Topics
Fly Tying
March Browns
Spey Casting
Fishing With Don & Derek
All pictures are mouse-over.

Sunday, March 9, 1:00pm to 5:00pm
Fly Tying Program: Classic & Cutting Edge Dry Flies
(Including March Browns)
Mark Meriwether – Deschutes River Trout Fisherman 

Pounding the bottom with weighted March Brown Nymph flies can provide constant action from mid-morning into the early stages of the hatch.  The March Brown Nymph in sizes #12 & #14 will be your bread and butter fly.  However nymphal color tends to adapt to the color of the stream bed.  Fishing two flies at once will increase your odds of hooking up.  Usually two different colors or sizes are used.  Gold Rib Hares Ear and Olive Hares Ears are valuable flies to have with you and will some times out fish the more realistic patterns.  March Brown Nymphs live in riffles and fast, rocky runs.  As the nymphs near maturity, they migrate to slower water. During the migration, they can loose their grip and drift in the current.  For this reason trout will congregate in places where fast riffles start to slow down and on the seams between the fast and slow water.  Fish your nymphs where the current changes speed.  Approach the water carefully.  Start by fishing the slower water first with flies that are lightly weighted.  Your flies will be most effective if they are perfectly dead drift.  Cast them slightly upstream and mend a little slack into you presentation.  As you work your way out into the faster current, add lead shot to keep your flies near the bottom.  
 
As the water warms at mid-day the nymph rise toward the surface to hatch.  Some of these nymphs are intercepted by trout during this upward migration.  Try tying a March Brown Soft Hackle to a dropper 3' above your nymphs. This technique can pay extra dividends.

As the Duns begin to hatch trout will rise to the surface to catch them.  This often produces the most visually exciting part of the day.  Big trout rising to March Browns during the peak can be very splashy.  Often the rise starts much quieter as trout pick off the emergers just below the surface.  At this time a March Brown Soft Hackle or Flymph fished just below the surface can be your best fly.  It is often even more effective if you add March Brown Cripple or dry fly to  a dropper 1' to 3' from your soft hackle and fish both flies dead drift.  Duns and emergers produce the best fishing, but some trout will sip spinners in the quietest of water. A March Brown "spinner fall" can extend your fishing day.  Spinner falls usually occur over faster water areas.  However they create the most reliable feeding activity if they raft up in back eddies down stream.  Sometimes the evening back eddy rise that you think is midge emergence is actually created by collecting dead March Brown spinners.

March Brown Nymph
Pounding the bottom with weighted March Brown Nymph flies can provide constant action from mid-morning into the early stages of the hatch.  The March Brown Nymph in sizes #12 & #14 will be your bread and butter fly for March Browns.

March Brown Cripple
You can fish the cripple like a dry fly by itself or it can be very effective if you add March Brown Cripple to a dropper 1' to 3' from your dry fly and fish both flies dead drift.  A Bob Quigley pattern.

Spey Casting for Steelhead and Salmon: 
An introduction to Gear and Techniques.  
Way Yin, M.D.
Continued from: 02/26/03 "Insider"

Historically, Spey casting involved the use of long-bellied or double taper lines.  However, modern day Spey Casting may be divided into two distinct and very successful styles.  One style (like that of Grant), uses long-bellied lines, with smooth, flowing, and long casting strokes.  Advantages of this style include efficiency (as little or no line is stripped or shot with each cast) and maximized fly (line) control through the swing.

Göran Andersson, Leif Stavmo and other Scandanavians have popularized a style of Spey casting which relies on short shooting-head type lines (with belly lengths of 35-55 feet); the huge lever arm of the two-handed rod is used launch these short-head lines prodigious distances. 

A variation of this type of casting is popular in the Northwest rivers of United States and Canada, popularized by the likes of Scott O’Donnell, Ed Ward, and and Dec Hogan.  Advantages of this “Skagit-style” technique (which successfully melds aspects of traditional long line and shooting head techniques) include it’s shorter learning curve, relative superiority in very windy conditions, and ease of use with especially heavy sinking tips.

