Structure Fishing
[ Structure Fishing ] [ FAQ ]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Previous Message]
Date: August 29, 2006 at 00:30:40
From: ken, [pool-64-222-39-242.prov.east.verizon.net]
Subject: I pulled this out of the archives it addresses the question from Mark
It is long and should be a couple of posts but..
I think it may be helpful as is.
It was revised in 2004 but I wrote it a long time ago.
This year I am going to try to get more people posting on the sinking lines board about fishing with those methods. I have tried to get more people posting about methods and different ways of using them but have not had much success. Adrian recently posted a diagram of a technique with a sinking line that is insightful and practical.
I use sinking lines and always have.
One thing that I did many years ago was go to the source of the most knowledge about sinking line expertise and weighted flies for use in current.
This is wisdom in the sense of what Lao Tzu said about, "eliminating," every thing that is not necessary as opposed to acquiring, “Knowledge,” that may or may not be helpful.
Long ago I went to the writings that were done by steelhead fishermen on the subject of fishing deep.
West Coast steelhead fishermen have been fishing with sinking lines in big strong rivers with long casts for decades.
Their casting methods and discoveries include the development of sinking lines and shooting heads and weighted flies like the wire bodied Comets and the Boss style bead chain head flies that gave rise to the Whistler style salt water flies by Dan Blanton and lead heads and Clowsers.
Their sophisticated presentation methods with sinking and floating lines have been on the table for evaluation and discussion for many, many years.
The wheel of deep presentation has been invented and perhaps perfected and it was done years ago.
Their writings and experiments with rods and lines are a matter of public record and they are not defensive about the kinds of techniques that work in a specific flow of water and what othere techniques will also work but only once in a while.
It takes an angler work and effort to become aware of this knowledge.
In the modern era there are a lot of “wanna-be famous,” pretenders who borrow the sizzle of steelhead fishing and brag about themselves but actually do not understand the principles behind the sizzle.
It can be a problem when reading the modern writers teh wana be's have not yet not been culled out by time.
I prefer to read the older less “flashy,” books from the thirties and forties and fifties and sixties and early seventies.
“Presentation,” in any form in moving water has to be approached from the standpoint of current and what effects current will have on your line and - therefore - your fly in relation to a fish.
Current is the powerful determiner of what happens on/to the end of your line and cannot be disregarded if you want to have consistent success.
One thing that west coast steelhead fishermen as an archetypical group know for certain is that the line is more important to the execution of how deep a fly will fish than the weight built into the fly.
They see both parts of the equation the line and the fly as critical elements and because these earlier fishermen were the ones who pioneered the splicing together of sinking and floating lines and lead core to form tapers and sink tips with particular sinking configurations for specific flows they are the single souce of this valuable root information.
Their efforts were to create lines and heads that acted in ways that would help them get a fly down to steelhead in, "particular," cold winter flows with CONTROL.
Their work preceded the line products that the manufacturers created later based on their fact-based discoveries. It is always grass roots people that make the discoveries.
One thing that becomes apparent when studying their work as written, is that lines are attempts to work with current not to “defeat,” it and that “Drag,” is not a monster but a force to work with much as air is a force to work with for an aeronautical engineer.
The early steelhead fishermen had to learn how to “Fly,” their line so it would do something that they wanted it to do much like the Wright brothers had to learn how to fly their aero-plane.
Those early days are long gone and very few people know about the mechanical reasoning behind the development of sinking lines as answers to presentation problems in fast deep flows.
There has been a de-facto, “Dumbing Down,” of the fishing populace as to the reasons behind the various tapers in sinking lines and almost a complete loss of the awareness of the effects of drag on sinking lines. When you do nothave that awareness any success is indeed a crap shoot.
In modern salt-water fly-fishing in particular the knowledge of drag and its effects on sinkinglines has never been a part of the
industry's awareness.
There is a great historical book written in the seventies I believe by Trey Coombs called Steelhead Trout or Steelhead published by Frank Amato that goes into great detail about these early experimenters with lines and weighted flies.
He describes their reasoning from interviews with the people involved and with their friends if they had passed and lists their formulas and their methods of splicing lines together and the characteristics of the lines they made.
It is fascinating reading and is enlightening about what goes on with a line under the water.
