In Defense of Dry Flies

No one ever said the process of fly fishing would be simple, easy or move in a straight line…

Technical Tubing

Last week, Kirk Deeter posted a tongue and cheek piece about doing away with plastic, chartreuse bobbers for the fall run, and learning how to actually cast, hunt heads and fish, which was mostly received as intended, i.e. readers laughed, were entertained or even decided they would ditch their bobbers altogether. That was the point of the humorous tip: be open to unconventional ideas and trying new things, and you might evolve your fishing technique…

We also received some boilerplate hate mail–feedback in the vein that we are “elitist snobs,” “dilettantes” (dabblers) and “self aggrandizing” our personal opinions (advising anglers to take the training wheels off their fishing skills) in a sport that values highly personal decision making wedded to a rugged individualism.

How dare we tell anyone how to pursue their intended quarry and with what techniques, if said techniques are effective, “legal” per the state’s fishing regulations and perfectly acceptable to the local fishing guides and lodges.

For the record, Deeter’s war on bobbers has been going on for a while (at least ten years), so the battle lines and feedback aren’t really anything new.

Generally, the pushback nets out like this:

“As long as fishermen are using legal methods widely endorsed across the spectrum and not exceeding legal limits, then they should not be exposed to any self-serving higher standards or forced to up their game. Fish how you want and leave everyone else alone…”

I guess this is the last remaining argument for the utility of bobber fishing: it works, it’s legal, leave me alone. Also, you’re an elitist snob for looking down your nose at me if I use them…

Fish any way you want–no one on our team has a strong opinion about the setups and rigs you employ on the water, unless those techniques begin to damage our fisheries at scale (like pegged eggs or old San Juan Worms on Gamakatsu Trout Worm Hooks, which are known to brain fish or damage their eyes). As an aside, recent research by the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission is trying to understand how banning pegged eggs and suspended attractors (as well as instituting single barbless hooks only) on the North Platte River will impact fish injuries, but it doesn’t seem overly complicated: raking fish with pegged rigs or foul hooking them ad nauseam with suspended attractors and bobbers tends to injure a lot of fish. Anyone who’s spent even a half day as a guide understands this.

But when you point out that plastic bobbers are for children, which they are, or that they impede your development as an angler, which they do, or that the fly-fishing industry has systematically created generations of anglers (some new, some old) who do nothing more than huck plastic bobbers and rake every fish out of every run, so they can count bodies on their fish clickers, you get more salient pushback:

“Please provide any data from any study or scientific research that supports your preposterous claim that trout aren’t feeding on the surface anymore because they are being pounded to death by a flotilla of bobbers…”

And, finally, we’re getting to the root cause of the disagreement–the “Live Free or Die” ideologue: “My techniques are not impacting your fishery…”

To which I say, after watching western fisheries slowly and systematically decline over the last thirty years, the hell they aren’t…

I won’t bore you with all the potential causalities for degraded fisheries: increased fishing pressure, climate change, warming water temperatures, effects of wildfires, a precipitous crash of bug populations, pollution, obsolete dams etc., because that would require five thousand words to unpack. And I haven’t even mentioned social media exploitation, geo-tracking apps, increased guide pressure, more invasive angling techniques (yes, bobbers) and, ultimately, what Deeter likes to refer to as the general “industrialization” of the fly-fishing industry–an increasingly impactful outfitting and social media apparatus that views our shared resources more as economic drivers than fragile ecosystems.

To what extent do some or all of these challenges contribute to a fishery’s “death by a thousand cuts” over a ten or twenty year span? All of them, obviously, to varying degrees.

The more important question is: what do you do about it? And how and why are some fisheries more insulated than others to these ever increasing challenges.

And to the guy who’s willing to die on the hill of slinging orange plastic toys, take in a few of these recent, western data points with a healthy dose of reality:

• Resource pressure: The Madison River in Montana had 200,000 single user days in 2024 (only 10% of those days were guides and outfitters)–so, any way you slice it, that’s a hell of a lot of river use and angler days, and a lot of bobbers.

• Fish are hurting: The Wyoming Game and Fish Department has been recently monitoring fish with hooking injuries on the North Platte River, and the results aren’t pretty: “More than 70 percent of the fish sampled at the Miracle Mile had some sort of hooking scar…”

This isn’t particularly complicated–the more anglers you put on the water with more invasive techniques (bobbers, pegged eggs), the more fish you hook and beat up. Fish spend a lot of time feeding underwater. Bobbers are a pretty good way of hooking these fish. Social media is a pretty good way of syndicating these hyper-effective techniques to a pile of neophyte anglers. Tons of fish are getting hooked and not handled (post catch) particularly well. That’s how you get to the Miracle Mile’s astounding number of injured fish.

