A few weeks ago I gave a presentation to a local Trout Unlimited chapter, during their monthly meeting. These are informal, a fun way to meet new anglers, and the chapters usually buy me a nice dinner beforehand. It’s not a bad way to spend an evening.
The presentation was about picking the fight fly pattern, but as I made a few final adjustments to my slideshow, I kept thinking about a related topic that’s been front of mind lately: pattern vs presentation.
I have the chance to work with a lot of newer anglers, and one of the most frequent questions I hear is, “What flies are working best right now?” My answer is always the same: it’s a lot less about your fly, and a whole lot more about how you fish it.
John Giearch wrote once that, if you fish the wrong fly long enough and hard enough, sooner or later it becomes the right fly. There’s more truth to that than most anglers probably realize, because in the majority of trout fishing, you don’t need an exact match to the real-life bugs fish are currently eating. So long as the size and shape are close enough, if you can get a great presentation, chances are high a trout will go ahead and eat your fly.
Obviously, on highly-pressured rivers, that can change. Those fish have usually seen enough poorly-picked patterns—and poorly presented ones—that they’ll be a bit more discerning. Even then, those tailwater trout will surprise you. Just a month ago I was fishing big crickets on a tailwater renowned for its picky fish. The trout largely ignored the blue-wings and midges on the water, and I stuck a few decent fish on the same cricket pattern, until a larger one broke me off.
Even during the pickiest of hatches—which for me always seems to be blue-wings—I’ve noticed the trout are sometimes much more willing to eat my flies when they’re a size larger than all the naturals on the water. A purple-bodied Adams instead of the standard parachute blue-wing can be a great fly during those sorts of hatches, too. I think the slight difference in the fly grabs the fish’s attention, but since the size and shape is so similar to the real bugs on the water, they eat it anyways. I’ll never know for sure, but that theory feels right to me.
I know this all runs counter to the advice most often doled out online or in magazines. You need the latest and greatest fly pattern to catch fish! The trout have seen all the old ones. They’ll fall over themselves to eat this new, improved pattern (especially since it’s the same as the old one, just tied with a different color of thread). Time and time again, though, and especially this year, it’s been proven true.
Take for an example a trip I went on at the end of last winter. My buddy Alex and I wanted to see how many different flies we could use to catch fish on a given day. We decided that once one of us had used a pattern, it was off-limits for both of us for the rest of the day. That meant when I hooked my first fish on a San Juan worm, that fly was off the board.
In total, we put about ten fish in the net (it was a cold winter day with not much activity), including Alex sticking a 24.5-inch brown on a Walt’s Worm. We also used an egg fly, the worm, a couple scud patterns, and a zebra midge. Those flies are all winter staples, but almost every fish ate our flies at the same depth, in the same kind of water, throughout the day.
So, the next time you’re struggling to put fish in the net and you opt for a fly change, stop and ask yourself: is it really the fly, or is it my presentation?