Neal Osborn
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Good call Lando. Könnten Sie das bitte erklären. I just grabbed a picture from that trip and didn’t look closely.
BWO’s are basically the main dry fly down in the Southeast tailwaters. When I first moved here I was tying all kinds of traditional dry flies and stimulators but soon learned that a box of BWO’s and a few other classics were pretty much all that was needed. The problem with BWO’s is that they are small and (for me) very hard to see. I have tried tying parachutes with flash/orange/yellow but I still have a hard time with the size 18-20’s during a take and especially if the fish are taking emergers or sipping. After a bunch of trial and error here is what is working for me currently and how I have helped my visual hook-up.
My current BWO setup, sorry about the photo clarity, I am still learning to take better fly pictures. Left-to-right, parachute size 18-20 (rarely size 16’s), BWO Viz-A-Dun from John Barr variation – I tie them with striped quills size 16-20, CDC emerger with green head, RS2 size 18-20 for my nymph. I almost always always trail an RS2 off my primary fly. Notice that these flies don’t have much visual white or anything to indicate a strike, thus the frustration. What I did to help was use orange strike puddy! I dab a bit on my tippet and then again on my leader and put a dab of floatant on the puddy (see picture below). This system works for me when the the orange dots suddenly go straight or into the water, strike is on.
As for tying BWO, I have learned that selection of feathers is crucial. I have switched from medium-grey dun (left) to the dark-dun Hoffman line. The latter gives a much better wing for BWO and this is what the commercial tiers use.
Brook trout caught on a size 20 BWO emerger in the North Carolina streams.
Zach,
Interesting. For the first time I got a message on my Macintosh that says the “certificate is not verified” when I clicked on the fly fishing discussion section. I clicked “don’t trust” and it took me to the discussion section but said other message like site is unverified. This is not usually the type of message or behavior one gets on a Mac and it has never happened on the IA site for me before. Don’t know if it’s related but thought I would post.
Now I understand the Bream thing better. Here is a quote from the article Light Line Bream by Chris Dunham. See the .pdf attached above for the full article. With a quote like this it is no wonder you guys are always talking about the Bream on the fly.
“Bream being the moody, cunning brats that they
are can go from charging, if not actually eating,
almost anything thrown at them to running a
country mile at the suggestion of a shadow.
Unfortunately, or fortunately (depending on how
you like a challenge), the latter is more often the
case. They are after all a long-lived species and the
older they get the more caution they display, which
is why in my book a large bream capture is a real
achievement and anything over forty centimetres is
worth crowing about.”Here is another great quote from the article. I am getting pretty interested in making a trip to fish for these guys 😉 I think that our fly fishing magazines need pros like this. 😀
“They also have some sort of attitude or identity problem that
means they’ll chase a fly in a pack like a school
of tailor. While this is good fun on a three or four
weight it doesn’t really make use of the light line
and can often be done better with a six weight,
especially when the wind kicks up. It’s further up
the estuary where the wee twigs and light lines do
their delicate, deceptive thing.”
