I was chatting with a fishing partner who is our fly-fishing club’s best chironomid angler, and I mentioned that I was working on the deep-water indicator part of my stillwater series. Indicator rigs are particularly useful for stillwater fly fishers because they allow you to drop flies into the pockets or close to steep vertical weed bed edges where fish graze for insects in areas with little open water that are difficult, if not impossible to fish with sinking lines and a cast-and-retrieve approach. Norm looked at me and said, “You must mean anything deeper than one foot.” We often agree to disagree on many subjects, and I filed his thoughts away, rather than start an animated discussion that I didn’t have time to finish. I was skeptical of his definition.
Not long afterward, I was hosting the author and stillwater-angling guru Denny Rickards. Denny was in Grass Valley to speak before the Gold Country Fly Fishers about his fourth book, Stillwater Presentation, and his stillwater fly-fishing system, which has evolved over many years and long hours on the water. Denny’s talk was riveting and changed the thinking of many of our members. Yet the best part of his visit was the chats that we had on stillwater angling during his two-day stay at my home. Much of our discussion focused on his “A.P.” or All Purpose flies. He designed them to imitate insects in transition from the larval and nymphal phase to what he calls the “pupal or emerger phase,” which occurs mostly in the first 18 or so inches of water below the surface film. It’s a zone where fish hunt and graze a great deal. Food is abundant and easy to capture, and trout are used to looking for insects that are struggling upward, particularly at first light and in other low-light conditions, when they are opportunistic, less vulnerable, and less cautious. Much of Denny’s system is built on f ishing this zone and presenting a natural, upward-moving food source, including line choices that help accomplish this.
It occurred to me that Norm’s definition of deep-water indicator fishing being anywhere below one foot was close to being right on, if deep-water fly fishing of this type involves presenting the larval form anywhere below the point in the water column where midge larvae pupate. This could be from a foot to 30 feet down. That evening, one of the issues that Denny and I discussed, was why we don’t catch fish. Sometimes, he pointed out, they just aren’t in a feeding mood because of physical conditions — moon phases, barometric pressure, cloud cover, water temperature, currents, water chemistry, wind direction, and oxygen saturation. But Denny was emphatic that when trout are feeding, if we don’t catch fish, it often isn’t because of our fly patterns. It’s rather the simple fact that we aren’t running our flies through water that holds fish.
That made sense to me. At group outings, I try to take a poll every evening, surveying the quality of the fishing. The question that gives us the best lead for the next day’s angling is, “Where in the water column did you find fish?” It’s amazing that in a large sample, anglers report success at about the same depth, even if they were fishing different areas in a lake and took fish on different fly patterns.
What depth is that? It’s where the food is. So we need to find concentrations of larval or nymphal insects dense enough to attract schools or pods of trout. The trout have to take in more calories than they expend in feeding, and underwater videos show that they move easily, not in a rush, taking insects that they don’t have to move far from their meandering route to get. They mostly feed on a horizontal or slightly upward pathway. The feeding band may move up or down vertically in the water column or move to other areas, sometimes nearby and at other times another part of the lake.
What they’re eating, of course, does matter. In the cold water of the spring, late fall, or winter, chironomids are the main food source until warming water and longer periods of daylight produce a wider variety of insect forage. Trout metabolism slows down as the thermometer approaches and falls below the 50-degree point, and the distance a fish will move to take a sighted food item gets very short. Ernie Gulley, “Mister Chironomid” at Crowley Lake, sent me figures that suggest that chironomids make up 39 percent of a trout’s diet in that rich impoundment. Others would suggest chironomids are even more important, particularly in slightly alkaline high-desert lakes.
It’s not always about chironomids, though. My fishing partner, Norm, has refined the use of balance leeches (for information on this type of pattern, see “The Balance Leech,” by Denis Isbister, in the March/April 2015 issue). They can be devastatingly successful, and their use is becoming more widespread. Another fly used at Crowley is a very small perch fry imitation. Don’t forget Bird’s Nests or Pheasant Tails. They’re about as generic as it gets and should be in everybody’s fly library.
