THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX BY JOHN BERRY

There are times, when you are fly fishing that you need to think outside the box. That is, you sometimes need to try something new, something that is counterintuitive or that just violates the rules. For me, this translates into fishing a fly in a manner that is not normally associated with that pattern. Most fly recipes come with instructions on how to fish the fly. I am writing about throwing those instructions out the window and trying a different technique. Most of these situations were not acts of desperation but accidents or just plain old curiosity.

The first instance that I remember occurred many years ago. My brother, Dan, and I were fishing at Chamberlin’s. This was way before His Place Resort or Denton Ferry RV Park. We had waded and fished our way up to the Hurst Hole. When we got there we immediately observed rising fish everywhere. It was a cool October day and we did not see any insects coming off. We had been fishing woolly buggers on our trip upstream.

Dan decided to give the woolly bugger a try and cast at a large rising fish. We were both surprised, when he got a take as soon as the fly hit the water. We stood there and caught over fifty trout each. Conventional wisdom requires that woolly buggers be fished on the bottom of the water column with lots of lead to get them down. In this case, we took off the lead that we had attached to our leaders so that they sank very slowly. All of our hits were at or near the surface.

Another instance of this was a few years later, when I was fishing with my fishing buddy, Chuck Kirk, on the Norfork River near what is now the Ackerman Access. There was a sulphur hatch coming off and we were fishing dry flies. Chuck was struggling and was essentially fishless. At the end of a drift, he got some drag on his fly and it sunk into the film. He immediately got a strike and was able to land a nice brown.

On his next cast, he sunk the fly as soon as it hit the water and was rewarded with another fine trout. Chuck had stumbled onto the fact that the trout were keying in on the emergers and the sunken dry fly was a great match to the emerging may flies. I joined him on the action and we did well during the duration of the hatch.

Finally the situation that triggered this article was a conversation that I had yesterday with my partner, Dennis Schule. He said that he and his wife, Mary, had done well the day before when fishing at Rim Shoals. He said that they were fishing a partridge and orange as a dropper below a ruby midge. They were catching trout after trout on the partridge and orange. Later Mary lost her partridge and orange on a good fish and switched over to one of my green butts, with great success. Both are soft hackles and are supposed to be fished in the film near the top of the water column. In this case, they were fished on the bottom and the trout keyed in on them.

In all of these situations, these flies were fished with a technique that was counterintuitive. The lesson here is to be flexible and occasionally try something different. You may be pleasantly surprised!