Fly Fishing Secrets at the River’s Edge

Like most fly fishers, I frequently find usable flies along the river’s edge. I spot most of them dangling from leaders wrapped around tree branches. A few are stuck in the tree branches themselves. Years of finding fly after fly along the river’s edge have provided me with a few fly fishing secrets.

Rather than turn these into a best-selling book and making a million bucks, I now share them with you in hopes these deep truths will improve your fly fishing experience:

1. Tree branches are the earth’s strongest magnetic force.

For years, I thought I was simply careless and not paying enough attention. “Rookie mistake,” I thought, after yet another errant back cast. But after seeing so many leaders wrapped around branches, it dawned on me that tree branches must have a Magnetic Force.

I am in need of a technology to de-magnetize my flies.

2. The Beadhead Prince Nymph is the fisher’s secret weapon.

Three out of every four flies I find at the river’s edge are Beadhead Prince Nymphs.

I can conclude only that this is the most superior pattern to use and perhaps the only one I will ever need. At first, I wondered if this was a reasonable conclusion. Why trust the fly selection of a slacker who loses his fly in a Ponderosa Pine?

But then I remembered the Magnetic Force. The fly fishers who lost these flies were likely skilled, knowledgeable veterans who simply underestimated the dark Magnetic Force of the branches behind them.

3. Buying or tying flies is a waste of time.

No more twenty dollar bills devoted to buying a dozen flies! No more money spent on dubbing material, hooks, beadheads, biots, peacock herl, head cement, the latest vise, and a host of other gadgets.

Now I’m saving so much cash that I’m planning on buying another high end fly rod.

The only downside is that I spend more time inspecting tree branches than I do fly fishing. Hopefully, that will change as I build up my supply. But I keep losing these flies that I find due to those darn magnetic tree branches. I may have to invest a metal detector to locate lost flies before I buy another fly rod.

Oh yes, there is another downside to my decision to stop buying flies and using only what I find at the river’s edge.

Three-fourths of the flies in my box are now beadhead prince nymphs. They work great, but at times I long for a caddis fly — particularly when fishing the Mother’s Day Caddis hatch on the Yellowstone River in Montana. I lost my last caddis fly pattern a couple years ago. Actually, I found one earlier this year, but I lost it a week later. It’s lodged somewhere on a magnetic branch.

I wish all those fly fishers using beadhead prince nymphs would switch to caddis flies for awhile.

2 Beginner Fly Fisher Mistakes When Fighting a Fish

I am haunted by a trout that got away. It happened on a spring day on Montana’s Madison River.

I had recently purchased a new fly rod—my first high quality rod. On my third cast of the day, my strike indicator disappeared, and a battle began. For a few seconds, the trout darted back and forth in the current. Then, it decided to run down river. The screeching sound mesmerized me as the fleeing fish stripped line off the reel.

“This is cool,” I thought.

But it wasn’t cool. I simply couldn’t slow down the fleeing fish. I pulled back on my rod, but the fish didn’t slow down. So I began to chase it. I held my rod high and ran down the river—well, as fast as a fly fisher wearing chest waders can safely “run” in knee deep water.

Then it happened. Suddenly the trout darted around a big boulder near the river’s edge, and my fly rod stopped quivering. The fly line went limp. The trout was gone, and so was my adrenaline rush. When I saw that the last two feet of my leader were missing, I realized that it had snapped off on the boulder as the trout swam around it.

Normally, I don’t brood over fish I lose. But I haven’t been able to erase this one from my memory.

One reason is the fish’s size. I never saw it, but it felt like the 20-inch rainbows I caught in this same stretch in the following years. Also, it would have been the first large fish I landed using my new fly rod.

Yet the main reason I am still haunted by this trout that got away is due to the beginner fly fisher mistakes I made that day with my fly rod. To be sure, the drag on my reel wasn’t set properly. And I’m sure I made other mistakes. But the two that cost me a better chance at landing the trout were related to the way I handled my rod.

Both are common mistakes made by beginners when trying to land a fish.

Mistake #1 – Pointing the rod straight up

I know where I got the idea to point my rod tip to the sky, straight up in the air at a ninety degree angle to the water’s surface. I learned it from the artwork of fly fishers landing fish. In each print, the fly fishers had their fly rods pointing to the sky so they could get the fish close to their nets. They had sufficiently tired the fish, making it ready for landing.

However, this technique does not work for fighting a fish. In fact, it might result in a broken rod tip.

Holding a rod straight up in the air when fighting a fish puts the pressure on the tip section. You do this only if you want to ease up on the tension against which the fish is fighting or to get it close to your landing net. Otherwise, you lower your tip at about a 45-degree angle with the ground during the battle. This transfers the pressure to the middle of the rod. It makes the fish work harder and tire more quickly as it pulls against the rod’s strong mid-section.

But there was a second mistake I made that day.

Mistake #2 – Pulling the fish up instead of sideways

Along with making the fish fight against the mid-section of your fly rod, you want to use side pressure. That is, you want to pull the fish from side to side rather than directly towards you. It is the side to side pressure which works against a fish’s muscles and tires it out.

Now your tippet must be heavy enough, and your knots tied correctly. But if you meet both conditions, you can wrestle aggressively with the largest trout and tire it out quickly enough for the fish to remain healthy when released.

If I had avoided these two beginner fly fisher mistakes on the Madison River that day, I might have landed a big trout rather than trying to chase after it.

But there’s something cathartic about confession.

Now that I’ve detailed my blunder, maybe I can forget about my mistakes. It’s better to be haunted by waters (a la Norman Maclean) rather than by the one that got away.