Improving Your Fly Fishing Success for Trout

It took me a long time to relent to the fact that trout do most of their feeding subsurface. After all, is there nothing better than watching a trout sip or hammer your dry fly off the surface?  In all my years’ fishing, I have not come across any more thrilling experience than a great dry fly eat, regardless of species.

While dry fly fishing is definitely an exciting way to fish for trout, you are definitely missing the opportunity to catch more and better fish by limiting yourself to fishing dries - and even just fishing dries or wets.

If you only fish on or just below the surface, you are definitely missing opportunities to catch more and better fish.

The third option, which I, mistakenly, lagged to embrace as a former fly fishing purist, is the weighted nymph. You only need to look at the competition fly fishing world and the euronymphing techniques that dominate that world to see the effectiveness of fishing flies closer to the bottom.

The good news is … you can fish a dry fly and a weighted nymph at the same time - the dry-dropper rig.  This rig allows you to suspend a weighted nymph from a dry fly allowing you to fish on the surface and below surface at the same time.  It’s incredibly effective.

To rig it, you simply tie your dry fly at the end of your leader, and then tie a piece of tippet either at the bend or the eye of the dry. I highly recommend tying to the eye if you are fishing a barbless dry fly as the tippet will slip over the hook point quite easily causing you to to lose both tippet and nymph. The typical length of the tippet is 1-3 feet and a weighted nymph is tied to the end of it. I tend to start longer and then shorten a foot at a time, if I’m hooking bottom with the nymph.

With the dry-dropper rig, the dry fly acts both a dry fly and attractor, as well as an indicator, i.e., it will jump or be pulled under when a fish takes the nymph and its time to set the hook - Game On!.

My favourite and most effective combination is combining a #6 or #8 Carter bug as the dry fly with a Blowtorch weighted nymph in size 14-18, but any similar combination of dry fly and weighted nymph will work as well.

Try this combination and technique out, I promise you won’t be disappointed!

Pro Tip: When fishing a dry fly or dry dropper rig (or any other Topwater rig), look carefully to ensure that you no longer see your fly or lure on the water.  If it’s disappeared, set the hook.  If not, wait until you can’t see it before setting the hook.  Fish will often swirl or hover near it before actually taking it. Make sure they have it before setting the hook!