Fly Fishing Beyond the Basics - Reading Water Part ¼
Male: So let’s start with Big Water perhaps the most intimidating yet no more difficult to fish than any stream if you take the right approach.
Female: This is Rio Baker in southern Chile about as big and fast and intimidating as any river you may encounter. It’s flowing out of life with General Carrera, the second largest lake in South America. It’s been said by many before us that the best way to figure out Big Water is to break it up into smaller water to which you can relate, divide and conquer.
Male: First and most on this, look at the banks. Here Kelly is working in it just like she would on a stream one tenth the size of the Baker. We’re casting streamers below structure that is created good holding water. As this scene unfolds, look at the diagram we’ve made of the baker. This spot is a place that has an outcropping or point of sorts where the river’s current is diverted and beyond the point are several submerged boulders both creating ideal restaurants if you will for a holding fish both in front and behind the structure.
So in any stream, large or small, look for structure, submerge boulders, trees, point, shells, anything that changes the water flow which will create holding positions for feeding fish. It’s really a matter of thinking like the laziest fish in the world and looking for the places it might do to equivalent of the human couch potato act. Hang out and stuff its face while watching the world go by or in the case of the fish, it’s the river and all its stuff that’s flowing by it.
Okay, once you identified the structure, you need to get your fly to it toward the fish are holding. In this case Kelly’s in a big river that’s moving swiftly fishing across and down along the swing. The water’s four five feet deep over the boulders and the boulders maybe three feet or so tall. So floating line will not work with this technique unless the fish are looking up and willing to come up from their lazy feeding and holding stations. Get off the couch if you will into the current to chase the fly. So wait on or near the fly and a sink tip of some kind is necessary. For this depth and speed of water, a line like the scientific anglers type five sink tip or McKenzie 200 line would be the best.
When your fish in a sink tip line generally you fishes short leader. The longer the leader on a sink tip, the less effective the sink tip since the leader unless it’s the sinking leader it’s going to work against the line. So it’s really for forth leaders about all we use in our sinking tip lines. In this case we would also fish a weighted fly. This particular fly is a black oiled bugger with grizzly hackle tied on as number six long hook with an orvis tungsten bead. So it gets about half of its weight from the bead head, a number 62 3/16 inch bead head, the largest they made plus it also has about eight wraps of 02 or lead under the body material. So it’s a heavy fly. This new tungsten bead heads are a great asset to fly tiers when you want to wait a fly particularly if you like the weight on the head of the fly which we think gives it better action and just a little bit of added fly rod.
Female: Now that was spectacular, sticking your fly because I finally cast the way up through while it drifted down. And I think I finally got the fly down in this neighborhood.
Male: The deal was okay so.
Female: If you look at our drawing of this part of the Baker for their upstream are three islands between which there is a cut making a very small stream. And again between the island of the bank, another cut. Islands create all sorts of good fishable water. The back and rolling current beneath the pour over from the island create ideal holding water.
Jim didn’t catch any fish here. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a good spot. Look at this piece of water on a small stream over in Argentina. It’s basically the same situation, a pour over into which you can roll a weighted nymph. Our point is that in this relatively small stream is exactly the same fishing situation you have on the huge water at the banker.
Male: There’s one right up predating my line. Two of them.
Female: This is incidentally Guide Martino Ferro on a Rio Rivadavia in Los Alerces National Park. A terrific guide and a close friend I might also add.
Martino Ferro: Go! That’s a baby, that’s a baby.
Female: In this case, Jim’s using a floating line with the 12 foot leader fishing a little size Tungsten head Prince Nymph. This is the perfect spot for fish to hold because the water pouring over the edge of this gravel bar that creates back - that hold the food as well as make it easy for the fish to cruise around picking and choosing which nymph they want. You really have to stay alert fishing a spot like this because it’s very difficult to detect the strike since the water is pulling your fly, leader and line in different directions. The best thing there’s here are those that just strike when they think they have a fish. Amazingly it works, too!
Martino Ferro: When we get closer there with the net, slow down.
Male: Maybe, maybe I can get them to swim up here.
Martino Ferro: Yeah don’t try to get.
Male: I don’t think so.
Martino Ferro: Try to get him in the quiet approach.
Male: I got him. Sure I got that fish.
Male: Hey when you bring it at here the relief.
Martino Ferro: Yeah let’s be quiet.
Male: I got the net.
Martino Ferro: Do you have the nymph?
Male: I’ve got the fish here. There we go. What? We figured that out.
Martino Ferro: So how was that?
Male: I give you hand though.
Martino Ferro: Thank you very much. Yeah, well that’s in.
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