I was sitting next to a local pond eating lunch yesterday. I sit there alot during lunch time, it sort of helps recharge the batteries before headed back to work. Anyway, I noticed a dead fish floating next to the bank. As I was watching I saw a fish, (bluegill I think) come up from underneath and take a bite. He was still eating on it when I had to go back and clock in. I know I’ve seen this discussed before, but I don’t remember any pics. So, if you got a “dead” fly you use, what about a pic?
They told me to use “Flesh Flies” for big rainbows on the Naknek in Alaska–which were essentially grayish rabbit strip Roadkill Streamers.
Sometimes with a tuft of pink up front. Worked too. Those rivers are almost sterile. No detritis and no bugs (not counting mosquitos and black flies). But still lots of big resident rainbows. Why? They have a bottomless but sterile lake to over-winter in. And they get to feast on dead salmon flesh for months at a time.
One of my first successful attempts at spinning deer hair was a dead or dying pattern. I tied in a feather clipped to be the tail and spun a white deer hair ball and clipped it to a fish shape. Then I colored it with permanent markers to bluegill colors. I clipped it flat on the colored side and left it round on the “up” side so it would always float flat side down. I haven’t been bream fishing in so long I cannot find the box that has it in it, so I cannot make a photo at the moment.
It has now cooled off enough to resume the pursuit of short wide fish. But in the heat of a Georgia summer, it is much more enjoyable to float down a river cool enough that wearing heavy wool sock under your waders is required to prevent numbiness of the toes. The enjoyment of these floats have increased since I began actually catching a few fish in the process.
I found one box but am suffering from “sometimers disease” as to the location of the others.
But the Kansas Jayhawkers are welcome to Georgia any time. Walmart is expecting Betty I think, they have a special on a bucket of CheezIt’s.
Not sure how one could categorize some of the richest ecosystems in the World “Sterile”… Certainly the majority of the energy in the systems comes upstream each year in the form of salmon carcasses, but there are lots of other food sources including everything from diminutive midges to monster rodents… in trout terms at least.
But flesh certainly does rule for a significant part of the year… Leeches and lampreys are common in almost all of the systems here and a huge food source, which could account for the reliability of string leeches and other flies like the Dolly Llama and intruders.
I am chairing the committee writing a second volume of the AK Fly Fishers pattern book and flesh patterns will be included in a big way. One of the toughest aspects of the job is deciding whether a particular fly is flesh, leech, lamprey, or just an attractor…
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