Streamers - Mending Downstream?

I am still in the learning process on this stream / trout fishing thing. The Chattahoochee River the only stream I have ever fished for trout. This is a tailwater fishery, typically 100 - 150 ft. wide of varying depths with lots of trees and other structure in the stream. I understand the upper layer of water is frequently traveling faster than deeper water and you ned to mend upstream fishing a nymph so the fly travels at the same speed as natural foods and materials. BUT, if you are fishing a streamer, imitating a swimming animal, fish, etc., which (at least in my old bald head) be traveling a little faster than the stream if moving down stream, Doesn’t letting your surface line pull the streamer faster than the deep water current make sense?

I suppose we all develop our very own technique of fishing streamers and that no doubt is what works for us! Obviously conditions are going to play an important part. When fishing water like your description for the Hooch what I do is fish the water in a diagonal up/across stream so the streamer hits the water, sinks a tad, and the floating line will kick up the streamer speed not only as it travels downstream but especially as it arks to the middle when reaching line length. Then the upstream retrieve adds to the possibilities as well. And a real successful streamer for such an application for me has been the Black Nose Dace.

This works best on an undercut bank, but also on drop-offs, overhanging brush, grass beds or anywhere where there’s a line of cover.
You cast your streamer up and across to the top and immediately give it a strong down-stream mend.
The purpose of coarse is to get your streamer moving as quick as possible with out yanking it away from the cover line.
Great technique.

I wrote this FAQ on mending years ago but it covers the basics.

http://www.uky.edu/~agrdanny/flyfish/faq/FAQ-6.HTM

Haven’t done a lot of streamer fishing, and not much the past couple years. And most of it has been on freestone streams and rivers, not tailwaters. I only fish sculpin / baitfish streamers, and usually my own original PSC, which has taken all kinds of trout in our Intermountain West and Western Montana cricks, and some mountain whitefish and pike minnow, to boot. But streamers like Scott Sanchez’ Double Bunny and Keith Fulsher’s Thunder Creek Minnows have also done well for me. ( I don’t use any weight on the streamers I fish - I think unweighted flies move more naturally in moving water. )

Having said that, the technique that I favor involves a Class II full sinking line, not a floating line. Depending on current speed and depth, I like an across or across and down cast, with the across on faster water and the across and down on slower water. On particularly fast currents, I will go to an up and across cast to give the line and fly more time to get down a bit.

The point is to get the fly subsurface before it starts moving across the current, and I like to apply a short, steady stripping to impart obvious movement to the fly as it swings across the current. Long casts to sweep the most water possible increase the chances of passing the fly within striking distance of more fishies.

This approach is counterintuitive in one regard. As a very good fly angler acquaintance explained it to me one time - generally, when in flight, deer run downhill, birds fly downwind, and fishies swim downstream, so a cast that will bring the fly downstream faster than the current is flowing should produce a predatory follow and strike by any fish eating fish that sees it. But I’ve had enough success with the approach I’ve developed that I tend to stick with it, regardless what I consider good advice.

Anyway, I did pull out a streamer yesterday when fishing the Lochsa. There had been steady increases in the streamflow for five days straight as run off starts ramping up and the fishies wouldn’t come up for dries and I wasn’t having much luck finding them with nymphs. So I decided to sweep as much water as I could with a brown ( chocolate ) PSC and connected with …

… plus a smaller cutthroat in fairly short order.

A couple other things to keep in mind, for what they are worth.

First, generally when small baitfish are out in the main current, they tend to stay high in the water column. So “getting the fly down” may not be all that important. Sculpin patterns are a different story, since sculpins are born to live on the bottom, and do for the most part. Depending on the baitfish in the system you are fishing, maybe the floating line is a better alternative.

Second, small fish will dine on a hatch just like big fish do, and when they do, a lot of the big fish will go after the small fish. So stripping a small baitfish streamer through a hatch can result in some great catching. There’s a Reader’s Cast article on “Matching the Hatch, Plan B” that I did some time back that is in the archives. And if you go way back in the archives of Fly Fisherman magazine ( I think that is the magazine where I saw it ) like to the late '70s or early '80’s you might find the article by Art Lee that I ran across several years ago looking through a stack of old fly fishing magazines. The entire article was his approach to “Plan B.”

One other thing comes to mind. It seems a lot of folks talk about making streamers act like wounded or injured baitfish. My thought is that if a fish waited for a wounded or injured baitfish to come along before it ate, it would starve watching a lot of normal, healthy, and active little fishies swim through the area before it found an injured one to attack. So I try to present my baitfish streamers the way I think a healthy baitfish would act, not an injured one.

Worked yesterday, again.

John