Posts Tagged ‘lake fly fishing’

Do you really want to have more success when you are fly fishing lakes? Lakes offer some tremendous opportunities for fly anglers and often, bigger fish than are typically found in small rivers and streams can be had. Even large ponds can hold some big old brutes of fish.

Although many anglers when fly fishing lakes will use traditional patterns such as Woolly Buggers, leeches and wet flies, often overlooked are chironomids.

This is a shame as chironomids are a large part of a fish’s diet in lakes. In North America, there are over a thousand varieties of these midges that don’t bite. They are also found in rivers and streams but are especially effective in stillwater fly fishing.

If you would like to have more catches when you visit lakes, it would be to your benefit to get to know more about chironomids and their various stages including the pupae and larva stage of their development. When the fish are taking them, chironomid fly fishing can be hot!

One of the nice things about chironomid fly patterns is their simplicity and ease to tie up. Effective patterns can be as simple as wrapping red stretchy material such as red Flextreme around a grub hook and securing it. The addition of a bead head and/or peacock herl at the head can add to the effectiveness of the pattern.

Another effective chironomid pattern is a simple tie of French Oval copper tinsel around the shank of a grub hook with a bead head and floss for breathers or gills. Of course, there are many other patterns that are simple to tie that you might have success with.

The best way to fish chironomid patterns is very slowly. Chironomids in a lake often have very little movement and are affected by the lake conditions and currents. When fishing them, give the line a quick twitch and then allow the fly to sink and move downward in the water and be moved around by the lake’s natural motions upon it. Often you will find a fish will take on this long pause after you’ve twitched your line.

Another effective way to fish them is to retrieve them very slowly.

Where legal, chironomids can be deadly when fished in a tandem of two or three flies. Experiment with them at various depths of the lake, and enjoy more success while stillwater fly fishing. Some chironomid and midge patterns here.

Other than a brief outing the other day to try out the Meiser Fly rod, I’ve been in bed, sleeping, napping, and feeling miserable getting over a nasty virus.

Woke up today and felt much better, and after feeling up to unpacking my suitcases from the trip to Grande Prairie, I thought I’d go back to the pond off Highway #9 near Orangeville, Ontario and try the Meiser rod out again. Hopefully this time with some fish on the end of the line.

All I can say right now is “Sweeeeet!” After making some adjustments for the handle length of the rod, laying out line was quite nice. Tried a few different fly patterns in the first half hour and caught nothing. Then tied on a white leech sort of thing tied up by Ernie Kalwa and after a few casts off the dock, felt a vicious take.

A couple of minutes later, netted this very nice 16 inch rainbow trout:

Continued to try the leech pattern but no luck on it. Tried a few other beefier type flies and still nothing. After a while, I noticed some fish rising to some hatching chironomids and thought I’d tie on a sort of “Brassie” pattern (not sure of the name of it – but basically a copper body with a beadhead and head of peacock herl).

The rod cast the fly exactly where I wanted, and during the extremely slow stripping of the line, this 17 incher was fooled and brought to the net:

Due to the angle of the camera, it looks smaller than the first one – but it was an inch longer.

Anyhow, really impressed with this Meiser System 2 rod!!

I still have to write up a full report of my day on Six Mile Water in Antrim, Northern Ireland – but yesterday and today I decided to spend about an hour each day at a rainbow trout lake just minutes from my home.

It’s interesting that sometimes, the fish simply won’t take what seems to be the obvious. Yesterday evening, there was very little hatching although the odd large fish was seen taking something off the surface.   These surface takes were rare however.   I was also testing out a Greys “Greyflex M2″ 10 1/2 foot rod – so to be fair, I was doing more casting and getting used to the action and length of this rod.  Thus far, I’m somewhat satisfied with the rod but it’s not quite performing up to my expectations.  Although it can lay out a long line, sometimes it feels as if it is “collapsing” on me.  I was using larger wind resistant flies in working with the rod – and found my timing had to be just about dead perfect on the forward stroke.  It could also be partly the line.  Last year, I was happy with the AirFlo Platinum – but after a year of use, it is gone quite crappy on me.

I had one fish in about an hour of angling on the lake – but not caught on what I thought should be working; flies like Wooly Buggers or Leeches.  Instead, it was the Malteser that took a fish.

This evening was a different story though.  I arrived at the lake about 5PM, chatted with an other angler for a bit and then set up my rod. At first, I thought the evening was going to be a repeat of yesterday evening until I moved to a different location.

Within about half an hour, I had five fish on a black Wooly Bugger. Stripped real slow – almost just drifting under the sinking tip line and leader.  As well as the five I brought to hand, there were several very soft takes that I just couldn’t set the hook on.  Anyhow, it was much better than yesterday.

The first fish turned out to be a 17 incher, which I decided to keep for breakfast:

I ended up with two that were larger than this very pretty fish, and two that were a few inches smaller.

A nice way to nearly finish up a day!