There are other books on the subject also and I myself made many lines and played with them based on the information in that book and they worked well and not so well and some of them I could not handle at all because I did not have the skill or power or length of rod to do it.
I remember reading about these fellows when I was a kid and the pictures of the gigantic trout they caught in the old fishing magazines like Field and Stream, Outdoor life and Sports Afield and Fur Fish and Game
They always won all the Field and Streams largest fish category for rainbow trout year after year and that is probably why they became known at all. They could do things with giant trout that the rest of us could only dream about.
I dreamed.
What I found in all of this, was that manufactured lines are a compromise of their ideas that are - generic - and not specific. They can work well if you know what they are designed to do and what you want to do with them.
This is not to say that they will not work without that knowledge. A broken clockis right twice a day.
Assuming that the line will work for you and do what you need it to do without you knowing what the line is capable of is a “delusional belief.”
Beliefs are arbitrary and change and depend on emotional states to give them power.
They lead to emotional disappointment when they fail to deliver imaginings.
The early steelhead fishermen made lines themselves to do specific presentations. The manufactured lines are based on their work but they are made to do general presentations not specific ones and because of that they have to be understood with an awareness of their limitations along with their potential.
That awareness of limitation has been lost and so we, and I include myself in this, try to accomplish specific presentations with them but often the lines themselves in conjunction with “Drag,” defeat our purpose but we through a lack of information continue to try and make them work and are not successful.
There is nothing wrong with the lines.
Our understanding of their inherent physical characteristics and what mechanically happens to a line when it is underwater, “in-current,” is incomplete.
Once I went to the West coast in summer and fished the McKenzie River.
This was in the early Eighties and I stayed for ten days.
I loved the river as it was big and strong and full and had the feeling of the world’s biggest trout river.
It was not nasty and had the feel of a coastal plain river and it was full of trout and some steelhead and few salmon and I enjoyed myself immensely.
I was fishing with a twelve foot rod that I had balanced so I could fish with it one handed and I had a ball using dry line techniques and I caught lots of Rainbows and some big ones and some small ones. Redsides they call them.
This was big water and it was like I said, comfortable and placid.
I had no trouble fishing it slowly and methodically and I thought it was wonderful.
Dry line techniques were easy and I could mend and fish deep when I wished.
Later in the week I went up to where the river was big but brawny. (It was to me at least.)
The river had a rock bottom and sand and gravel and it was wide and fast and I knew I needed a big rod with power to fish it at all.
I had a 10-½ foot nine/ten /eleven weight three-piece rod that was a club but it was powerful.
I waded along and fished and caught many, many rainbows and although the rod was too strong for them to show their stuff I needed it to fish the way I was fishing.
I am sure that if I lived there I would have refined my approach to suit the fish but I was a tourist and I had what I had.
I came to a big tail out at the bottom with a big run and pool in the river and it was immense and I felt like a flea in relation to the expanse.
I positioned myself above the tail out itself which was a couple of hundred feet wide or so it seemed and the river had a heavy current that hugged the far bank and it looked deep.
I knew it was strong enough to kill me if I waded too far so I waded out as far as I could,
I had changed over to a running line for heads and I was excited to try out some of my homemade heads.
The first one I tried was a section of lead core about fifteen feet long with ten or so feet of # 4 sinking line and I attached it to the lead core with a loop I believe or it could have been a splice.
I do not really remember.
I cast it across and down and I did cast it well and it landed very far away and I was pleased with myself.
I began to feed a little line and was planning to sweep the bottom in a wet fly swing as soon as it got down current a bit but it hung up right away. I tried several more casts a bit further down on angle but I could not get it to fish because it kept on hanging.
I was using a little black and white Muddler minnow that I tied and it was about an inch long and very “Fishy.” I liked the fly.
I had two of them and I did not want to lose one and I was not able to make a cast without hanging so I backed up out of the river and took out my little plastic bag with my heads and started to ponder the situation.
I do not remember all the details as I was in that state of mindless Hummm!
I took out a shorter piece with a short section of eight feet of #12 floating line with loops on both ends and I looped on a ten foot piece of #2 sinking line and looped a six foot section of lead core to the end of that. I remember that pretty well because of what happened next.
I waded back out, no stripping basket by the way not even a Wes Drain type
although I did think about it and I made a long cast quartering downstream and fed line into the drift and tightened to swing the fly and
“Tic,” a fish. It was magic.
