At the Vise: Czechish Nymph

An old acquaintance of mine, Gary Davis, was kind enough to give me a place to crash for a night at his juniper and ponderosa pine ranchette outside of Bend. That way, there’d at least be beer money left over in the job budget after driving that far to read the opening of a few stories at the downtown Patagonia store. Retired now from managing California projects for a big-deal corporation, Gary, I should add, is a serious, no-nonsense angler. He’s always up on the latest technique or so-called innovation described in magazines like this one or online. Gary’s active, as well, in the Central Oregon Flyfishers, the biggest fly-fishing club I know of. He attends workshops and classes whenever they’re available, and his fly boxes are filled with intriguing new patterns, often tied with materials I barely recognize or that I’ve never even seen before.

So I was a wee bit flattered when, over a couple of ales in Gary’s well-appointed living room, he mentioned thinking of me while he sat through a recent club presentation on Euro nymphing. “It kept going through my mind,” he said, “that this is exactly how you were fishing when you took me to South Junction and we caught all those good redsides on the Deschutes ten years ago.”

Well, not exactly. From what I’ve seen, rigging variations in Euro nymphing don’t necessarily mirror the way I go about it. And, by way of context, I can recall, however vaguely, an essay written by James Babb in Gray’s Sporting Journal well over a decade ago in which Babb challenged the idea of new nymphing techniques, describing tight-line methods he and family and friends used long ago on the Tennessee River. Or if I’ve got the details wrong, that was the general idea.

And anyway, what was Charles Brooks talking about when he taught us how to nymph for larger trout forty-plus years ago and counting?

I know, I know: readers out there will contend that this is different, that Euro nymphing is something entirely new. On the other hand, Gary Davis actually attended the workshop — and he’s the one who claims I was doing it way back when.

We can at least agree on this: nothing successful I’ve ever done on a trout stream is more than an interpretation of techniques I’ve seen or read about elsewhere, methods practiced by anglers with much more experience than I’ll ever have, despite the many decades I’ve already squandered in this far-fetched game.

What I like about the attention given to so-called Euro nymphing is that it’s prompting anglers to put away their bobbing strike indicators and get back in touch with their flies. It’s about time. Learning to stay in touch with a sunk fly dead-drifting naturally downstream and then even leading it through the drift without dragging it downstream or across the current is the telltale stuff of successful nymphing. I’m less enamored, however, with the notion of a brightly colored “sighter” inserted somewhere in the leader. With your butt section Nail Knot and the two or three Blood Knots that make up your leader, don’t you already have plenty of things to “sight” — or watch — to indicate even the subtlest change in the drift of your cast? And, anyway, by the time you register this type of visual clue, you should probably already be lifting or swinging or in some other way tightening your line with the rod tip, while at the very same instant softening your grip in case that’s a pig down there that has every chance to make mush out of your 4X tippet.

Fun stuff. And how else can you get to know your prey better and how it feeds than when you actually feel the way it eats the fly? This is priceless information — a source of insight and even enlightenment as different from indicator fishing as fly fishing is from fishing with bait.

That’s saying a lot — and it’s sort of why old-schoolers like me have been harping about nymphing without bobbing strike indicators all these years. Guides, on the other hand, often prefer clients to fish with nymphs suspended beneath strike indicators. Unless an angler has experience without an indicator, he or she is likely to hook more fish using one. Also, presenting nymphs from a boat, with the rower, not the angler, controlling the drift, might well be more effective with flies dangling under a bobber.

I don’t know much about that. And as far as I can tell, it has little to do, either, with the Czechs or the Spaniards, or even the French, carrying home the gold from the latest world championships, the venue that brought so much attention to high-stick, short-line nymphing and what now seems like the Euro-nymph craze. To win, team anglers must follow the strict rules laid down by the Fédération Internationale de Pêche Sportive Mouche, which make it illegal to add anything — neither a sinking nor a floating device — to your leader. That means no strike-indicating bobber or split shot. The rule has inspired a style of fly that must do double duty as both a sinking device and a fish-fooling lure.


When I got serious about nymphing, a quarter of a century ago and counting, that double-duty fly was often a heavily weighted stonefly nymph, tied to the point of the leader, with a much smaller immature caddisfly or mayfly imitation tied to a tag end of my Blood Knot connecting the tippet to the leader. That big weighted nymph gives you the all-but-taut line that’s so critical in shortline nymphing, and because I often fished where salmonflies and stoneflies live in abundance, that big, dark fly, working its way downstream among the rocks, was frequently gobbled by big trout.

But so was the much smaller Hare’s Ear or Wet Caddis or some sort of soft hackle. In fact, as time went on, I grew more confident fooling bigger fish with smaller flies, especially when nymphing, so it wasn’t long before I was fishing with a brace of small flies, adding split shot in various ways and positions to my leader to do the job of the weighted and now discarded stonefly nymph.

