Fly Fishing

Nymph fishing is a fly fishing technique and likely the most challenging too. Because the fly, which is very small, is underwater this can often be a tedious test to even the best angler. Needless to say, even the most patient fishermen can find this frustrating. Trout fishing is where the best of what the angler has to offer needs to come to the forefront mainly because of the diet that trout have. Trout eat insects that are called sub surface insects or nymphs. This is why if an angler does not have several techniques down pat he will be greatly limited to where he can fish and what he can use.

An angler is attempting to mock a specific stage of insects when nymphs fly fishing. This is why all fly fishing is done underwater, not on top of it. This makes fly fishing with nymphs more challenging because the fish will never rise to the surface in an attempt to gulp an insect. In contrast to dry fly fishing when the angler uses nymphs the angler will not be able to keep his eye on the fly and that is where the challenge comes into play as it makes it more difficult to detect strikes and set the hook.

The challenge gets even bigger with nymph fly fishing because the nymphs have a tendency to float along or just near the bottom of the water. The problem comes in as the nymph is often “bumping” into underwater obstructions, particularly rocks. The angler then feels these bumps and can easily mistake them for bites. Especially for beginner anglers this can be quite challenging as the strike indicator will momentarily pause when the nymph hits a rock. It is only a matter of time before the nymph actually does get hooked on something and then it has to be freed.

Fly fishing with nymphs causes the angler to have to use methods to get their fly down into the water. This is not a challenge with dry fly fishing because all fishing occurs right on the surface. Everything in dry fly fishing is two dimensional. With nymph fishing, however, the angler needs to determine how deep the trout are and then figure out how to get their fly to that depth which adds another dimension to their fly fishing. In order to do this successfully the angler needs to know how to get nymph to the right depth and how to make good and precise casts so the nymph is allowed to sink to the right depth of where you think that the fish are.

When dry fly fishing the fish will normally hit the bait really hard but with nymphs this is not the case, they are much more graceful when approaching nymphs. Trout are gentler with nymphs and sometimes this is nothing more than laziness, waiting on the nymph to come right to the fish. It is because of this, setting the hook properly when fly fishing with nymphs is extremely important for success. These are the challenges of fly fishing with nymphs.

Photo Credit: href=”http://flickr.com/photos/chaddycakes/”>Chaddycakes

This post involves:

angler, fish, fly fishing, nymph fishing, nymphs, trout, trout fishing

... and focuses on:

fishing

Posted by Hike Camp Fish on January 12, 2010 in fishing.