When the bite diminishes, often due to weather or water conditions, I tend to try fishing deep. Depending on the fish I’m chasing and the stream itself, that usually implies dredging the bottom with nymphs or streamers.
When fishing nymphs, I try to fish where nymphs live.
I had read years ago that when nymph fishing, you should be feeling the occasional tick of your fly on a rock. Taking that to heart, I noticed that I was beginning to catch caddis casings on the point of my nymph hook. I figured I was getting the nymph where it was supposed to be.
I confirmed this by routinely getting hung. Sometimes, the snag won and I had to rig up all over again. During one of these pauses for rigging, I concluded there had to be a better way.
These fly patterns will flip your hook over and reduce hangs.
Knowing I couldn’t have been the first to address this problem, I began to look into it and discovered three different ways to turn my fly over so the hook point was riding up. Though not perfectly snag proof, it was less prone to hangs. Depending on your target fish and the fly pattern, you might find all three fly styles useful.
The first you will recognize immediately, the Clouser. Bob must have been getting hung and losing a bunch of flies when he developed this streamer pattern. It has since caught on for a wide variety of fish and waters.
The barbell on top of the hook turns the fly over.
The reason the hook turns over is that the weight will turn to the bottom, and in this case, it’s the barbell tied on top of the hook shank. As you’re tying this fly, just remember it will be upside down in the water, so the colors under the hook will be on top in the water.
I’ve not found any disadvantages in this presentation, so if I’m tying weighted streamers to fish deep I routinely use this Clouser style. For trout fishing, I’ve trained myself to set the hook on a strike by lifting and this usually results in the hook going into the roof of a fish’s mouth. This is true of all three upside-down presentations.
For my favorite streamer patterns, I’ve started tying them in both unweighted and weighted versions. The unweighted ones I’ll tie on normal streamer hooks without the barbell and the weighted ones on the same hook with the barbell. This gives me the option of fishing the streamer in a range of depths.
Jig flies also drift with the hook point up. This one I plan to try on crappie.
The second style of inverted fly will also be familiar, namely, the jig fly. This category of patterns works well on a wide range of sizes, and in this case, the weight of the bead and the bend of the hook eye turn the fly over.
The popularity of Euro nymphing has given this category of flies a marked boost and you will often find them in shops in hook sizes ranging down to an eighteen or smaller. Usually, these patterns are a bit more sparse and tied with tungsten beads, both with the aim of making the fly sink faster.
But jig flies work well in traditional patterns as well. You will now find pheasant tails and other traditional patterns in fly shop bins tied on jig hooks.
The third approach to flipping your fly is one you might not have thought of, namely, using a bent-shank hook. These hooks have a bend about a third of the way back from the hook eye. When tying, you simply put a tungsten bead on the front and wrap wire for weight from the bead to the bend.
This offset in weight then turns the fly over so the hook point rides up. I’ve found this approach useful in nymphs size fourteen and larger. Particularly, when tying stone flies I’ll use this hook style.
Typically, these hooks come in long shank with heavy wire. Daiichi, for example, offers it in 3X long shank with 1X heavy wire. I’ve found other companies that go smaller, but usually, these will still be with longer shanks.
With all three of these patterns, I set the hook by raising my rod tip, hopefully hooking the fish in the roof of its mouth.
With these three approaches, I’ve found I can present flies deep to trout whether offering a small nymph as a jig fly, larger nymph on a bent shank, or minnow imitation as a Clouser. All three improve my odds of running along the bottom without catching things I’m not fishing for. Better yet, I lose fewer flies this way.
So, whether you buy flies or tie them, it’s good to have an arsenal of flies that ride along the bottom with the hook point up. But if you’re tying your own, just remember that what’s in your vise is upside down.
Jim Mize now loses fewer flies to the bottom, but seems to make up for it in the trees. You can purchase Jim’s award-winning book, The Jon Boat Years, at https://uscpress.com/The-Jon-Boat-Years or buy autographed copies at www.acreektricklesthroughit.com.