Clearly, this is a much deeper conversation about More Evolved Ways to Handle Fish, but to casually waltz into this conversation as a resource user, completely oblivious to the impact your fishing “techniques” have on a fishery, both individually and at scale, is patently ludicrous.

We’re all anglers.

We all interact with these fisheries and their inhabitants.

We all have an impact.

The conversation should be about more thoughtful ways to evolve and minimize our impact.

When the Aluminum Hatch Came to Baldwin

I grew up in a “dry-fly fishing only” family on the banks of the Pere Marquette river in northern Michigan. It’s also important to note that the Steketees were not fly-fishing snobs; the genesis of our dry-fly fishing effort centered much more on utility than any pretensions around social positioning.

In those days, during the late 60s and early 70s, the river system’s largely hermetic brown trout would routinely feed on dry flies during the day, and evenings, of course, given midday bugs were around (Hendricksons, Sulphurs). The evening mayfly emergences were highlighted by Gray and Brown Drakes, before the Hexes appeared at dusk a few weeks later.

Later in the summer, hoppers and beetles were consistent ways to coax the river system’s often enormous fish to the surface for a look.

The point of this abbreviated history is to relay the fact that dry-fly fishing was the way to catch these fish. Bobbers, Sex Dungeons and swinging flies were not required, and in many cases, probably would’ve been ineffective. Though nocturnal and reclusive, these fish were still dry fly eaters.

Then sometime around the mid-to-late 70s that all changed.

Family evenings at dinner, or after on the porch, focused on the likely culprits: overfishing, lampreys, lampricide to kill the lamprey larvae (that also might be killing the insects), the salmon, the steelhead, generations of logging damage and sediment in the river (good old fashioned sand), loss of bank structure and, of course, the newly established “aluminum hatch”: an endless flotilla of Old Town and Grumman aluminum canoes unleashed by the enterprising Swede named Ivan a few miles upstream at the M-37 bridge.

Over the next twenty years, as the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) refined the efficiency of their lampricide program and studied the river’s brown trout, steelhead and salmon, study after study showed that the brown trout, despite infrequent, anomalous fluctuations, were a healthy and sustaining population.

The fish were there, but they had altered their behavior.

As my grandfather and uncles spent more time playing cards and tying flies at night, I was the young kid heading out and fishing. Yes, the fish still ate dry flies, but they had also become much more wary and carnivorous, preferring to ambush streamers or mice after everyone had gone to bed.

Who could blame them?

Refactoring their food gathering from relatively static dry-fly runs during the day to long-distance roaming at night, these fish were becoming travelers in search of prey. Some of the first brown trout telemetry studies ever recorded began to reveal their astounding adaptations, often traveling a dozen or more miles in a single night and working their way back home by sunrise.

The point of this lesson is not to bemoan the loss of a long-forgotten dry-fly fishery, which would be easy to do, but to simply point out: our seemingly innocuous interactions with these complex ecosystems is always creating impact. The nagging question is always, can we define the quantity of this impact? And I guess that depends on your ecological perspective (or education) and how closely you’re looking.

Does running a thousand boats down the Madison River each year create impact? Does running a pink, plastic bobber over 500 fish per day create impact?

Anyone ignoring or feigning ignorance to these sorts of inquiries in this day and age of ever increasing fishing pressure not only is a poor steward for the resource, but an unserious student of the angling craft.

Does anyone in their right mind think the camo-cladded guides on New Zealand’s South Island are stalking and targeting 10-pound browns with obnoxious pink bobbers?

I would argue that any angler operating with so little tactical fishing awareness, will find it nearly impossible to find consistent, long-term success as our fisheries continue to evolve in increasingly complex ways.

Understanding that bright, plastic bobbers spook most of the fish in a run (that matter) is barely step one in the 1,000 page tome on “Fly Fishing Better.”

The Scourge of Strike Indicators

What do you guys have against bobbers?

This is a question our team fields a fair amount.

I can’t speak for Kirk, Tim and the others, but for me, the answer requires a three-part explanation: 1. They’ve become a crutch that hinders angler development, providing an inflationary amount of success relative to skill. 2. They are an exceptionally effective tool at hooking fish for beginners and intermediates, providing exponentially more opportunities for fish to be mishandled and injured (look no further than the recent Miracle Mile fish injury studies). 3. They spook fish, particularly the year classes that matter.

