You’ve got your fly rod, you’ve got your fly line, and you’ve even figured out how to build the perfect leader. Things are looking good for you, a beginner fly angler. All that’s left to do is to choose your fly, which, to the uninitiated, can be very intimidating. Between the bright colors, hatch charts, and borderline insane names (I’m talking to you, Kelly Galloup), picking a fly can feel downright impossible.
The good news is, it’s not. Once you understand the different types of flies that line the shelves of your local fly shop, choosing one gets easier and easier. Knowing the basics of fly types will help you decode what the staff is trying to tell you when they say words like “nymphs” or “streamers.” More importantly, it’ll provide a baseline understanding of fish diet, insect lifecycle, and feeding habits, which will make you all the more likely to land a fish in your net. After that, everything—the colors, materials, even the nonsensical names—starts to make a lot more sense.
Below is a crash course on the different types of flies in fly fishing.
Nymphs
Before we dive into nymphs, a quick note on freshwater entomology, which is the backbone of most trout fishing. Without overly complicating it, there are aquatic insects that live in the water and hatch year-round. They’re a feast for trout.
These aquatic insects start as eggs, which hatch into immature, wingless larvae and nymphs. They live underwater, typically under rocks, in gravel, and in weeds, and they’re a massive food source for fish. When they get loose and float downstream, trout love to slurp ‘em up (hence why so many anglers love to “nymph”—it can be very productive).
Nymph flies are designed to imitate these teeny, tiny immature bugs. If you’ve ever wondered what the colorful beads are at your local fly shop, they’re probably nymphs. Some of them look like little worms, others look like pom poms with tufts of hair. Some are almost microscopic, others are large and heavy, with colorful collars and wired bodies.
Here’s what you need to know about using a nymph. First, they’re designed to sink and bounce along downstream, either under an indicator or tight-lined with a euro-nymphing set-up. They can be effective in deeper water or when trout aren’t coming to the surface to feed. They can also be effective in winter and early spring when trout aren’t willing to expend a ton of energy on larger prey.
Popular Nymph Patterns
Wet Flies
Wet flies are wet because they’re fished under the surface of the water. Unlike nymphs, which are crafted to look like immature aquatic insects, wet flies are typically designed to look like bugs who are more mature. Some look like insects emerging from their pupa (aka, “emergers”). Other wet flies are designed to imitate pupae, drowned adult aquatic insects, and other grown bugs that float around beneath the water. They can be productive during hatches and when fish are feeding on top—emergers look like bugs that have gotten stuck trying to hatch, making them easy targets. Other wet flies look like dead adults that drowned before they took off.
Popular Emerger and Wet Fly Patterns:
Dry Flies
The final stage of the aquatic bug lifecycle is the adult phase, where they’re “hatching”, aka, flying away from the water’s surface. Dry flies are tied to imitate these insects, which are most commonly mayflies, caddisflies, stoneflies, midges, and dragonflies.
Many patterns are tied in stiff, buoyant materials, like elk hair, deer hair, CDC, and foam in natural-looking shades of beige, black, white, and green. They’re designed to land gently on the water and float there to attract fish that are keyed in up top. They also make great anchors for dry-dropper rigs; many folks will tie a thin line of tippet with a nymph or another tiny fly off larger dry flies to increase their chances of a strike.
When fishing these types of flies, it’s helpful to have a bottle of floatant on hand, which keeps the materials from getting waterlogged and dragged underneath the surface.
Popular Dry Fly Patterns:
Terrestrials
Some folks lump dry flies and terrestrials into the same category, but most anglers consider them to be very different patterns that do very different things. Dry flies are aquatic insects that are flying out from and around the water. Terrestrials are land-based bugs that have fallen into the water. Yes, they too float on top of the water, but how they got there is very different.
Terrestrial flies are designed to imitate land-based bugs that live on the sides of rivers, lakes, and ponds, such as ants, spiders, beetles, grasshoppers, cicadas, and crickets. Many are tied with a big foam body with rubber legs that look like a juicy bug from the fish’s POV. Other materials, like dubbing, CDC, and deer hair, can be used to add realistic features like wings and thoraxes. They’re effective in the warmer months, especially in late summer when aquatic hatches slow down. Like dry flies, they’re great for dropper rigs, too.
The TL;DR: Terrestrials = land bugs.
Popular Terrestrial Patterns
Streamers
Streamers are designed to imitate prey that swims subsurface and are great for attracting larger predatory fish. While most streamers are crafted to look like bait fish, they can also imitate crustaceans, like shrimp and crawfish, squid, eels, leeches, and more. They’re likely going to be the biggest flies in the fly shop, tied in bolder silhouettes in flowy materials like marabou, feathers, and fur.
Some streamers, like the Epoxy Minnow and Sparkle Minnows, are sleek and streamlined to dart quickly through the water, while others are articulated to “hang” for a natural, swimmy movement. Others, like Clouser Minnows and Zonkers, are weighted or beaded to get down deep and attract fish via a sporadic jigging motion.
The point is, streamers swim. If you want to attract more aggressive, hungrier fish, you can use a streamer.
Popular Freshwater Streamer Patterns
Popular Saltwater Streamer Patterns
Topwater Flies
Topwater flies are exactly what they sound like: flies that are designed to stay on the surface and attract fish with noise, movement, and a little bit of chaos. This category includes poppers, gurglers, sliders, and other patterns that imitate larger prey that fish are willing to expend some energy to chase down. Unlike dry flies, which are meant to imitate delicate insects and drift naturally with the current, topwater flies are usually worked across the surface with strips, twitches, and pauses. Many are tied with foam, deer hair, rubber legs, and other buoyant materials that help them float while creating a commotion.
Popular Topwater Patterns
Final Thoughts
You don’t need to know every pattern, match every hatch, or understand why someone named a fly the Meat Whistle to catch fish. If you understand the broad categories—nymphs, wet flies and emergers, dry flies, terrestrials, and streamers—you have the framework you need to make smart decisions on the water. Think less about the specific fly and more about what it’s trying to imitate. Is the fish eating in the middle of the water column? Reach for a nymph. Are bugs hatching? Try an emerger or dry fly. Once you start viewing flies through the lens of fish behavior and food sources, the learning curve becomes a lot less steep.