8-17 SS Nymphing

 Going nymphing.

 If the fish aren’t on the surface when you are flyfishing, our flyfishing guru and correspondent Josh Mills tells us to forget the drive fly approach and go sub surface flyfishing. Here is the man with all the details: “a lot of people get hung up in flyfishing with just drive fly fishing. Given the opportunity, that is the way I would like to go, but for the most part, 80 to 90% have a trout diet is sub surface. That means you have to play the chess game underwater. That’s done by nymphing and nymphing is dead drifting flies through the currents to try and match aquatic insects that have come loose from their rocks or are hatching or merging. If you can get nymphing down, it is one of those tactics that will help you on a day when fish are not rising. There are 3 critical parts of nymphing. One is a drag free drift and that is done by casting out and letting it come back toward you and getting the line above and that is what they call stack mending. Number 2 is the flies of weighted enough? Do they have bead heads or are you adding split shot to make sure that the bugs are getting down in the current because most of the time these bugs are going to be close to the bottom unless they are hatching through the water column. Number 3 is adjustment, meaning that you are not always going to be fishing the same depth so you are not always wanting to fish the same length of leader. That can be done by adjusting your strike indicator or for lack of a better term, your bobber. There are plenty of online resources that you can check out: nymphing for steelhead or nymphing for trout, the 2 typical things you do when things are not going on on top.