How many fish have you caught on one fly? Never changing the fly, maybe the tippet because of the windknots. but not the fly!?
So far I’m up to 32 not counting a dozen LDR’s and many hits. This week I plan to get it to 50 (caught 18 on it’s twin before it came apart!).
My best day of fishing ever was on the same fly for about 14 fish-really great fish.
I dont’ know what I did with the exact fly that caught them but I definitely immortalized that particular pattern in my fly box.
Jack,
I can understand having to stretch a dollar in this economy, but isn’t that taking it to an extreme? :rolleyes:
I caught like 12 bass on the same fly. the hackle came off the wooley bugger but they didn’t mind. then they died down the next outing and the steelies came so I never tried for more but its still tied to my 5wt rod. if you have a hares ear nymph or something i have caught chubs galore on them all day. they hold up well. tyrrone nothing is extreme! I will walk out and get any fly I snag if possible instead of breaking it off. I will cut down and reuse hooks when possible too. I am very cheap. haha. but why not be.
My best recollection is that I took 35 bows and brookies on a single Harrop’s Henry’s Fork caddis a couple years ago on one of our mountain spring creeks. The same day, before I fished that fly, I had 33 bows and brookies on a single soft hackle pheasant tail.
A few days ago I noticed the rubber legs stonefly nymph I was fishing is one that I was using last winter. ( It’s very distinctive because one of the tails broke off about an eighth of an inch from the hook. ) I know I’ve fished it quite a few days, and it may well have caught more than 35 browns and whitefish in the South Fork by now, with more to come.
I’ve had similar experiences fishing the mountain streams here in East Idaho, catching upwards of 50 fish on the same fly in a single day and missing probably twice that many. Happened two different days just this last September, once with a #16 Yellow Humpy on Fall River, and once with a #16 Parachute Adams on Rainey Creek. I think it’s probably because the fish are generally smaller in the mountain creeks and don’t beat the fly up as much, although the brushy conditions can certainly make it a challenge.
I’d guess about 30 or 40 10-12 inch trout on a #14 Copper John . Tied tightly it is almost indestructable. If I do it right and check the tippet every once in a while and re tie when necessary I almost never lose one.
Exact number is unknown but I am 99% certain that it is over 100.
Tim
I stopped at an even 30 trout - some of respectable size - in just under 2 hours of evening fishing this past summer on the Yellowstone, all caught on one size 16 Parachute Adams.
19 assorted browns and 'bows on a #16 haystack…until the tree ate it :oops:…funny thing, I re-tied with another #16 haystack, and the fish just flipped me a fin 
As you know Jack, the trees regularly eat my flies. 
I had a couple of times over the last few years where I had around 100+ on a single fly! They seemed to keep catching fish better as it got rattier and rattier. The hook point finally broke off and there really wasn’t much left of the fly other than some dangling thread and fuzz that was once a dubbed body. One day it was bass…and the other day it was browns. You should have seen the guys standing nearby that day.:shock: I’m SURE they wanted to kill me, because they were not catching anything. I could even hear them whispering about pushing me in. It was just one of those days. Right day, right fly, right technique…because I observed some small detail along the shoreline just as I was entering the river. Those guys wanted to play with dry flies. 
Wrong choice. You should have seen their faces when I showed them the fly I was using! In fact I gave them some, but I didn’t go into real great detail on how to fish it. :twisted: But it did not matter…they didn’t listen to what I DID tell them. The next day…that same pattern didn’t work. The little detail I observed the day before was over.
Jack, how often during your fishing do you re-tie the tippet to fly knot? seems that’s where most of my lost flies gain their freedom. remembering to re-tie the knot helps a whole lot. it just seems to wear–anyone else have this problem?
Back in the days when I counted fish more, I caught well over a hundred brim on a single #12 Gurgle Pop several times. This was no great testiment to my fishing skills since I counted big guys, little guys and all in between. Surprisingly the enough the Gurgle Pops were still in pretty good condition. 8T 
My son took me to a small high mountain lake in the Uintah mountains that neither of us had fished before. I had a float tube, and finned out about thirty five yards before it was deep enough to keep from dragging my feet in the mud. I had a black wooly bugger tied on from a previous trip, and the leader had been cut back to where it was pretty stout. I decided to toss it out anyway, and the first cast brought in a rainbow of about 13 inches. From there, it was Katie-bar-the-door. Never changed the fly, and never re-tied. It got a bit tiresome after about 40 or so, so I gave it up and went exploring. I figure there must have been a F&G truck there shortly before.
I’m not a fish counter (I run out of fingers and I’m too lazy to take off my boots when the fish are still biting) but during hopper season I’ve gotten through several entire very productive days on a single fly. The most species I’ve caught on a single fly in a single day? 5 (bluegill, bass, crappie, carp, catfish) again on a hopper.
i’ve got a popper stuck in the head liner of the truck that has caught a few fish. It was fished for almost an entire summer. The thing is chewed up pretty good. I don’t know how many bass it caught. Maybe 50. Maybe more, maybe less. I’m not that good of a bass fisherman and I am not very good at math.
Oh man, I read about you guys getting 10 - 20 - 30 fish in a day. I haven’t caught a dozen fish this year.
I gotta go fishing more.
I had a popper one summer that I fished until all the paint came off the head and it was just primer…I’m sure it was over a hundred bass and bluegill. Trout flies usually get retired at the end of the day to the hatband if they’ve caught fish. Not very econimical, is it?
The leech patterns I tie with a dubbing brush I regularly catch over 100 fish on (mainly bream) with minimal wear. I also have one streamer tied with Polar fiber that I caught 86 bass on in one morning. As I was getting ready to call it a day, I snagged the fly on a piece of brush about 8 feet out in the pond. Since the water was only about 16 inches deep, I waded out to rescue the fly since I felt it deserved a better ending than rusting away on a branch. It is now taped to my computer monitor as a remider of fun times when I’m stuck in the office on a beautiful day.
Jim Smith