At this point, we’re one step away from what’s now being hailed as Euro nymphing. And it’s a very, very small step indeed. Because the competition rules say that you can’t add split shot to your leader, you add it, instead, in the form of a metal bead, preferably tungsten, to the fly. A little epoxy and lead wire will help that puppy sink, as well. In fact, the more streamlined you make the fly, reducing drag and surface area associated with rough dubbing or hair and feather fibers, the more quickly it sinks, which means it doesn’t need to be as heavy as a traditionally dressed fly of the same size.

Picture, as an example, a Copper John: the mechanical properties of this jiglike pattern have allowed anglers to fish smaller flies in faster water or in deeper lies, maintaining contact with the fly without resorting to split shot, which, sadly, often ends up in the stream. Of course, it also works under a bobber or suspended beneath a high-floating dry fly, as well. In my eyes, the Copper John is the progenitor of most flies associated with Euro nymphing. Tie it on a small jig hook, one that best fits a bead with a slot in it as well as a hole, and you have a fly that swims or drifts upside down, able to probe the depths of a stream with less chance of hanging up or snagging on the bottom, and a near replica, sans epoxy, of countless Euro nymphs fished today.

Granted, I’m oversimplifying each and every aspect of Euro nymphing. My thesis, as is often the case, is that the latest and greatest method or technique or movement in fly fishing is rarely anything new at all, but, instead a return or slight refinement to something out of the sport’s long and storied past. Or as my father used to say about my mother’s tangents along her convoluted spiritual path, “Same candy bar, different wrapper.”

Nonetheless, it’s true that at one time, long ago, nobody weighted a fly, much less squeezed lead to the leader. Nymphing of any sort was considered contrary not only to the rules, but even the spirit of the sport. Yet at the same time we know that there were always North Country anglers who didn’t give a lick about rules written by upper-class sports, and from the very start, they found that sparsely dressed wet flies, tied on stout hooks and fished on a taut line, could be murder when the trout weren’t rising. Carry that thinking forward far enough and, with a few adjustments to casting angles, mends, and then lifting all of that useless slack line off the water, you’re more or less Euro nymphing with the best of them.

No doubt new commodities deemed necessary to execute so-called new techniques will always be part of the sport. After all, I bought jig hooks and replaced my old brass beads with tungsten — slotted, no less — to experiment with nymphs for this column. And I don’t suppose it will be long before we find ourselves styling our latest and greatest creations on hooks made out of some sort of new, fourth-dimensional metal that’s denser and heavier per unit size than anything used before, just so we can gain that half percent of sink rate with our sleek and slender Hot Spot Hare’s Ear that will finally — finally — show those damn Czechs, or Spaniards, or even the French who’s boss on a trout stream.

Materials

Hook: TMC 2457, size 12 to 16

Bead: Copper-colored 1/8-inch tungsten bead (size 12); 7/64-inch (size 14); 3/32-inch (size 16)

Thread: Camel 8/0 Uni-Thread, or similar

Legs: Fine (Comparadun) dark deer hair

Tail: English grouse, or similar

Rib: Small copper wire

Body: Golden olive Crystal Splash

Thorax: Dark brown squirrel with guard hairs, or similar

Tying Instructions

Step 1: Slip the bead over the hook. Secure the hook in the vise and start the thread. Even though I experiment with jig hooks, I prefer the profile of the curved, 2X-heavy TMC 2457 for this and other beadhead patterns.

STEP 1
STEP 1

Step 2: Clip a small tuft of extrafine or “Comparadun” deer hair. If you don’t have any of this type of deer hair, get some. It’s much easier to work with for many applications, especially on small flies. Clean and stack the hair. Measure the hair length so that it’s about equal to the length of the hook, then tie it in directly behind the bead with the tips of the hair pointing forward past the eye of the hook. As you tighten the thread wraps, squeeze the hair forward against the bead, causing it the flair like the wing of a Comparadun. Then make a couple of thread wraps between the standing hair and the bead, creating a small space for dubbing later on.

STEP 2
STEP 2

Step 3: Secure the butts of deer hair. As your wind toward the aft end of the fly, clip the butts a bit at a time to help taper the fly. Wind the thread into the bend of the hook and then tie in a short tail. Clip the butts of the tail material so that it blends in with the forward half of the body. Now wind the thread forward and back a few times to create a smooth, carrotlike taper for the body of the fly.

STEP 3
STEP 3

Step 4: As you wind the thread to the back of the hook the last time, secure a short length of copper wire. When you reach the root of the tail, also secure a couple of strands of Crystal Splash. Wind the thread forward, then touch a tiny amount of superglue to the body’s thread wraps before winding the Crystal Splash forward, covering the entire abdomen. Stop the Crystal Splash just short of the deer hair. Now rib the abdomen with three or four evenly spaced turns of the wire.

STEP 4
STEP 4