Deadly Dries

Autumn can bring exceptional dry-fly fishing on our small stillwaters. Ben Bangham provides useful pointers to target fish off the top.

- Ben Bangham

It really excites me when I see the rings spreading out from what can be described as an epicentre of excitement, sometimes even hitting other rings as they spread across the lake’s surface.

This, however, can be one of the most frustrating times, as well as the most exciting, on a small still water. These fish can be very tricky to take on a dry fly because there are several factors that are against you when trying to land one of these silver torpedoes.

So what is against you and how can you try and stack things in your favour to net a surface-feeding prize?

Big Dry Or Little Dry?

The main factor that is stacked against you is the size of the fish that you are targeting. They are big and strong most of the time and this is a problem.

In most situations, what the trout are feeding on is very small, which means that it is hard to imitate as well as being hard to fish effectively with the heavier tippet that you need due to the fish size.

There are certain waters that you can work with this because there might be very few snags around and a lack of weed and suchlike. However, this is rarely the case, so what do we do?

This is when bigger and brighter flies are the way forward when the fish are looking up to feed, and hopefully it won’t take too much to convince the trout to eat something big and juicy that plops down in front of it.

Another factor that you must be aware of is which way the fish is pointing. If you cast behind it then it isn’t going to see the fly and it isn’t going to take it. You must be able to lead the trout with the fly to get it to take. Unlike rivers, where the fish lift to take a floating fly and more or less return to exactly the same place, on still waters they will be constantly on the move, so placing your fly in the middle of a rise will not always result in a take, or even the fly being seen.