Imitations of Callibaetis nymphs also should be in every stillwater fly fisher’s fly box for deep-water indicator nymphing. Several years ago, master fly tyer Phil Fisher, fly-tying author Jim Cramer, and I drove south from Sun River to join a small group of anglers from the Davis Fly Fishers at Oregon’s beautiful and productive Diamond Lake. They were nice enough to call us on cell phones and let us in on a good thing that they had discovered. Together, we anchored five prams and Phil’s larger boat in a rough circle over a several acre patch of even bottom that had short weed growth in 12 to 14 feet of water. We fished two-fly indicator rigs, with Phil’s UV Callibaetis pattern, which had a hint of light magenta purple in the abdomen and thorax, as the bottom fly, and a classic red Oregon Snowcone 14 inches higher up.
A cloudy sky and deep water kept the trout that our Davis friends had found feeding all morning and into midafternoon near our boats and within casting range. We were fairly close together, and we caught so many fish that the huge sample allowed some observations: 80 percent of our fish took the bottom Callibaetis imitation, which we set one foot off the lake bottom, and 20 percent took the Snowcone chironomid. Who knows if a reversal in fly position would have made a difference. Few fish took a fly near the boat’s shadow, and we were rewarded for making longer casts and for paying close attention to our indicators. Our biggest fish came on longer casts. Takes were very subtle, with many occurring on short, slow retrieves of the rig, 6 or 12 inches, after the flies had settled and reached the depth we wanted and had sat there for awhile.
We used release indicators that allow the indicator to slide up the line when a hook set on a fish pops the clear, hollow peg. At 12 feet, our leaders were longer than our rods, and an indicator can interfere with getting a struggling fish to the net, which is even more of a problem when angling from a float tube or a pontoon boat. There’s also a new indicator on the market that uses a twisting peg that adjusts tension on a rubber O ring so your indicator stays in place until you need to reel in, then slides up your leader. It’s rapidly gaining in popularity.
Once a leader gets much longer than 10 feet, it can be a challenge to cast an indicator rig with two flies without getting a bird’s nest. But sometimes you don’t need to cast very far. As you get into deeper and deeper water, you don’t need to be as concerned about placing your flies out and away from the boat’s shadow, because light decreases with depth. Still, when you use a leader that is much longer than 10 or 12 feet, you need to do a series of slow roll casts, open your casting loop, and be wary of tangles that necessitate a complete, time-consuming rebuild of your rig. In a float tube or a pontoon boat, you can roll the rig out in a big, wide loop and back-kick away. Personally, I’ve never used a rig longer than 15 feet, yet in British Columbia, land of the chironomid, the famous stillwater guru Brian Chan will fish as deep as 30 feet, if needed. At Crowley, guide Ernie Gulley at times needs to go that deep to get to fish.
Wind chop gave our flies an up and down animation (wind is your friend), and the short, slow retrieves made our flies rise and fall in short vertical paths, like an insect struggling upward, then falling back. We were anchored up fore and aft, so there was no boat swing. Repeated mends helped take out line slack in the mild wind chop and aided in setting up on the slightest movement of an indicator.
Once you find a place that produces for deep-water indicator nymphing, make a note of it. Our friends had GPS coordinates for this patch of fertile bottom. You will find that these areas tend to repeat year after year if water levels remain the same. However, the West’s drought will result in lakes with much lower levels this year, and the fertile patches of bottom might be much harder to locate.
In any case, you have to place yourself precisely to fish at the proper depth. At Oregon’s Crane Prairie Reservoir, a legendary still water that is fairly shallow, successful indicator fishing is practiced by guide Fred Foisette on the edges of three submerged river channels. Fred double-anchors his boat on bends in the channels and is precise in where he wants you to place your rig. Several feet up or down the channel slope can make a huge difference. In this type of angling, he is looking for fish moving along the transition zones, and a pull of 6 or 12 inches every so often is also a big part of his technique.
Indicator fishing gives the stillwater fly fisher yet another tool that, like an array of different lines and a well-thought-out fly box, that is based on aquatic biology. Low water levels this year will force fish into new territories and will result in different weed growth patterns. Summer is an excellent time to explore this versatile technique.
