What flies are good for stained water?
This won’t be much of an answer and it would be helpful to know what you’re fishing for in stained water to give you something more helpful. But I tend to go with brighter stuff, Micky Finn’s, chartruese & white clousers, yellow, orange, chartruese egg and sucker spawn patterns. Nymphs with flash, or gold, orange or chartruese bead heads. If you have a target species your referencing here let me know and I might have some other recommendations.
General guidelines for me are the more stained it is the larger, flasher the fly becomes. Last week of the inland trout season I was fishing some heavily stained water and was wishing for clearer water conditions. The next day I was fishing gin clear water and wished that the water was more stained. 
Good luck
Good question, it’ll be good to hear what others use. In general, you might want to think “big, bright, bulky” for stained water, at least as a starting point.
Big- go to larger sizes than you’d use in clear water
Bright- chartreuse seems the most visible, and other fluorescent colors like orange can also be good. Black and “blurple” (black/purple) can be good too, maybe because it presents a good silhouette.
Bulky- flies that push water are good, since they send out stronger signals for pick up by a fish’s lateral line. I’ve never used flies with rattles, but that might help too for some fish like bass or redfish?
As far as patterns, it depends what you’re fishing for, but some examples might be:
rabbit strip flies, half and halfs, deerhair divers, chartreuse clousers for bass
Hot pink, chartreuse crappie candies for warm water panfish/crappie might be good
Big black muddler minnows, zoo cougars, large stonefly nymphs with a “hot spot” for trout and also work well for steelhead, along with hairwing salmon patterns like Green Butt Skunks, and big marabou and spey patterns
If you’re fishing moving water that’s off colored the material can make a difference. In high fast water you might want a hair wing type of fly that will help to hold it’s shape. In slower water, something with marabou or spey hackle will breathe and pulse, but get compressed in high flows.
Around here, a very effective fly for striped bass in the stained water near harbors where there are menhaden, is a large chartreuse deceiver or half and half. Even though a white/olive deceiver looks more like a menhaden, the chartreuse colored flies seem to work much better especially when the water is off colored.
Hope this helps…
peregrines
Hi Jiggin,
You’ve already gotten some good advice from Alra195 and Clay. Generally, flashing and bright, large and the capacity to move a lot of water are the way to go. I’m going to alienate a lot of people with the suggestion but when this happens to me on a lake, usually because of boats and jet skis muddying the shoreline water, I go with a size #6 or #8 Wooly Bugger with a metal propeller to help move lots of water. Yes, I know that I may be cast into the lower regions for that admission but I’m talking really MUDDY water. I bought my orginal buggers with propellers from Cabelas but now tie my own. Good luck, remember muddy water bothers fishermen more than the fish. 8T 
I find that woolly buggers are good stained-water flies, because of the vibrations put out by the stiff hackle fibers. Fish seem to be able to locate that fly fairly well.
Sometimes a brighter fly will work, other times a dark fly. Try both ends of the spectrum to see what the fish prefer.
In a non-fly-fishing example…we’ve found walleyes in a lake in Canada that had a preference for rootbeer-colored plastics, which practically blended in to the tannin-stained water! I don’t know how they see those lures, but they sure like’em!
There’s a great spring creek a couple of hours from me, and a lot of locals don’t head there until the water’s a little stained, because that’s when you have the best shot at landing one of the finicky, 20-plus-inch browns on this tough little stream. Once the water’s up and off, they like to throw what the folks above have mentioned–heavy woolly buggers with plenty of flash and weighted crawdad imitations, as well as kreelex flies, which I’ve never used but look extra meaty and flashy. Good luck,
dave
When the waters off color (like real thin mud) I go with bigger, dark colored flies. Seems to work pretty well.
BLACK is the most visible in well stained water. It’s also the most visible at night. Purple is another good color but it really has a lot to do with what YOU call stained. Up here, there’s good stain…like the steelhead green stain…and the badly stained… AKA chocolate milk, MUD…etc. For steelhead green, I use bright flies. (Chartuse, hot pink, sparkle nymphs etc). For badly stained… Black is the color … OH NO… EAR WORMS. (Black is the color of my true loves hair… la la la …)
Hi,
I always go with black for muddy water. If you mean stained, like clear water but the colour of strong tea, then yellow bodied with red (natural) hackled patterns are supposed to be good (at least, in the 1800s and early 1900s thats what they seemed to suggest).
- Jeff
Get a hold of a copy of “What Fish See”. The author suggests a number of color combinations that work very well in various water conditions. Combining black with chartreuse or gold, as well as silver combined with chartreuse or yellow. Those color schemes have worked very well for me.
Well where I fish, is stained water water is something different.
Stained water is the dark tannin colored water that abounds in our hemlock lined streams. While the water is dark it is also crystal clear. There I choose my flies and tactics similarly to “normal” streams.
Cloudy (stained?) water is a different critter altogether and usually means high or receding water if we are talking streams, or suspended silt or algae if we are talking still water. There I use the same tactics that others had recommended.
So what is your definition of stained?
Thanks for the info. I will be targeting trout in two local lakes and i don’t want to use powerbait just flies. It’s more fun on a flyrod than spinning gear like everybody else.
I tie some of my patternsn that have hackle on them with dry fly hackle instead of a wet fly hackle. THe stiffer hackle moves more water helping the fish home in on the fly.
ie Tie soft hackles with a large dry fly hackle.
Rick
I am with Deb on this one. It almost never fails.
As other have noted, I favor BLACK wooly buggers when the water darkens up after a rainstorm. I’m talking the Rio Grande and its tribs in Southern CO. and fishing for browns.
The last two weeks there has been little to no “staining” from runoff and the fishing has been tough under a bright sky with the water so clear.
I live close to a pond with that kind of water. Small black/ orange WBuggers with a few strands of gold flashabou are great.
Rocketfish