It’s probably worth unpacking this a bit…

On skill development: John Juracek, a noted fly casting instructor, likes to point out that ninety-eight percent of anglers have major fundamental flaws in their casting strokes. Even if this assessment is only half true, and it’s closer to forty-nine percent, that’s still an eye-opening number of anglers walking around the river without the ability to execute a basic and meaningful fly cast. Imagine ninety-eight percent of the golfing public unable to swing a club. And it’s even worse with fly fishing, because you can string a plastic bobber to your leader, huck a Pat’s Rubberlegs out on the drop-shelf and hook a twenty-inch brown trout, without really having a clue what you’re doing. If we want to enable a new generation of more in-tune and tactically competent anglers, we have to teach them how to stalk fish and cast. Outfitters and guides have earned the same challenge–teach your anglers how to cast and fish and ditch the body-count mentality with double bobbers out of the boat. On the river, less can often be more if those fish are larger and earned through higher-end skill. There also could be an industry argument and economic incentive to source new forms of revenue from “skill development” categories like coaching, classes and instruction. For a proxy, look no further than the golf industry that estimates its golf instruction and coaching market at $1 billion (U.S.), golf training aids market at $1 billion (global) and golf simulator market at over $1.7 billion and growing (global). Understand, I’m not suggesting the tiny, niche fly-fishing market needs to emulate the golf vertical and start constructing “Topcast” venues–I’m simply highlighting the well-known physiological fact that the human brain is wired for learning and skill development. And our teaching, guiding and outfitting instincts should reflect this fact.

On the hyper-effectiveness of bobbers: As everyone knows, indicator fishing can be pathologically effective–they target fish where they eat (underwater most of the time), they put training wheels on your ability to properly drift a fly and, most importantly, they provide feedback to the angler when fish have eaten your offerings. In that regard, as a tactical, utilitarian tool, they perform exactly as advertised, and then some. Watching an A-level predator wipe out a run with a well-managed indicator game can border on gluttony. And that’s probably where the challenge starts–a hyper-effective tool employed across every free-flowing river at scale can hook and potentially injure a lot of fish. Adding to this challenge, hardly anyone in our fly-fishing media ecosystem is pushing back against these largely normalized attitudes of excess. Your entire social media feed is filled with frothed-up anglers, dangling bobbers and gasping, grip-and-grin fish, pumped out by the guides, lodges, travel providers and fly shops. That’s how the sport is sold today: people stuffing fish in nets with the cameras rolling. And you wonder how we got to seventy percent injury rates on the North Platte. Is it just the indicators that are to blame? Of course not, but they provide a fundamental inflection point to the wider disorder. They are the dumbed down gateway drug.

On fish being “bobber shy”: They are. Period. But what does this actually mean and can you prove it with a “scientific study”? Let me quickly state, without carving out another 1,500 or 3,000 words about my long, personal history with strike indicators, that I have fished and tested every indicator and bobber setup in my lifetime: wood slip bobbers for pike as kid, cork and toothpicks, polypropylene yarns, wool yarns, Palsa pinch-ons, BioStrike leader putty, Thingamabobbers, the New Zealand Indicator System, dry-droppers, submerged hoppers, red Amnesia, bright fly lines…honestly, this is hurting my brain. So, I’m not here to rain on your bobber-hucking parade, I’ve been there. But I’ve also learned over many painful decades that big, freestone fish don’t really love these fake, stupid things floating over their heads (tailwater fish may tolerate them more). We spent years as West Slope guides testing the kinds of indicators both the browns and rainbows would tolerate in (relatively) clean Colorado River conditions. (No, I’m not telling you.) Hell, a few weeks back on the upper Madison we spotted some big, mid-river fish, and we threw bobbers (without flies) just to see what they would do. Spoiler alert, they peeled off those runs so fast it would make your head spin. Well, now I’m confused, should I use them? Of course, and you should experiment with every size and material type known to man, but understand, they are just one of many tools in your fly-fishing toolbox. And as you evolve as an angler, not only will you grow beyond a number of these introductory techniques, you will also realize their fatal flaw: ubiquity.

Yesterday’s hot fly or indicator or billboard artist is just today’s also-ran.

The only constant in fly fishing is its continual evolution and change.

The rivers, oceans and fish will never stop moving.

And that is the beauty and complexity of it all.

Approaching the sport with humility, creativity and adaptability are the rare earth minerals you should be hoping to mine.

In Defense of Dry Flies

A few years ago, I was fishing with the great, young guide Colton Schofield on Idaho’s Henry’s Fork, looking for risers during the Mother’s Day Caddis hatch. Halfway through the gale-force wind day, we found a big, active brown, tucked under a giant rock that shelved off the river–the only logical way to approach the fish was from a position above and in the boat. A long, eighty-foot reach cast that might float a spent caddis right to his snout…

So, Colton jumped out and held the drift boat in the current, while I attempted to make a number of reach casts from the bow: forty, sixty, eighty…I lost count. The wind and angle made it impossible, without a twelve-foot rod, to get the fly another foot closer. We were in the ballpark, but not close enough.

