Big Fly, Big Fish
One of the premises of my book “Long Flies” is “Big Fly, Big Fish.” I’ve seen it literally thousands of times in my six decades of fly fishing across the globe. For example, I’m head to Alaska in July with my friend, Dave Graebel. He loves to catch the big rainbows on dries, and we will try to focus on that as much as possible. But on the days when the hatches are not evident, I will be slinging really, really big leech and sculpin imitations on my Hardy Zenith 7-weight. The take by those big bows is very powerful; they leave no room for guesswork. Of course, the big kings, chums, and sockeyes on long flies fished on my Hardy 9-weght Proaxis-X will be great too.
What reminded me of all this was a photo that Theo Bakelaar sent of a big brown that gobbled a really big streamer. This is a great time of year for the big flies. The water is often cold and the hatches sparce. The big fish need plenty of food and respond very well to big stuff fished deep along the bottom. It’s a great time to haul out the fill sinkers or the 30-foot sinking head lines and scratch bottom with big articulated imitations.
Big Fly, Big Fish