Using Attractor Patterns to Trigger Stillwater Trout with Phil Rowley (Littoral Zone #21)

00;00;01;09 – 00;00;32;01 Phil Welcome to the Littoral Zone podcast. I’m your host, Phil Rowley. Littoral zone or Show. Larry The Lake is a place with the majority of the action takes place. My podcast is intended to do the same. Put you where the action is to help you improve your Stillwater fly fishing. On each broadcast, I, along with guests from all over the world, will be providing you with information, tips and tricks, flies, presentation techniques along with different lakes or regions to explore. 00;00;32;18 – 00;00;58;02 Phil I hope you enjoy today’s podcast. Please feel free to email me with your Stillwater related Fly fishing questions and comments. I do my best to answer as many as we can prior to each episode just before the main content. Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoy today’s show. Hi Phil here and thanks for taking the time to join me on my Littoral Zone podcast. 00;00;58;29 – 00;01;24;00 Phil First, I want to apologize for not delivering this episode to you sooner. The past few months have been a whirlwind for me. This past fall, I finished the last of my destination, Stillwater Schools. My Final Guide Days of the season and my annual hosted trips to chase Giant Rainbows on Argentina’s Jurassic Lake with Estancia, Laguna Verde and Golden Dorado on the Parana system through the Golden Dorado River Cruiser. 00;01;24;21 – 00;01;50;16 Phil Soon after those trips, I also squeezed in a week at issue like Mexico as a guest of each, like paradise, fly fishing lodge. Here I targeted Bonefish, Tarpon permits, snook jacks and Barracuda. Now, you might think the ocean differs from lakes, but believe it or not, there are many similarities. I tend to see the ocean as a massive lake, and many of my Stillwater presentation techniques often work well here. 00;01;51;06 – 00;02;13;16 Phil So keep an eye on my website for updates about future hosted trips and be sure to subscribe to my newsletter so you don’t miss out. If you want to join me on one of my trips or schools in the future, the links will be posted in the show notes. Now, before we discuss the power of attraction, I want to answer a question I recently received from Kirsten about droppers and surface feeding trout. 00;02;14;23 – 00;02;42;21 Phil So let’s get to Kirsten’s questions. Dear Phil, really enjoying your laterals on podcast, you have asked four questions which could form the basis of future podcasts. I have two questions nagging me. First, your best combinations from multiply rigs. A number of options, big ones, small, different silhouettes, different colors, different weight movement. Do you have a preferred approach to combinations on multi rigs? 00;02;43;04 – 00;03;03;14 Phil Well, let’s answer this question first. This is an excellent question, and I’ve got a couple of answers. Actually, I got several answers when selecting multiple fly risks for dropper rigs or sorry, multiple flies for dropper rigs. I try to avoid preset pattern choices. I base my selection on what I observe when I arrive at a lake or when I’m out on the water. 00;03;03;25 – 00;03;25;08 Phil That said, I do follow some guiding principles. I often make contrast based choices. For example, contrast can be a different size. It can be a different color. And if I’m fishing with small flies, I may use a larger animated pattern such as a leech or an attractor, to draw a fish’s attention to a smaller fly or smaller flies. 00;03;25;29 – 00;03;53;29 Phil If I’m faced with a Hatch situation, I may offer different variations on the hatch. For example, of chronometer staging and hatching. I would opt for a darker fly on the point to suggest a staging pupil that’s hovering and suspending near the bottom at the same time on a dropper further up the system. I might choose a brighter chroma style pupa to suggest an ascending gassed up pupa when fishing during early spring and fall when boatman and back streamer falls typically occur. 00;03;54;13 – 00;04;14;09 Phil Fish can switch preferences throughout the day, eating boatmen for a while, then switching the back. Swimmers and then going back to boatman and then back to back swimmers. In these instances I would fish a rig featuring both patterns so that at any one time I’m offering the fish a food source they will eat and the one that best matches their switching preferences. 