least) a brite color and a small splash on the surface gets their attention better, resulting in more strikes.

There may be no truth to this notion at all and some day I would love to have the time to experiment going back and forth between traditional trout flys and panfish flys and seeing if one is more productive that the other.

12

Hi All,

Bluegill can be pretty selective, and I have seen them taking dun mayfly duns when they would not take anything I had except for a mosquito dry I had that was in the ball park to matching the duns. When I lost that one fly it was over for me. (I had inadvertently left my mayflies at home.) Dave Whitlock has written that trophy bluegills are more selective, difficult to catch, and wary than trophy trout or trophy bass.

Bluegill books I have read advocate “match the hatch”, as being highly sucessful, as have some of the feature articles on this site. I have had some similar experience in my own bluegill fishing.

Thus, for me, it makes sense that trout patterns that match the bugs that bluegills are on, will work. I carry quite a few tradtional trout patterns, such as Wulffs, pheasant tails, damsel fly nymphs, buggers, woolly worms, etc., for bluegills.

I do keep separate boxes, because I don’t, for example, carry elk hair caddis, stimulators (except for specific hopper patterns), improved sofa pillows, for bluegills. Nor do I carry nearly as many colors of Wulffs for bluegills as I do for trout. In my nymph boxes, I don’t carry stone nymphs etc. for gills.

On the other hand, I carry a much larger selection of nymphs and drys in my trout boxes than in my bluegill boxes.

I try to carry too many flies of all kinds for both kinds of fishing anyway, so carrying ones I won’t use just makes it worse.

I want to maximize the patterns that I will use in the boxes I do carry, and so don’t want to carry ones I won’t use, so have gone to separate boxes.

Even though flies that don’t seem to make sense seem to work fine at times. Around here I don’t find caddis or stoneflies in my bluegill water, as you would expect, but EHCs and stims do work for gills at times I am sure. However, Dave Huges, for example, does most of his hopper fishing with EHC. The right stimulator is often a good hopper pattern too.

Still, I would rather use a traditional bluegill fly when it is working for four reasons: 1. the poppers, foam spiders, chenille bugs, etc. seem to have a much longer lifetime than to traditional trout flies, 2. poppers, chenille bugs, foam spiders, etc., in size 12, 10, or 8 do not seem to be taken as deeply as do small pheasant tails and Wulffs, so they are easier to remove from the gill with out injuring it, 3. #12, #10, and #8 traditional bluegill flies tend to discourage the dinks, and I am not bothered with them nearly as much as when using smaller tradtional trout flies, and 4. I like using the traditional poppers, spiders, and chenille bugs.

Regards,

Gandolf

13

Bull gill’s can be very selective…But so can Smallies… The other year while fishing the lower sections of Penns Creek…Great smallmouth fishing I might add…

I could see fish riseing all over the place…Could’nt get a bite…Tried everything I’d known to have worked in the past…Notta…Finially, I noticed this bug coming at me on the water…so, I reached out and grabbed em…turned out it was a caddis…of the tent wing veritity…
Seeing as I was carrying my downs chest box that day…which is my trout setup, I was able to readily match it…and bam…day saved…caught the rest of the eve right up till night fall and then everything died as it almost always does…I won’t leave home for the penns and a few other places around here without many of the hatch matches for any of them…It may mean a trip back to the car at times…but I’ll do darn near anything to catch fish!!.

14

I have had evenings when a McGinty dry or LeTort cricket just can’t be beat. The aforementioned bitch creek nymph & prince nymphs are also productive for me. Warren put it well too.
Mike

15

I am amazed at what various fish will take. Bluegills pretty much take anything they can get those little mouths around, in my experience. Trout flies should work fine.

The one that blew me away was hooking up with a 19" channel cat on my 4wt rod. He took a #16 bead head nymph! What a blast!

16

Please let’s do not forget the classic bluegill bait… empty hook.

This is a tradition. My wife and myself every year catch one bluegill each on an empty hook.

Most of the time this happens after landing a fish when you set the rod down and hook drops to the water next to the boat. :smiley:

And yes I am guilty: I do not always go fishing with the long rod.

17

What are trout flies?

What are panfish flies?

I use flies that imitate certain things that trout and panfish eat. Since many of those things are the same, flies, nymphs, little fish… I don’t really consider them to be one thing or the other…

I use a few flies that don’t look much like anything, or through the addition of stuff like rubber legs no longer really resemble what they were designed to represent. But the fish seem to like em.

Do trout and panfish have different preferences? Yep. in my experience they do… although, most days Joe’s “Old Reliable” is a hard fly to beat for either group. And I am amazed at how many nice pan fish I have caught with tiny midge larva, which most would call a “trout fly”.

But I can’t think of a fly from my trout box, that wouldn’t sometimes catch a panfish, even those designed for bugs they don’t often see. Try a size 18 CDC and Elk if you don’t believe me.

While the other direction (flies in my panfish boxes for trout) may be less productive (I’ve caught trout on poppers, but I think they were just the dumb ones :slight_smile: ) I am betting that a gilbuster, or a jitterbee would be just the ticket on some of those picky trouts that are tired of getting stung by all those nasty little BWO’s people are fishing over them.

The point is… I think the distinction has been over blown, and sometimes to the detriment of fisher-people.
I also think that the distinction has diminished peoples appreciation of pan fish, the frequent implication being that a gill will bite anything you throw at it. With those tiny little biters, that is probably true, but with the big 'uns. I don’t think it is true at all. To consistently bring home 10 inch gils and 14 inch crappies, presentation and pattern are equally important…

Just my 2 cents… your mileage may indeed vary.

Ed

18

In many cases I think that the fies are equally effective. For my largest panfish I fidn that flies tied specficially for them work better for me. Maybe it is that I have more confidence in them.

This whole dicussion is colored by what is available to many people through catalgoues or fly shops, if they don’t tie. They have small popper for panfish. There are poppers, decievers and clousers for bass.

Would the answers given here be changed if there were as many pages of warmwater flies as there are for trout flies? Or even if there were as many varieites of flies listed as those for saltwater?

I will end the rant now.

Rick

19

Dave, that certianly does fit the scale of amazing…My most amazeing catch was a 15 in. pike…on of all things a #14 Blue Dun dry…I would have bet $1000.00 I was casting to a trout the way it was rythmicaly riseing and taking ever so gently under the shade a willow limb…Anyone else have an experience like this ??

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Black Ants
Mosquitos
Wooly Buggers
GRHE
PTN
Black Gnats
Scuds
San Juan Worms
Marabou Leachs

All in my warm water fly boxes

Greg