After forty minutes of deafening wind, I announced, “Alright, this fish can’t be caught,” and let fly one final cast, just like all the others–adequately aligned, but a foot off the correct line.

Another fish (that haunts you) to file in your mental Dewey Decimal System.

But then something unusual happened: As the spent caddis floated its way down to the fish, the trout pulled off the rock (the extra foot we were lacking) and slowly began exiting the run–he was done feeding after 40 minutes and started drifting back to his lair.

After three or four seconds of additional drift, I said to Colton, “The fly is going to end up right on his snout…” And it did. The fish poked his nose out of the water and inhaled.

Was it luck, patience, coincidence? I believe it was Bob Dylan who famously wrote in 1965, “Take what you have gathered from coincidence” in the song “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” where I’m sure he was referencing the challenge of his artistic process: meaning isn’t simply handed to you; it’s something you actively cultivate from the chaos.

For the angler, the lesson is particularly analogous: you are not an innocent bystander, haplessly watching bobbers float down the river. Your job is to excavate the patterns and meaning from the seemingly arbitrary chaos. Over time, the “gathered” knowledge will help refine the approach. Eventually, you’ll have a plan.

That fish wouldn’t have tolerated a banging boat or TurtleBox blasting above his head.

That fish wouldn’t have tolerated a plastic bobber.

That fish wouldn’t have tolerated a sloppy cast with the right fly.

Sometimes, the fish is the card dealer, and all you can do is hang around long enough to give luck a chance.

I’m Ready to Enter a Bobber Recovery Program

The first step in bobber addiction is the hardest, and we’re here to walk the rest of the way with you…

On-water detox: Step number one is to admit you have a problem. Afterwards, you can choose to taper your withdrawal, substituting plastic bobbers with more elegant indicators like yarns, high-floating dries or other parts of your terminal tackle. Experiment with colors, sizes and materials, and track any fish reactions in a journal. There’s also the more blunt force “cold turkey” withdrawal, where you simply start fishing streamers and dry flies and leave the indicators at home. It’s a high-risk strategy, with high-risk rewards, and in a nymphing pinch, cut your leader down and use the end of your fly line to detect strikes.

Quiet reflection: In all seriousness, consider tracking your findings in a fishing journal–how different fish react to different kinds of stimuli. If you’re able to sight fish, start watching fish movements, instead of distracting substitutes. Understanding their behaviors, not those of indicators, is how you truly jump your learning curve.

Fish a single, versatile fly rod: A couple weeks ago in Montana, we ran into a number of wading anglers, lugging around multiple fly rods (one for dries, one for nymphing) on the river. In a boat, bring all the rods you want, but you’re still only going to fish a couple. As a wading angler, two fly rods is a distraction, and regardless, you should be learning how to fish one fly rod in many different scenarios (nymphs, dries, streamers etc.). If your fly rod can’t do a bunch of different stuff, that’s a red flag and should be telling you something. Like a great NFL defense–your favorite stick should be multiple.

Build a fallback plan: As you move forward, you’ll need a clear strategy to prevent relapse–a comprehensive bullet list, often facilitated with a trusted mentor, that might include: fly tying, one-fly events, mousing at night, “streamer only” float trips, “dry-fly only” days, carp fishing, Tenkara trips to the creek that runs through town. Get out of your comfort zone and risk some failure, but also some bigger wins.

Fish with superior anglers: Don’t be afraid to spend the day with a highly sought-after guide, fly-fishing expert or casting instructor. Most of this sport’s truly valuable knowledge is handed down on the river with experience. You also can’t boil the ocean of ideas in a single day–hone a few new insights each season and iterate. Narrower inquiries always outperform spray-and-pray approaches.

Break the rules: Fly fishing tends to attract a lot of “birds of a feather” world views and fishing strategies. And social media has only exacerbated these tendencies. But if everyone is doing the same thing, your ability to “surprise” a wild opponent becomes systematically dampened.

Herman Melville, the famous American novelist and short story writer, remarked in an 1850 essay about Nathaniel Hawthorne’s collection of stories, Mosses from an Old Manse, that writers should be willing to take bold and often unpopular risks:

“It is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation. He who has never failed somewhere, that man cannot be great. Failure is the true test of greatness. And if it be said, that continual success is a proof that a man wisely knows his powers, – it is only to be added, that, in that case, he knows them to be small.”

No one ever said the process of fly fishing would be simple, easy or move in a straight line.

And wherever you land on the skill evolution continuum, the most important tendency to advance is a relentless faith in what you’re trying to accomplish.

The difference between an average and exceptional angler can be remarkably subtle, and most often is related to a single-minded focus and ruthless consistency.

An unwavering belief in the direction you’re headed.

Once you figure this out, the remaining pieces will inevitably follow…

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