Robert Morrison with a bright White River brown, caught during the class
Four drift boats, enough fly rods and sinking lines to start a small fly shop, a battallion of streamers ready to hunt and eight jazzed up fly fishers hit the water early Saturday afternoon. Our first streamer tactics class was ready to roll.
The class leader, our bud and virtually full time streamer guide Alex Lafkas from the Holy Waters of Michigan had done a good job during the morning classroom session, of not only giving the team a good run down of the principles of streamer fishing but getting everyone, guides included all juiced up to hit the water.
So hyped up in fact my plan for a “platoon” photo of the class and instructors all wadered up and serious was forgotten in the flurry of activity. Of course the real purpose of the afternoon session was to give some practical instruction on casting, presentation, retrieves but if the big boys were hungry, no one was going to complain.
If I can summarise some of Alex’s key points:
- Fly size is dependant on what food the fish are eating, some days it might be 2″ sculpins other days stockers.
- Key colors olive, white, yellow, black and tan/ginger.
- He prefers flies with some decent weight ie coneheads or dumbell eyes.
- Treat every cast as though it could be the one to catch a the biggest fish of your life.
- He likes a short fast jerky retrieve.
- He prefers a presentation so the fly swims downstream.
But fishing is fishing, and while our planning had been fairly good on this, a big patch of bright blue weather as we hit the water didn’t exactly help. All week I’d been praying for heavy gray skies if not outright rain, conditions we had during the classroom session.
This was a drift boat class and the guides were our own Chad Johnson, Alex of course, Ben Levin who you will be seeing more of around the shop, and myself, climbing back into a drifter. There is a lovely aesthetic about oar powered drift boats, and they do a very good job stealthily approaching the banks.
But for those of you with riverboats these can be a very good streamer delivery vehicle as well. Our guide team can offer either approach according to preference and conditions, (Wayne Buck took some instruction in high water techniques back in January).
Since the afternoon session meant short floats Ben and I took Cotter to Rim, Chad and Alex Wildcat to Cotter, but there were slim pickings, as the guys got used to the approach. Bill Thorne moved a couple of big fish early at Wildcat with Alex, and Robert Hime hooked a 20″ plus brown with Chad, a fish which shed the hook by running hard at the boat.
On the lower float the guys were working their way through some aggressive rainbow smacking the smaller to mid-size flies we started with, not what we were after but it cuts down the boredome and allowed the guys to practice their stripsets and work on casts and retrieves.
About 3/4 of the way throught the float Robert Morrison smacked the pretty pretty fish pictured above out of some soft water but the big fish were elusive. Depsite all that we finished up with one group of fly fishers, with some new skills in their gear bags and a serious jones to get back and do it again.
Thanks to all the guys for joining in the class with enthusiam and to Alex for all his work and the other guides.
