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Dry fly fishing is an addiction. Watching a trout rise slowly from the bottom of the river to slurp down your perfectly drifted fly does something to your brain that makes you instantly want more. This is at least part of the reason why winter sucks so much for fly anglers. Sure, you can still go out in the cold to dredge a couple of nymphs along the bottom and probably catch a few fish. Yet the lack of visual connection to the trout always makes fishing this way feel sort of hollow, at least for me. But that’s not to say you can’t catch trout on dry flies in the winter. The right conditions and tactics can result in excellent winter dry fly fishing, and rivers void of crowds. Follow along as we tell you how and where to catch trout on dry flies during winter.
Rising to The Challenge
Believe it or not, trout will still eat dry flies during the coldest parts of the year. Yet fishing dry flies in winter is vastly different from fishing dries in spring, summer, or any other season. You can’t just blind cast and drift a bug through a juicy-looking chunk of water or smack a hunk of foam down onto a riffle and hope for the best. In winter, you have to fish tactically.
Winter dry fly fishing is all about timing and precision. It’s drifting the exact right pattern at the exact right time and place and knowing, not hoping, that you’re doing it right. While this can make winter dry fly fishing incredibly challenging and undeniably frustrating, when you do it right, it takes the sting out of winter by giving you some of the most rewarding dry fly action of the entire year.
Picking Your Flies and Leaders
One of the nice things about fishing winter dries is that there’s only one real fly choice—midges. These tiny, mosquito-like insects are in the river throughout the year and will hatch on the surface on an almost daily basis. When larger chunks of meat like mayflies and stoneflies are around, trout generally ignore these practically microscopic morsels. Yet during the starvation time of winter, midges are usually the only thing on a trout’s menu.
Midge flies for winter fishing should be large patterns that offer trout more bang for their buck. Think large midge cluster flies like the classic Griffith’s Gnat or Stalcup’s Cluster in sizes 16 to 22 rather than tiny individual midge patterns. However, to ensure you can pick off any stray trout that might be targeting individual insects, it’s best to fish a two-fly rig with a midge cluster and a single dry-fly midge pattern like the Top Secret Midge or Parachute Midge in sizes 22 to 26 as a dropper.
Fishing flies this small means fishing with extremely light leaders and tippet, from 6x to 8x, which have spiderweb-like diameters. While tying knots with line, this light can be a pain; it only helps your cause when targeting spooky trout in the low-clear water of winter.
The Right Time and Place
With their metabolisms slowed down to a crawl in the cold water, trout only feed for short intervals during the winter and spend the rest of their time just conserving energy. For these fish to swim all the way to the surface to feed, conditions have to be nearly perfect. This gives you only small windows of opportunity that you must jump on because the fishing can be red hot.
The best winter dry-fly fishing usually happens during calm, slightly overcast afternoons when air temperatures are peaking in the mid-30s or warmer, causing midges to hatch. So, sleep in a bit and then head out onto the water in the late morning when air temperatures are just beginning to rise, and your fingers won’t be too numb to tie knots.
Ideal places to find the bugs and subsequently the fish are going to be in long sections of slow, smoothly flowing water near the tails of deeper pools. You can also try any shallow flats or dead water that is immediately adjacent to the faster flowing drop-offs where winter trout spend most of their time. Watch the surface of this slow water carefully for any tiny dark flecks of life that indicate emerging insects. Pay extra special attention to the edges of the bank, as you can often see the bouncing flight patterns of midges that have already emerged and have begun to breed.
Wait For Risers
Blind casting is futile during the winter, so there’s no point in making a bunch of movement and possibly spooking wary trout until you see fish beginning to feed. Instead, once you find a good-looking area, hunker down on the bank and watch the water until you spot some rising fish. Rises are usually subtle during the winter and are often little more than a tiny dimple on the surface that looks like a raindrop, so you’ve got to be vigilant to spot them.
If you only see one or two small rises, try to hold out for a little while, as the action of feeding fish will usually cause more trout to move into the area. Once you have several winter trout keying in on midges, the action can be fast and furious, so it’s worth scouring the river and staying patient until you’ve got a good pod of fish in front of you.
Winter trout will often continuously rise for hours, meaning that you don’t have to rush right in as soon as you see them starting to feed. Instead, take some time and plan your approach. If you can, try to get in behind the feeding trout and then make a slow and deliberate upstream cast that lands the fly out and slightly to the side of the rear-most fish. While they won’t move too far, if you can drop your fly within a few inches of a riser so that it moves slightly out of line to take it, you’ll have a much better chance of hooking and landing the trout without spooking any of the others. When you do it right, you can then systematically work your way forward and catch every fish in the group without any of them becoming the wiser.
Cold Cravings
One of the best parts about fishing dry flies in winter is that everything seems to move in slow motion. In the low, clear, cold water, every action a trout makes is calculated and deliberate, allowing you to watch fish spot your fly, move towards it, and then rise up and eat it in full IMAX Technicolor. It’s the kind of dry fly fishing that dreams are made of, creating images that will stay with you for months and give you that sweet, sweet surface action you crave all year long.