(This was a big trip for me and I finally made it to the Umpqua, which was a boyhood dream I cabbaged onto after reading Bergman and the chapter in his book, “Trout,” called “Steelheads of the Umpqua,”)
The floating line kept the line high and the sinking line let the lead core get down but with a profile that lent itself to swinging the fly just above the bottom in the fast water without it hanging up.
It fished the whole tail out perfectly.
I was using a floating running line and I could mend the long running line and flip the line upstream and keep the drag of the current from pulling the fly down.
The weight and mass of the sinking section gave me back pressure to tighten and flip the line off the surface of the water and because it was thin running line I could easily keep in contact with the line and because of the profile that the line had in the in the water, surface to bottom, with the floating line high and the #2 sinking line hanging down from that and pulled straight from the tension from below from the weight of the lead core the whole tapered head fished perfectly with no drag and it swam close to the bottom and swept across the tail out and caught fish on almost every cast.
The profile allowed the drift to be tended and controlled every inch of the drift.
The fish were small and I kept hoping for a giant tail walking summer run steelhead but I didn’t catch one or hook one but I did learn that the profile of the line from the bottom to the top was critically important.
The fly was not weighted and I used a long searching leader so that the fly would move in a wide circle as it moved down current below the tip of the lead core. I felt every tap easily. I think I did because the fish were very co-operative.
There are other ways to fish flows than this but I tell the story to illustrate the importance of having a strategy when fishing a particular piece of water with a sinking line or sinking head.
The principle of “Hanging,” down to fish deep is the essence of control in fishing flows because it allows you to mend and keep tension on your fly and allows you to keep the fly moving downstream ahead of your line.
(There are other ways to do it but this is just a short piece not a book.)
When I tried the long lead core with the # 4 sinking line it fished too deep too quickly. If the water had been faster or deeper it may have been perfect but the water was shallower than thought it was.
I do not think I could have done as well with a straight sinking line because drag would have pulled the line down stream and I would have had to wait until it cracked the whip and moved the fly across the tail out.
If I had needed to do that then the far side of the tail out would have been out of range for me and I hooked most of my fish just as I tightened and the fly had not yet moved cross current and was on the other side of the flow, not after the fly had moved across the river and was below me.
Also I do not believe the sinking line would have allowed me to fish as deep or with any fly control where I was positioned.
If I could have been further out in the river and been able to cast square across the current I think I could have reached fish that may have been holding further back in the tail out close to the lip but the line would have had to have straightened and that would have left me with a much reduced area to fish. I would have been higher in the water but at the tail out lip that may not have hurt at all.
I like the idea of a longish leader on sinking lines to allow the fly to whip around and be moved by bottom currents and do a searching pattern.
Short leaders work also and I am not saying that long is better just that long works very well.
I learned how to do that long leader thing, “drift fishing,” for steelhead with light mono and that is something everyone should try to learn as it gives you a “feel,” for fishing deep in strong flows that is uncanny.
Using weighted flies both bead chain heads and lead heads is something that these fellows developed and perfected and they use those flies to ferret out holding fish in the pockets in fast water and in strong flows.
It is not just the fly that does the work but the combination of the upturned hook and the reaction strike and having a controlled, precise drift that delivers the fly to where a fish is holding right on the money.
You can fish weighted flies in a random way and “sometimes,” you have to and they do work and they do work well but to see someone who has mastered this weighted fly technique and who knows his river and where the fish hold do it is amazing.
It is like the energy of watching a fox catch a mouse, tight line and short precise casts and a longish leader a flick and see him lift and feint and bow and twitch.
It is a marvel of fishing prowess and it is a wonder to witness and watch.
I have been fortunate to see several masters do this in front of me and hook steelhead after steelhead.
I am not talking about lifting or snagging but real focused “Heron like,” prowess.
Which leads me to this. Striper fishing with sinking lines and weighted flies is in its infancy and the tackle and the development of rod lengths and actions and flies and lines is “Stone age,” no mater what the technology of the graphite is.
When it comes to presentation techniques and understanding how to fish deep with control and consistency salt-water methodology and expertise is in need of help.
It is clunky on the whole and not very sophisticated.
It is fun!
