All stillwater fly fishers have experienced difficult days. Our casting is abysmal, or we can’t find fish, or they don’t cooperate. Conditions may force us to use alternate tactics or even leave the water. The most common of these conditions is wind. In the wind, safety can become an issue in both float tubes and other watercraft. And sometimes, it’s the wind to blame for those abysmal casts. Modern weather reports include hourly wind forecasts, and some days, it’s best just to stay home and check something off the honey-do list.
But wind also can be a stillwater angler’s friend, if you learn how to use it. It can beat a trolling motor as a stealthy way for the angler afloat to cover water, both surface acreage and at different depths, and to find fish. You can employ wind drifting at Davis Lake, Bridgeport Reservoir, Crowley Lake, the central and eastern Oregon lakes, and numerous higher-elevation lakes where wind is a predictable daily occurrence. There also are other angling techniques that can exploit wind that otherwise might ruin a day on the water.
The Answer Is . . .
As anyone who has fished a Western lake in any kind of small watercraft knows too well, wind will blow you around. Whether you are fishing from a float tube, pram, skiff, or larger boat, its surface area acts like a sail. The trick is to use that energy to cover water that you want to fish at a speed and depth that leads to angling success.
You need to pick your spots to use this technique. If you just allow yourself to be randomly blown across a lake, you won’t be targeting fish, and you’ll just have a long slog back into the wind. In wind drifting, you are looking for fish and underwater structure that may not be apparent in a faster-moving boat. A good starting point for doing this is the back of a cove and out and across a point into deepening water. You want to set up your drift across shoal edges, drop-offs, water color changes, brush, weed or willow lines in high water, subtle microchannels, potholes, or a temperature change suggesting a spring. Don’t overlook foam lines. Foam is home. It provides fish with cover near the surface and concentrates food, and foam is usually associated with wind lanes. You can drift parallel to a foam edge or cross diagonally or perpendicular to it.
Another often overlooked place to look for f ish is where mud lines form, usually associated with a point. A sharp demarcation between muddy and clearer water is what you want to look for. Fish use the cloudy water for cover and lie in wait, orienting into the wind, for the wind to bring food to them.
If you are rigged with a floating line, change to a subsurface fly for wind drifting — it’s a subsurface game. I often start with a soft-hackle AP Emerger. I cast perpendicular to the boat’s drift and then strip out most of the fly line. The fly will stay within an inch or two of the surface. To get a bit deeper, you can use a sink tip. Still, they don’t sink a fly very deeply. Full sinking lines will get your fly deeper because they are thinner and have less drag. Whether drifting a shoreline or in open water, casting perpendicular to your watercraft’s progress also gets your fly out of your boat’s shadow and wake.
Water depth, line depth, fly depth, and drift speed all matter and are all interrelated. The idea is to move the fly through different depths over varying bottom material in a large swing before your line straightens out, which is a great time to add a strip or two. A mend with a few yards of slack thrown in will allow your fly to sink a bit deeper. Periodically note your speed and try to duplicate it in repeated passes if you are getting hookups, or anchor and cast and retrieve.
As should be clear from this, boat speed needs to be controlled just as much as when a watercraft is under its own power. A drogue can be used to slow your progress, if you think you are moving too fast, a pull or two on the oars can pause the drift or change your angle of attack. Your drogue can be a five gallon plastic bucket from Home Depot or a commercial one made of fabric in the shape of a funnel that stows nicely in a small skiff. I sometimes fish with a guide out of Sunriver, Oregon who has sliding gunwale grommets for attaching drogues on a 19-foot aluminum flat-bottom skiff. He adjusts both speed and angle, slowing the boat enough, if need be, to use chironomids in water too deep for anchoring.
Periodically slow or stop the boat for a minute and let your line sink. A fly’s rise to the surface when you resume drifting will interest fish. Trout are often hooked when you resume movement and your fly rises upward like emerging naturals, just as fish are hooked when, on a river, you lift and pull in line to make another cast. The late Jay Fair was a trolling specialist and often guided on large, windy lakes such as Klamath, Davis, Frenchman, and Eagle. He showed many an angler how to move their rod tips in a circular fashion and periodically lift in a long pull to animate their fly’s path through the water. It works well when wind drifting, too.
To anchor for casting and retrieving, I’ve rigged my stillwater skiff foreword and aft with easy-to-drop drift-boat-type anchors that are held by davits reaching out from bow and stern, and with chocks for quickly securing the anchor ropes. I can move the skiff without bringing a mud-and-weed-covered anchor into the boat. The stern anchor is a bit heavier and is on a pulley multiplier, so I can lift it without straining a muscle or climbing over a seat. If wind speed allows, I anchor with the long axis of the boat perpendicular to wave or wind direction. If you repeatedly drag anchor, it means the wind really is up, and it may be time to head home or find a lee shore.
