Streamers and Flies, Exact Color, Is it Critical?

FAOL Community Fly Anglers Online
1

Hi All,

I have been dying some white fox to tie up some warm water streamers. Currently I am working on yellow, chartreuse, orange, red, and pink. Brown, olive, black, and maybe other colors are next in line.

The question is, are we as fishermen and fly tiers a lot more picky about exact colors than are the fish?

What brought this on is that I am currently using Kool-Aid for the colors listed, and fox hair soaks up a lot of dye before it is intensively colored. I am having to dye the material two times each to get a bright and intense color.

One bag of Kool-Aid gives pastel colors if you try to dye too much fur at one time, and sometimes even if you just dye a small amount.

It began to dawn on me that maybe the pastel colors will work as well, or better, than the more intensely colored material.

What do you think, will a pastel yellow (or orange, or chartreuse, or any other color for that matter), work as well as the intensely colored ones?

I am wondering if the stuff we buy is intensely colored because fly tiers, and fly fisherman, expect it, not because the stronger colors work better.

What do you think, and what is your experience?

Thanks and regards,

Gandolf

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in general, the rule of thumb to “matching the hatch” is size, shape, and color, in that order. are there anomalies, only 100% of the times…LOL. Best wishes

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Gandolf, In my opinion, the exact intensity of the colors matter more to the fisherman than the fish, especially in warm water where it is often stained in color. I believe that color contrast matters more in that it calls attention to the fly which is the first step in catching any fish. Jim Smith

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… but I have done several experiments with dry flies, as in Salmonflies, Golden Stones. Hoppers, and Skwalas.

The following is copied from a thread I started last year on the subject of color. There are some interesting opinions on the subject in that thread.

"I tend to think of these flies as color variations on a golden stone pattern rather than a hopper pattern, since golden stones are a staple for the fishies on the river I was fishing, and while there are hoppers, there are not a lot of them. ( I did see a few hoppers yesterday, for the first time this year. They were small and the color was quite close to the standard color combination for the golden stone. )

Took pix of each fly yesterday before I fished it. The outdoor pix show the colors and details better.

Another thing that I forgot to mention in my report yesterday ( got to say I was bushed after driving three hours and fishing seven hours in mid 80’s to low 90’s temps ) was the size range of fish caught.

Most of the fish were in a 10" to 14" bracket, and all but one of those were West Slope cutthroat.

I think one of the fish in that bracket was actually a 13-14" steelhead. It is the largest pure rainbow looking trout I have landed on this river. I didn’t look closely enough to see if it had any evidence of cutt hybridization but I am pretty sure it did not. That would make it an extremely rare fish in this system - it had to be a resident to be that big, and there just is no resident population of rainbows. All the rainbow looking fishies are steelhead, either very small, under 8", just starting their journey or very big, well over 20", on their return home.

The few fish over 14" were all cutts.

The fish under 10" were typically cutts with a few juvenile steelhead, down to about 5", in the mix. Some smaller fish did hit the fly, but weren’t big enough to eat it and hook up."

My own take on it is that color ranks fourth, not third, in the priorities in fly tying and selection - the four in order of importance being size, silhouette, action, and color. I think that color is probably more important in nymphs and streamers than dry flies, because I suspect fishies can see the details and color of totally submerged objects better than they can see the details and color of floating objects. But I haven’t done any experiments with nymphs and streamers since I don’t do nearly as much fishing with those kinds of flies.

If you want to read the entire thread, follow the link.

http://www.flyanglersonline.com/bb/showthread.php?46979-About-that-color-thing-…

John

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John,
I believe you are correct. All the studies on trout vision, that I have read, indicate that color becomes more important as the trout comes closer to the subject. So, I believe it is more important in sub-surface flies than in dries. This is dependent, to some extent on the design of the “dry” fly. If the fly is an emerger or half emerged fly, I think color becomes more important.

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I think another factor is whether the fish are feeding selectively or feeding opportunistically. With selective feeding fish – eg, fish feeding on specific emerging insect – color is probably of some importance. However, I suspect that with streamer fishing you are probably catching more aggressive, opportunistic feeding fish and precise color matching is of less importance.

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I think you can use any color you want in your warm water streamers and still catch fish if you present it properly. Bluegills, crappie, and especially bass are not color selective in most instances (I fished a whole tournament season with EVERY lure a pastel pink-saw no drop off in catch rates, actually the reverse). Your ‘pastels’ may become the new hot color if you just keep them wet.