Again this year, the Olive Wooly Bugger Gang got together mid-May at Grand Lake Stream to share fellowship, eat, play cribbage and fish the Stream for hungry landlocked salmon. Upon our arrival hopes were high. Last year, fishing exceeded all expectations. Everybody got multiple hookups, including the “newbies,” who were just learning how to toss a fly line without getting a #14 Adams impaled in their neck.
This year, Monday morning broke unseasonably cold and windy: 38 degrees with a biting north wind tunneling down West Grand Lake. Not my cup of tea. Fishing was slow, perhaps due to high water flow and uncooperative water temperatures. Come noon there was one die hard still on the Stream — my eldest son Scotty, who, when given a chance to fish, rarely takes time out to eat or sleep. The remainder of us other Wooly Bugger boys were all hunkered down at camp beside cribbage boards, plates of munchies and drinks of choice.
Next day, though, the weather softened some. By mid-day a warming sun coaxed up a meager hatch of dust-colored Mayflies. Some surface sipping began to be visible in the glide below the Cable Pool and my pulse rate rose accordingly. “I think they are Hendricksons,” my nephew Paul Huston yelled to me from downstream. Immediately, we abandoned our sinking lines and switched to floating lines and dust-colored dry flies. Before the hatch shut down, we caught a couple on top, which is always the most fun fishing of all — at least for me.
Sight fishing is my thing. You can have your nymphs and awkward strike indicators. Oh, stripping line under the surface with a small wet fly is OK, but trying to target a dry fly to a salmon on top that has just sipped a floating bug is, as the cliche goes, “as good as it gets.”
Speaking of floating, my experience convinces me that, when it comes to seducing a surface feeder, float is everything. I learned out West that on moving water your fly, no matter what it is will only entice a fish if it comes down the stream looking and floating like the real McCoy. The slightest telltale V-drag around the fly will turn a fish away every time. It is not easy, either, to get that perfect float, especially on fast-moving water.
Fly fishing writer Dave Whitlock explained the physics of this perfect float recently in an article. According to Whitlock, the real Mayfly dun sits on the surface film of the water with only its legs protruding beneath the surface, and the fish sees this. So the hypothetical perfect float for an artificial dry fly would have almost the whole fly floating on the surface film with just the tail and the hackle ends keeping it on top. In practice, this is hard to do. In most cases, the hook of the dry fly and lower hackle is just beneath the surface.
My belief is that, although there are subtle degrees of variation in a dry fly’s “floatability,” you can maximize the odds toward achieving a perfect float by using a professionally tied artificial, dressing it right, matching your leader and tippet size to the fly size, and, last but not least, practicing your presentation. If, in your cast, the fly line furls out and your fly and leader flitter down to the surface like a real bug alighting, you are ahead of the game.
All in all, this member of the Olive Wooly Bugger gang never had one strike on our namesake artificial, but I caught enough fish to bring me back another year. Actually, the frosting on the cake was winning enough cribbage games to merit a spanking new L.L. Bean 4 -weight fly rod , awarded to me by our group’s high poohbah, Bob Leeman.
Some of us do better in cards than in fishing, float or no float.
The author is editor of the Northwoods Sporting Journal. He is also a Maine Guide, co-host of a weekly radio program “Maine Outdoors” heard Sundays at 7 p.m. on The Voice of Maine News-Talk Network (WVOM-FM 103.9, WQVM-FM 101.3) and former information officer for the Maine Dept. of Fish and Wildlife. His e-mail address is vpaulr@tds.net . He has three books “A Maine Deer Hunter’s Logbook”, “Backtrack.” And his latest “The Maine Angler’s Logbook.” .Online purchase information is available at www.maineoutdoorpublications.com.
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