Depth
The key to subsurface stillwater fly fishing is knowing how deep your fly is and the water depth under you watercraft. Depth finders also give speed readings, and many scan the horizontal upper water column well at the low speeds generated in wind drifting. (See “HighTech Fly Fishing,” California Fly Fisher, November/December 2015). Indicator chironomid rigs, and balance f lies and horizontal float-n-fly setups (See “Floatn-Fly,” California Fly Fisher, March/ April 2019), are so effective because you know precisely how deep your fly is and can change depth quickly, even more so if with a partner and you simultaneously try different flies or combinations. You can learn how different setups work by being observant on the water, but a quicker way to understand the behavior of fly line, leader, tippet, and fly depth is to experiment with a friend’s help and test your setups in a swimming pool or a clear lake that’s warm enough to allow you to comfortably stay in the water.
I doubt that the business end of a full sinking line, wind drifting at 0.5 to 0.7 miles per hour with 70 feet of line out, will be 5 feet below the surface. To get deeper you have to go to lead core with mono or gel-spun backing. My stillwater skiff has room for six rods and reels rigged with lines of different sink rates. I primarily fish full intermediate lines which most commonly feature sink rates of 1-1/2 to 3 inches per second. Although the entire line sinks and eventually will gain significant depth, in reality, they, too, don’t get more than a few feet down when worked behind a wind-drifting boat. These lines are commonly designated “clear” or “camo.” “Clear” is a misnomer — the light transmission falls somewhere between opaque and full clear, and it still creates a line shadow. The great disadvantage of “clear” lines is line memory in cold waters. These lines can be challenging to cast. Opaque intermediates are available and cast much better. Stillwater guru Hal Jansen actually dyes his lines to match sky background.
Dapping
Another way to deal with and profit from wind is by using “dapping” techniques. Dame Juliana Berners in The Boke of Saint Albans, 1496, mentions using a long greenheart rod to fish flies on a short, braided horsehair line. And the Irish, Scots, and, to a lesser degree, the English have been using and perfecting the technique of dapping on their abundant and often windy lochs and loughs for centuries. (If you want wind, believe me, you can find it on the Scottish lochs.) The idea is to use a line that catches the wind as a kind of kite to dance your flies on or in the surface.
The classic modern dapping rig is an 18-foot rod with mono backing, a section of floss to catch the wind, and then a long leader with a large dry point fly and two droppers that can be nymphs or emergers. Optimally, air temperatures should be higher than the water temperatures, potentially enhancing insect activity. Crane fly imitations are used by purists, and some anglers will fish the real thing, caught by young boys and sold at dockside.
Trout and sea trout and an occasional salmon are caught in Scotland this way. Like Jay Fair, the ghillies impart subtle, refined movements to the dancing flies, and that makes a difference. It is an art requiring practice and has long been a part of angling history.
Closer to home, Gary LaFontaine, in Fly Fishing the Mountain Lakes (1998) discusses dapping from shore at high-elevation lakes, where the wind and lack of back-cast room makes other techniques difficult. A dozen feet or more of dental f loss (I prefer flat Teflon), can be used between backing and leader to catch the wind and carry a dancing fly out from shore. There also is dedicated commercial dapping floss, available in many colors — Napier and Craig Dapping Floss is available on the internet. I had a dentist friend who lusted for an expensive fly reel. He finally bought it after reading LaFontaine’s book, justifying the purchase by calling it a “floss holder.”
LaFontaine explains that dapping works at high altitudes because most of an alpine trout’s diet consists of insects and terrestrials brought to the lake by gusty mountain winds via what’s know as “up-slope blow-in,” which happens from the Central Valley when hot air rises, carrying massive numbers of insects up the western slope of the Sierra.
Evelyn Gamble of Portola tied a version of the Yuba River Buzz Hackle, a size 10 or size 12 dry fly with a grizzly and brown hackle tail and a full palmered body of entwined grizzly and brown hackle that is a superb dapping fly. I have used it on just a floating line and 9-foot leader when wade-fishing windy lakes, especially Lake Davis, since she first tied me some in the summer of 1973.
Practice
The wind can be your friend, but even friends can be annoying. Sometimes when the wind blows, you just have to put up with it — just carry on fishing. At times like those, it helps a lot to have practiced casting in the wind. My late fishing partner, angler/author Jim Cramer, lived at Bodega Bay, known by salmon anglers as “Blowdega,” for 14 years. I helped him lay out a casting range on his bluff facing the ocean. We built a platform on each end, marked off 10-foot increments, and practiced casting into, diagonally across, and with the wind. Jim would brave Pacific storms and work on his wind casting. Small wonder that he was always top rod on windblown bonefish flats and in windswept Patagonia.
Seize the Day
Wind doesn’t have to ruin a day on the water for the stillwater angler. It’s an opportunity to make lemonade with lemons. Even the October and November east winds, the ones that bring fire peril and sink boats on buoys, have their uses. When they blow, you might find tumbled and stunned crawdads along the shoreline at Tahoe and a few other lakes. It’s a long shot, but a crawdad pattern fished in shoreline chop may bring a huge brown to net, particularly if you fish into darkness and beyond. But whenever the wind blows, it can be used to your advantage — for a stealthy drift, for dapping, or, if your casting can deal with it, for fishing well when other fly fishers can’t even try.
