Found myself in the middle of a shrimp blitz yesterday. No problemo I thougt...on with the shrimp fly.
Could notta catcha evena ona them little buggers!
In only inches of water, literally. Unfortunately, despite the depth (or lack thereof), I could not see anything but swirls galore given shhhmuckiness (technical term) of the water.
jborkowski- I've run into that alot this year and the solution seems to be to dead drift the fly in the surface film or just below it. My best luck has come with a deerhair fly tied on a #2 Billy Pate eagle claw hook. The tail consists of some calftail about shank length beyond the bend, 2 strands of flash slightly longer than the hair and a grizzly hackle tip on either side tied splayed. The rest of the fly is spun deerhair clipped to taper from the hook bend to the hook eye- shrimp like. Fishing with a floating line and hang on.
There is another fly that I use as a point fly using the latter as a dropper. This fly is a small General Practioner tied on a #1 eagle claw 254. This fly I tie in gray or olive whereas the above fly I tie in natural deer hair with olive or gray calftail.
I've had many multiple hookups and even cut-offs from blues grabbing the deerhair fly after the bass grabbed the GP which runs deeper.
Hope this helps. Ron
juro, you know what peeves me most about your snide little comments ...it's that somehow you probably wouldv'e turned cocktail sauce into fish while I stood there dazed and . anyway, glad i could be your laughingstock...i learned from the best :razz:.
thanks rel1 for the actual advice. sounds complicated, but also sounds like it might've worked. shrimp were throughout the water column, but the fish were bangin' them on the surface. i put on a floater but didn't have anything spun that would stay in the "film".
Sorry about that prank buddy! I was just trying to say sometimes you just have to eat crow.
Sometimes you can do something totally unintuitive to unlock the mystery. My best night in a worm hatch happened when I forced myself to walk away from the slurping fish and found a feeding station behind some rocks when the outgoing current started. Not all the fish were slurping, the biggest were almost "filter feeding" in a station by some rocks. My mistake was to try to catch fish amidst millions of worms with a worm fly. Yeah right.
Just like trying to catch big bass feeding on YOY herring, 1" long. They only hit the concentrated clouds of bait, matching the hatch is about the worst thing you can do unless the fish are small enough to care about individual herring fry. Not going to happen with a 35-40" fish. Have to try something else besides a matching 1" herring fly to break the code unless you are fishing tunoids or small schoolies.
A few seasons ago I discovered something about the way stripers eat shrimp and went through a series of attempts to figure it out with a fly. What I found to be most effective has been of great value to me today, and the fly that works best for me while the fish are focused on shrimp is ironically not a shrimp. Let's just say it's a reliable "segue for a shrimp grazer".
Wish I were there, the challenging scenarios are the most fun!
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