All styles have ardent advocates, and numerous heated debates have arisen over which style is “better”.  Some advocate that one style permits longer casts than the other; but I have seen 140+ foot casts under fishing conditions with each casting style.  Simply put, the truth is that no style is better than another; all three styles clearly catch fish, and as with any stylistic debate, the skill and knowledge of the fisher using the rod has far more to do with fishing success than the particular style itself!

Unlike the refinement of equipment for single handed casting, where line weights and rod actions have displayed a tendency toward common describable applications, weights, and actions (i.e. fast actions powerful shorter rods for salt water fishing, softer, slow action light rods for technical trout fishing, long rods for reservoir and float tube fishing, etc.), the world of Spey rods is surprisingly lacking in uniformity in terminology, standards, or classification.  The terms “Spey”, “European”, “Modern”, “European Spey” and “Traditional” actions are thrown about rather liberally, and a 10–weight rod from one company may actually be lighter in hand than an 8–weight from another.  Some manufacturers offer a bewildering array of two–handed rods, grouped loosely by their intended (as opposed to actual) actions, while others offer more limited choices.  Some companies, even while offering only a total four or five two-handed rods, will make those rods with wildly differing actions in different line weights.

Regardless of the descriptions of a rod being traditional or European in action, Spey rods, like any other fly fishing rod, can be broadly classified fast, medium, and slow in action.  For example, when the same weight is suspended form the tip of a horizontally held rod, one with:

• Fast Action: flexes predominantly in the tip section of the rod,
• Medium Action: flexes more towards the middle of the rod, and
• Slow action: flexes into the butt of the rod.

Some rod manufacturers (like Scott and Burkheimer) produce Spey rods with “progressive actions”, whereby the rods are designed to flex deeper into the butt as more loading is applied.

Complicating matters further is the consideration of “quickness of response”.  The quickness by which a rod recovers from a given degree of deflection (how quickly it returns from bent to straight, or the speed at which it “dampens”) varies widely across manufacturers.  Several factors influence the quickness of a rod, including the taper of the mandrel around which the rod material is wrapped, the modulus of the material used, the wall thickness of the rod itself, and the weight of the top sections of the rod.  A rod with rapid dampening characteristics (“quick dampening”, or quickness) will more rapidly return the potential energy stored by rod loading to kinetic energy imparted to the fly line as the rod recovers from its loaded state. Although the action of a rod may be fairly quickly determined by “static” loading (for example, handing a weight off the tip of a rod as described above), both action and quickness influence the casting characteristics of Spey rods, generally much more so than single handed rods.  Unlike many single hand rods, it is exceedingly difficult for even an expert to determine how a Spey rod will cast just by wiggling or shaking it in a store.

Traditional “Spey” action rods may generally be distinguished from their “European” action counterparts by being slower (deeper flexing) in overall action.  The European action rods are designed to handle overhead casting as well as certain traditional Spey maneuvers, and are typically characterized by faster actions with stiffer butt sections. However, these distinctions, while valid in a general sense, blur between different manufacturers; one manufacturer’s “traditional Spey” action may actually be faster than another manufacturer’s “European” action. If one were to throw in the offerings from several top–drawer commercial rod makers, all with their unique ideas on what properties make a good Spey rod, a confusing and potentially intimidating situation faces the novice or intermediate Spey caster.

Rods designed for pure overhead casting generally make for poor Spey casting rods, although exceptions certainly exist.  Even among good Spey casters, casting styles and equipment preferences will vary as much as the rivers, streams, and quarry fished.  A proficient caster’s style will heavily influence their preferred choice of equipment and lines, as will the type of water primarily fished.  For example, a Spey caster with equipment fine-tuned to skating a dry fly on the Deschutes River will likely encounter difficulty using that same equipment effectively with 250–300 grain sink tips on a cold and windy winter’s day on the Skagit River.  Even the types of preferred Spey casts influence choices in equipment; the fisher who exclusively likes to shoot line, frequently fishes heavy sink tip lines, and preferentially uses an underhand technique may tend to prefer a significantly different rod than the fisher interested in fishing long-bellied floating lines.  The fisher who primarily relies on sunk line fishing with shooting heads and overhead casts will prefer a fast, relatively stiff fast action, or interestingly, a slow action stiff tipped rod, whereas the “long liner” will generally prefer a medium, slow, or progressive action rod.