00;04;15;02 – 00;04;48;27 Phil Pattern function can also play a role. If I am fishing a washing line to set up and control my presentation depth when retrieving flies horizontally, I’ll offer a buoyant pattern on the point such as a. Fab foam based dragon water boatman, back swimmer or even a dry fly a fish are feeding at or below the surface. There’s lots of options here and I like to keep them open, but there’s just some that I look for when I’m considering what patterns to put into a multiple fly rig and which sequence to put them in. 00;04;49;25 – 00;05;18;12 Phil Kristen Second question deals with an approach between fishing dries and mergers. Do I differentiate between the approaches to fishing purely Dreiser and mergers, or would you prefer a combined rig to cover both? Would you be able to use different approaches and tactics when tackling adults or mergers or both simultaneously? This is another great question. Often when fish are taking dries in or mergers, I will fish multiple flies as well. 00;05;18;18 – 00;05;36;13 Phil I mentioned that in my previous question. I’ll often mix an adult within a merger pattern and try to fish those patterns in a washing line setup, perhaps a dry dropper or some other way to keep those flies up near the surface where the fish are feeding. And I also tend to pay attention to the rise forms as well. 00;05;36;14 – 00;06;04;15 Phil I think that’s really critical when fishing dries, as I may, fish to dries or two or mergers or three dries and two or mergers or some combination like that, depending on if I’m allowed to fish droppers and how many. And it’s easy to react to arise that you see by immediately choosing a dry fly to imitate the adult phase of a hatch trout like any other fish, are opportunists and tend to focus on the easiest prey source in the case of a hatch. 00;06;04;16 – 00;06;29;19 Phil This is typically an emerging nymph or pupa in the process of transforming into a winged adult. Often, the adult opportunity is short lived as the adult insect, almost sensing its vulnerability, takes flight as soon as possible. When faced with surface feeding fish, I always try to suppress my excitement, which isn’t always easy, and watch the rise form for clues about what stage the trout are feeding on. 00;06;29;19 – 00;06;57;17 Phil To guide my pattern presentation and my pattern choice. When taking dries, trout poke their noses out of the water and many times you can see them take the adult. You’ll often see the nose poke followed by the dorsal fin and back as they arc through the surface fill. Be sure to keep an eye out on the bow wave and the speed of the rise as this provides clues to the direction of travel and their cruising speed so you can accurately lead them to where the next rise might be. 00;06;58;10 – 00;07;18;06 Phil Another key to watch is for the telltale air bubble of a surface feeding trout. The bubble is a result of the trout not only taking the adult insect, but a gulp of air, rather, which they expel as they descend down into the depths. An air bubble in the middle of a rise is a pretty good sign that trout are feeding on something on the surface. 00;07;18;26 – 00;07;44;10 Phil Now trout feeding on a mergers tend to show only their backs and dorsal fins as they target ascending or suspending pupa at the surface or just below the surface. The rise is usually slower and more deliberate as the emerging insect is helpless and cannot escape like an adult. In most situations I’ve encountered with rising fish, I find it more effective to imitate emerging insects or pupa than the adults. 00;07;44;24 – 00;08;07;21 Phil It might not be as fun as catching fish on dry ice, but it’s usually more successful. So based on those, again, that’s going to guide when I’m fishing dries or emerges and my rig settings, again, if I think they’re eating in mergers, I’m going to fish emerges exclusively. If I see them or believe them to be fishing dries and emerges, then I’m going to have a combination of both. 00;08;08;00 – 00;08;29;12 Phil And of course, if they are feeding on adults all the way around, if one is good, two is better. But if it’s flat, calm, little wind, clear water, really, really challenging conditions, then a lot of times I’m going to opt for a single fly as I worry sometimes multiple flies landing all around a surface, feeding fish may be too much and spooked them. 00;08;30;02 – 00;08;56;20 Phil Now, these were great questions. Thanks again, Kirsten, for taking the time to send them to me. I really appreciate it. If any of you have specific Stillwater questions or frankly other fly fishing questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me through my website. Phil Really fly fishing dot com or via email at Phil Rollie at Phil Reilly fly fishing dot com or check out my social pages and send me a message there through my Instagram, Facebook or YouTube. 00;08;57;05 – 00;09;19;02 Phil Just search for Phil Rollie five fishing and you’ll find me. Now let’s get on with our podcast. Okay, let’s get to the meat of the sandwich. Today’s podcast, A Tractor. Patterns and techniques are, as I prefer to call it, the power of Attraction. So what are we going to talk about today? We’re going to touch a little bit of the history of tractors and fly fishing. 00;09;19;18 – 00;09;36;29 Phil What we’re trying to do, which is basically trigger a reaction from a non feeding fish so we can talk about those triggers. We’re going to talk about why you want to use the tractors anyway, when you’d want to use the tractors. Talk about some presentation techniques and then I’m going to talk about some of my favorite attractor patterns. 