The state of the art as it is now reminds me of a time in fresh water Bass Fishing when the tackle of choice for everything was a 4 ½ to 5 ½ foot long casting rod and all the lures weighed 5/8 of an Ounce and the line had to be twenty pound test if you wanted to consider yourself a real “Bass Fisherman.” It was dumb.
Tournaments ended that trance in one day for this simple reason - it didn’t work well enough to win.
I still like fishing with that tackle but it is not the end all or be all.
Stripers are amazing in the many types of environments they flourish in and there are a zillions ways to catch them both conventionally and with a fly.
Fly rod fishing for stripers in relation to fly rod fishing for trout and salmon is still in its infancy and “right now,” it is apparent with even a cursory glance that lots of salt water fly fishermen are unaware that there is so much solid and tested information and expertise about fly fishing out there.
Many are trying to re-invent the wheel.
Fly fishing is universal = not - exclusionary and the broad knowledge is already out there about how to fish with the fly rod in difficult situations and how to master the mechanics of line control and many other things in addition to the familiar modern approach of casting and stripping with weighted flies.
There is no quick certificate that will get you savvy but there is an open door to the information and it can be found in reading the older works on the fundamentals which actually are highly advanced sophisticated techniques when compared to the knowledge that is considered state of the art in the salt water world right now.
Tackle is not limited to one size but for some reason people are hesitant to experiment.
There are other disciplines in fly-fishing to look at and gather from and everything does not have to be new and technical to be solid and good.
I like old Medalist reels because of my history and caught my biggest fish (of the year) at the time of this writing) on one and it was attached to a fiberglass rod.
I paid 14 dollars for that reel when I was a kid and I had to save up for it.
It is not the expence of tackle that is real but the reason for having it and what it will and can do for you that is important.
It is, as always - function.
The form will follow and sometimes it is a work of art but even so the object itself is never the function, just a beautiful expression of it.
You absolutely cannot buy being a good fisherman at any store or by fishing with any guide.
You do not have to be a good fisherman in someone else eyes.
It will not give you confidence in yourself.
Self-confidence comes from within be exactly who you are and never pretend to be more than who you are.
That is sane and it gives peace to your spirit and drives the angst out.
A stick and a string is what fly-fishing is and it is the little boy in you who knows it best.
No pretense to hinder growth is a worthy goal.
Getting back to Lao Tzu and paraphrasing him.
Sometimes you have to let go of what blinds you in order to see clearly what you have.
I once read a story about how to catch monkeys.
You take a wide necked jar and tie it to tree or a stick in the ground and you place a bunch of nuts all around it and wait for the monkeys to discover the food. Once they do they will come and gather the nuts and settle in and act in normal primate ways. If there is a tree they will climb it and settle in and shriek and howl and chase each other around and play and fight and do allsorts of things while the food supply is there.
You can catch as many as you want by placing a large number of jars there and putting a nut in each one of them. The trick to catching them is within the nature of monkeys.
They will not let go of something they have grasped that they want. We primates do not like to let go of what we want or have.
At a certain point when the monkeys are content and a bunch of them have their hands in the jars or even one you get up and scare them away. All of them run except the ones with their hands in the jars. They run but the jar is tied to the tree or stake and they fetch up and are stuck by the fist that holds the nut. It won’t go through the hole at the top of the jar and they cannot let it go as it is against their nature to let it go.
That is what Lao Tzu was talking about.
Freedom.
P.S.
One thing I have noticed in many peoples fly boxes is
a lack of different styles and sizes of flies.
I know this is because there has been a lack of shared information about versatility in fly-fishing.
I have met hundreds and perhaps thousands of fly fishermen who have never caught a striper on a floating line for the simple reason that they have been told that there is no reason to learn how to use one.
That is a limiting belief and it stops growth in any direction other than the one already known.
They have a fist.
I have also seen those fly boxes completely filled with the same sized flies with lead heads in different colors and no flies tied with out the lead heads.
When I see that, I want to give the person a hundred flies of different patterns and sizes and configurations and I do not want to hurt their feelings at the same time.
It is a dilemma.
I try to give them a few but they often take them home and put them in a shadow box and never use them.
I prearrange with my friends and when it is at hand I often give them other people’s flies as it frees them up from grasping and holding on.
There is a bit of monkey in all of us including me.
|
|