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Barbel on Streamers
I must confess to be a dry fly addict, generally only turning to subsurface tactics as a last resort. I am also a light-line, delicate presentation addict so rarely fish with lines over 3 weight; as a result streamer-fishing is something that I very rarely do despite being well aware of its efficacy. I am certainly not against the fishing of streamers for trout & consider the slavish following of the Halfordian ethics of upstream dry fly only to be outdated & rather narrow-minded.
Flyfishers in the USA have been fishing streamers for trout as a standard practice for many years, as have reservoir flyfishers in the UK, but I’ve seen relatively few river flyfishers using these tactics. However, more & more river anglers are realizing the potential of streamer fishing, particularly when targeting big predatory trout. Martin Smith of Huddersfield is one such person. In 2016 I joined him on a tiny headwater brook of a South Yorkshire stream & was amazed at the size of some of the trout that he extracted from its miniature pools with a small Jighook Streamer (Martin’s Minnow). It is also surprising how even really small trout will take a streamer nearly as long as they are!
Martin Smith streamer fishing on a South Yorkshire brook
Pike, perch & zander are of course the obvious fish to target with streamers, but there are other coarse fish that respond positively to a well presented small-fry fly pattern. Recently I’ve been targeting chub & barbel with streamers & have had encouraging success, catching chub up to nearly 4lb & barbel to nearly 6lb from my local Driffield Beck, plus wild brown trout to 2lb 8oz.
My usual setups for fishing streamers are totally unconventional as I usually fish dry fly & occasionally change from dry fly to streamer fishing when I feel that it is appropriate. As a result I just use my normal dry fly gear. For the trout, chub & barbel on my local Driffield Beck, chalk stream, I sight fish with a 10’ 4/5 weight rod, 3 weight Sunray Jeremy Lucas Micro Thin line & 12’ of leader/tippet (7’ butt from an Essential Fly 12’ 6x tapered leader tapering from 0.43mm to 0.2mm approx., plus 5’ of 0.18 or 0.2mm tippet, rather than the thinner tippet used for small dry flies). On small streams I generally use an 8’ 1 weight rod with a Sunray Jeremy Lucas or Stuart Crofts’ 1 weight Micro Thin line & 10 to 12’ of leader/tippet. Whilst when fishing the turbulent pocket water in the Austrian alps I fish my streamers with a 14’ 8” Tenkara rod & a 0.285mm diameter fluorocarbon line & 3’ of 0.15mm tippet. Casting with such light setups requires an Oval or Belgian Cast so that constant tension in the line is maintained & to avoid bead-heads hitting the rod. This works for me fishing at the normal ranges that I do on rivers & the advantage of light lines & long leaders is that it is far easier to apply subtle movements to the fly by manipulating the rod rather than the retrieve. Barbel in particular seem to respond best to high frequency twitching as the fly is slowly drawn along the riverbed.
Brown trout caught on a White Zonker & 1 weight setup
Of course on the very rare occasions that I’ve seriously fished for pike in the UK or large mouth bass in Florida I’ve used more conventional gear, for pike a 9 or 10 weight rod with a suitably tapered line for casting bulky flies & for large mouth bass a 7 weight with a gain a suitable tapered line for casting bulky streamers & poppers. Tom at Sunray has the Microslik El Guapo Streamer lines (floating & intermediate) specifically designed for streamer fishing.
A Martin’s Minnow variant
Barbel that took a Martin’s Minnow variant
Euro Nymphing. Tackle, methods and flies.
My favourite methods of fly fishing are dry-fly or sight-fished nymphs/bugs, but particularly during the winter, when fishing on spate rivers, the grayling are usually loath to rise to a dry fly and the water is too coloured, or the light too poor, to see the fish for sight-fishing. It is then that I resort to a range of nymphing techniques. Of which Euronymphing is my most used technique
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Movement in your fly when fishing dry fly. Give it a twitch!
Frank Sawyer and Oliver Kite showed nymph-fishers the value of the induced take when nymph-fishing and stillwater fly-fishers are aware of the importance of applying movement to lures. However, many of the dry fly anglers that I see appear to rarely apply movement to their surface offerings, believing that ‘dead drift’ is the most effective way of presenting surface flies.
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Carbon, Cane & Fibreglass Fly Rods. Let's talk about it.
In the early 1960s when I first started fishing split cane was still the most popular rod-making material and fiber glass was just starting to become popular. However my first ever coarse fishing rod was made of ash butt & middle sections with a greenheart wood tip. My first fly rod, bought in the early 1960s, was a second hand 9’ cane rod built by E. Kerry of Lockton, a small village near Pickering.
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My favourite flies for Grayling fishing in Winter
Presentation is another critical factor in achieving success & grayling are just as unpredictable with respect to this. Sometimes they want a fly ‘on the drop’ & often they will travel quite a distance to take a fly as it slowly sinks. So there are times that it doesn’t pay to fish a fast-sinking, heavily weighted fly.
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