When is a Streamer a Fly and not a Lure? 10/1/24

A story of my trans experience in fly fishing

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When is a Streamer a Fly and not a Lure?

For years I distained fishing streamers or even nymphs for that matter, as for the first five years or so of my fly fishing era I only fished dry flies.  Fishing down below whether it be with streamers or nymphs didn’t appeal to me because I at the time thought that by doing so would be regressive as I not so long ago had left the dark side of spin fishing and had followed the light and came out on the our side and there was no going back.  It wasn’t until after I attended a fly fishing clinic that was conducted by author and fly fishing trailblazer Ralph Cutter, where his instructor Bruce Ajari demonstrated tight line and strike indicator nymphing techniques, that I began fishing down deep.  I from then on incorporated nymphing into my repertoire of fly fishing techniques to the point that probably 80% of my fly tying time became devoted to tying nymph patterns rather than dries. I became so devoted to developing nymph patterns that I had a few accepted by Umpqua Feather Merchants for inclusion in their wholesale catalog for several years. 

Eventually two events occurred that stimulated my interest in streamer fishing.  The first event was an industry junket that I attended on the Green River in the mid-90s.  A group of us that included some of the more well known fly fishing gurus of the time spent a couple days fishing the section A of the Green River which was just below the Flaming Gorge dam.  It was late September and we had terrible weather.  Temperatures were in the high forties, and it rained for most of the time.  To make things even worse, we had to row our own rafts and I, being the only one in our little group of three who had any rowing and white water experience, ended up doing more rowing than fishing.  

As you can imagine, we didn’t do very well the first day.  At dinner when we met up with the rest of the group,  it turned out that most had similar experiences with the exception of some guys from Minnesota who were well known for the streamer patterns that they had developed and were in the Umpqua catalog and were best sellers at the time.  The Minnesota guys had literally crushed it.  In my mind that didn’t seem fair.

The other event that literally made me a true believer in streamers happened after I joined the staff at Kiene’s Fly Shop in Sacramento CA.  I was surprised to discover that several of the staff were avid bass fishermen and their favorite bass species were Striped Bass.  Their favorite streamer was the Clouser Minnow and to be more specific, a chartreuse and white Clouser Minnow.  They used other colors of course but seemed the chartreuse and white seemed to fit the bill most of the time.  One July I got invited by a couple of the shop’s guides to take a float on the American River for Stripers, and after a morning of sticking multiple two to five pound fish.  I became hooked so to speak and for a while afterword the only flies that I tied were Clouser’s.

As time went on I began fishing small leach and sculpin streamer patterns when fly fishing for trout.  I would usually start out with dries, and if they didn’t work, I’d switch to an indicator rig, and if that didn’t work, I switched over to swinging dark leaches through the riffles and often that did the trick.  Though streamer fishing seemed to work when other techniques failed, it never became my number one go to for the reason that I personally preferred dry fly and nymph fishing as they both offered a challenge that streamer fishing did not.  To me dry fly fishing was all about the challenge of the set that required technique in casting, line handling and timing.  Same for nymph fishing and the pleasure of catching a fish on an intricate pattern that I had been working on for months, gave me great pleasure. Now that I had incorporated trout streamers into my portfolio of flies, I had a new effective technique available for catching fish. 

This past spring I was giving some thought to what differentiates a streamer from a conventional fishing lure.  Wikipedia defines a lure as “any one of a broad category of artificial angling baits that are inedible replicas designed to mimic prey animals that attract the attention of predatory fish.” That definition pretty much describes our streamers to a “T”, so when we use streamers are we really fly fishing or lure fishing? Well arguably the simple answer in my opinion is that if  you are  using fly tackle, fly rod, fly line, fly reel etc, regardless of whether you have an artificial fly or bait and the end of your leader, then you are fly fishing, but there is another argument that you must have an actual fly on the end of the leader to be fly fishing.  A counterpoint begs the question whether a spin fisherman who fishes a bubble with a fly rig is fly fishing. One could also question whether indicator fishing where the fly is suspended beneath a floating bobber (ie indicator) is really fly fishing. It’s a complicated issue and probably not worth discussing unless you and your buddies are sitting around the campfire sharing a bottle of Blantons. 

