Fly-fishing is not just a topwater game. Most fishermen know that when fly-fishing for trout, dry flies imitate insects, and under the surface you use nymphs to attract the bite. What about fly fishing for other species? Largemouth bass, for example will eat anything that swims, floats or crawls. Limiting yourself to using hard poppers or deer-hair bugs when using the fly rod for bass is cutting your game in half. Baitfish imitations, called streamers in fly fishing lingo, are a huge part of getting the drop on the bucketmouth.
A streamer can imitate all of your favorite color patterns. Black and silver bucktails are a very productive searching pattern, while sunfish or sexy shad style patterns can bust a slump quickly. My favorite all around has to be a baby bass, maybe because it makes me laugh to see a creature eat its own kind, or maybe because I catch bass like crazy with it! Size and shape are more important than color, so choose imitations that match both in the body of water you fish.
The most important thing about fishing, as in real estate, is: location, location, location; and the central issue in fly fishing for bass is presenting your fly to the correct place in the water column. While it is true that there are limitations to the amount of weight you can throw with a fly rod, covering the whole column effectively is no problem. Shank weighted hooks, dumbbell eyes, and even material weighted flies will deep dive, jig, crawl on the bottom, or suspend like a jerkbait.
Catching bass with a fly rod can be one of the most primal and exhilarating of the sporting endeavors, so don’t limit yourself to only one side of the largemouth world. Go down there and get them!

-Gabe

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 31st, 2010 at 12:33 pm and is filed under Fly Fishing, Fresh Water Fishing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.