Fly Fishing Tactics For Bigger Bass - P2

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Come On Down!

Jim Hendrick continues his series on catching bigger bass with an ‘in-depth’ look at putting your flies where the fish are.

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he faster we retrieve our flies, the more casts that we need to make. The more casts we make, the less time our fly will spend in the water. If our fly is spending more time in the air rather than in the water, we are less likely to catch fish. The continued act of casting and the disturbance it causes may also decrease your chances of catching a big fish. If we slow down our retrieves we will, by default, make fewer casts and, hence, decrease our chances of spooking a big fish by making bad casts or poor presentations. But slowing down our retrieves does much more than that. So why should we slow down our retrieve in the first instance? Under normal circumstances, we, generally, slow down our retrieve when the water Flies made from synthetic materials are easier to cast and sink more rapidly.

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temperature drops a little or water clarity deteriorates. You are forced to make these adjustments to your retrieve because we believe that fish are often sluggish in cooler water and we need to give them time to see the fly when things are muddy. All of these influences are beyond our control, and as we can’t change the weather or the water’s condition we must adapt to our surroundings. There’s nothing terribly wrong with that logic. Most of our bigger fish take when our fly is in deeper water, in fact, a favourite tactic of mine is bigger flies fished slowly, close to the shore, or even parallel to it. The chances are that you’re asking just how big is big or how slow is slow, and how deep is deep. A big fly to me is something

Fast-sinking shooting heads will help put your fly into the taking zone.

Jim Hendrick has no doubt that bigger bass prefer bigger flies.

When targeting some areas at distance under tough conditions like these, I have a set-up that consists of RIO’s Cold Water running line, which is 100ft long, to which I attach either a length of T-14 or another heavy shooting head. These lines go down fast! How you attach your fly, is, of course, another important factor. As we have mentioned, going down deep and fast is often a great tactic, but attaching a buoyant leader or fly to your fly line will defeat your objective. Your line will sink quickly, your You need to move your flies down normal leader less deep when fishing in areas like this. quickly and your fly might not want to wet its feet at all and prefer to stay in the mid layers. This creates a ‘U’ in your presentation and the fly is often nowhere near where you think it is or where it should be. Fluoro sinks, while mono has a tendency to float. A long leader, tapered or otherwise, will tend to move the fly into position a lot slower (if at all) than

greater than seven to eight inches in length. Consequently, to push a big fly like this, you need the matching equipment so a 10-wt rod, or similar, is required to make safe and reasonable casts. When fishing into deeper water you will need to move down deep fast or else the opportunities will be lost. Lines with grain weights of 450 or 500 are often a necessity. When you are fishing into fastmoving deep water you may need to use lines such as RIO’s T-14 shooting head or the new integrated T-14 Outbound.

a shorter leader, so make your leaders from fluoro and make them short – less than five feet is good. This helps us, not only in placing the fly where it’s needed, where the fish are grubbing around on the bottom, but it also helps us in turning over big flies in our casts. Regarding your last item, the fly, in my experience there’s no doubt that bigger bass like bigger flies. Big bass, like most predators, are opportunists and won’t burn energy unnecessarily. But try not to confuse bigger flies with more material. More material often means more buoyancy. We want our flies close to, or nailed to, the bottom in quick time, especially if we’re fishing fast water. As a general rule for trying to adapt your fly, or when making fly choices for this type of fishing, synthetics hold less water than natural materials. An unweighted synthetic fly will sink faster than a natural fly tied of roughly the same size. Casting a synthetic fly is also a lot easier as the water will shake out with one or two false casts. We’ll delve into fly types in the next issue, but one or two choices of fly have stood my customers and me in good stead – the Hollow Fleye, the Spread Fly and the Sloopy Droopy. The last one gives the illusion of a large-bodied prey and it will outfish many others!

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