As runoff was winding down in the Sierra’s this past June, I was tying up some trout streamers getting ready for my first trip of the season when I was thinking back to before I transferred over from bait fishing to artificial lures, specifically Mepps spinners (see my  previous post on 9/24/24) and how effective that method had been.  I began wondering whether a fly that incorporated many of the features of a Mepps spinner would be just as effective.  I dug around my pile of remnants left over from this year’s tying sessions (I clean my fly tying table only once a year) and came up with some materials that I knew would get attention of trout.  For example, I knew that trout were very attracted to the colors red and yellow as I had witnessed trout coming up to the surface and striking my red or yellow strike indicator many times.  Another feature of the Mepps spinner was movement.  That spinning blade and its corresponding vibration was obviously an important feature that made the lure so successful.  Well, I couldn’t do much about incorporating a blade/vibration into my fly without some kind of hardware and that in my mind would be crossing the line so to speak as far as differentiation between a fly and a conventional lure was concerned, but there were plenty of fibers used by fly fishermen to tie bass flies that would provide plenty of movement.  And I had a meterials storage bin full of them.

The materials components that I came up with were a 2X long #12 hook, 3 red glass beads for the abdomen, chartreuse tungsten bead or conehead for behind the eye of the hook, pearl flashabou style fibers for the wings and pearl UV Ice Dubbing for the collar.  Very little research went into experimenting the efficacy of each if these components, as I just used what materials were sitting on my tying bench. 

I began tying what was a very simple design incorporating these components though as I expected,  there were many little things that had to be worked out such as getting the beads around the bend of the hook which consequently required testing different hooks and sizes and gaps, and coming up with the correct color for the beads etc.  All in all working up this pattern ended up taking hours though as I’m an avid fly tyer, it was all fun. So when I was done tying the result looked like a mess but once I put it in a glass of water the flashabou laid down giving the fly the look of a comet. It looked nothing like a Mepps. Oh well, I was going to fish it anyway, and as my dad (and probably every other dad) said “the truth is in the pudding”.

So now the fly needed to be tested. Being that one of my functions as the host of my website www.californiaflyfishingreports.com is that I keep up to date on trout plants by the California Department of Fish & Wildlife and I saw on their website that they would soon be planting a creek that was tributary to the south fork of the American River which is located  a little more than an hour from my home.  The perfect place to try out my new streamer.  When I arrived, it was obvious that the word had gotten out,  as there were quite a few fishermen in the honey hole below the bridge which was obviously where the bulk of the trout were.  I did notice however that the pool and tailout upstream from the bridge was devoid of fishermen, so that was where I headed. 

I decided to work up the run from the tailout and fish my usual indicator rig and if I didn’t do very well switch over to my new streamer.  I tied on my usual, can’t go wrong, combination of a #16 Bird’s Nest with a #16 Frenchie tied to the dropper.  I slowly worked upstream but wasn’t getting any grabs.  I questioned whether any fish were in there but when I got to the top of the run, I stripped in the line in to change flies and noticed a couple of fish following the yellow strike indicator, so I knew there were fish in there and this would be a good test for my fly. 

I tied on the fly and added a split shot about twelve inches above and flopped it into the water.  Once it sunk jigged it a little and all the fibers laid down to give it the appearance of a tiny Halley’s Comet.  I then cast out into the far seam of the run and fed some line to help the fly sink and then swung through the fast water. As soon, as the fly reached the seam on my side of the creek, I felt a hard grab and had a fish on.  I continued casting from that same spot drifting the fly to different locations in the tailout and caught about ten fish in about an hour when things finally slowed down. 

Obviously, the fly was a huge success, and my experiment showed that there was no question that the Mepps spinner imitation was definitely a viable option.  I have to admit however that once in the water the wet fly bore no resemblance to a spinning Mepps spinner and In all fairness I need to mention that in a normal situation where planted fish have been in the water to become acclimatized, I might not have caught so many fish in such a short time, as planters who stay in schools tend to maintain their competitiveness learned in the hatchery.

For the time being I have gone almost full circle as far as fly fishing technique is concerned as this summer I did something I thought I would never do, forsake dry fly fishing and nymphing for draging streamers down deep. Since June I have forsaken dry flies and nymphing and have been fishing this fly exclusively with exceptional success. In some way that doesn’t seem fair.  

As I get more experience with it I’ll make sure to post the results it here.  I feel the fly has now earned the distinction of being given a name so I thought it should appropriatly be called the “Cheater”.