00;09;37;03 – 00;09;58;05 Phil And many of these are available on my YouTube channel and I’ll try and put some pictures and recipes in the show notes as well, along with links to those tagging instructions so you can see them. Because I realize in the podcast, obviously it’s not easy to see flies. So the power of attraction, when you think about fly fishing, it’s really founded on the principle of a match, the hatch philosophy. 00;09;58;14 – 00;10;25;04 Phil So you observe or you see, which is the same thing, of course, a trout feeding on a natural food item. You imitate that food item with your pattern and your presentation techniques and you catch that fish. However, what I’ve learned is that fish don’t always eat our flies out of a feeding response. Often there’s other things, other triggers that come into play that are not to do with feeding, but other things that make the trout put that fly in your mouth. 00;10;25;16 – 00;10;47;18 Phil Now, attractor patterns are nothing new to other disciplines of fly fishing. Steelhead fly fishers have used them for years to attract basically a non feeding trout sorry, a non feeding steelhead, a steelhead that is perhaps more focused on reproduction than feeding salmon when they return to spawn and live out their lives. I’m talking Pacific salmon here and of course Atlantic salmon too. 00;10;47;18 – 00;11;12;27 Phil To some degree. They’re aggressive and they will chase down things that are not necessarily food items as a fly invading their space or just somehow flips a switch and they’ll take it. Saltwater flies use a lot of attraction as well. Not all the flies aren’t matching natural food items. There’s an element of attraction to them, either in the colors you tie them or where you put that colors and how you fish them, of course. 00;11;13;08 – 00;11;38;02 Phil Trout particularly, I’m talking about river and stream anglers have long used some form of attraction to help them increase their catch. And when you look at non-trade species like Pike and Muskie, we often fish louder colors at larger flies at an aggressive pace to trigger a reaction out of these naturally aggressive predators. So attractors is nothing new in fly fishing. 00;11;38;02 – 00;12;03;10 Phil But for some of you, and maybe something new to think about in Stillwater, fly fishing. Now, if you look around fishing in general, there is a couple of anglers that come to mind that have, you know, understand the power of attraction, if you will. And if you look in the conventional world. Recently retired bass angler Kevin Van Dam is one of the the best, if arguably the greatest of all time when it comes to tournament bass fishing. 00;12;03;20 – 00;12;23;02 Phil He’s won numerous Bassmaster Classic Angler, the year titles to his name. He’s made a lot of money fishing in bass tournaments and in his Dawson’s and power fishing is his key to ongoing success. If you follow that, you know, when you’re in a tournament, you have a limited amount of time. You’ve got to catch as many fish as you can. 00;12;23;10 – 00;12;48;11 Phil So your finesse techniques, if you’re thinking about conventional fishing, like drop shotting, take time. And it’s a slow, dedicated presentation technique. You don’t necessarily have that time. You need to run and gun fish aggressively using what they call often reaction baits, swim jigs, spinner baits, crank baits, rattle baits, etc. These are baits designed to take advantage of those aggressive fish and their naturally aggressive tendencies to catch them. 00;12;48;11 – 00;13;05;07 Phil You just don’t have the time in a tournament to spend lots of time doing finesse techniques that you would perhaps if you were fishing more recreationally. Of course there are times in tournaments that that technique and that approach is required, but most of the time you’re fishing fast, covering a lot of water, trying to catch as many fish as you can. 00;13;05;08 – 00;13;25;17 Phil This is also the same if you ever get into fly fishing competitions as well, particularly in Stillwater, fishing is it’s a lot of aggressive flies and techniques because you just don’t have the time to sit and fish chronometers and fish them slowly, for example. And of course a lot of the rules in competitive fly fishing, don’t you allow you to fish indicators and things like that. 00;13;25;17 – 00;13;50;03 Phil So there’s a different approach when it comes in and attractor patterns and attractor techniques are part of that. You know, Kelly Gallop is an angler I respect. He is known for his streamer techniques and patterns. He’s was originally born in Michigan. He now resides in Montana. He owns and operates the Slide River Inn in along the banks of the Madison River and his book, Modern Streamers. 00;13;50;03 – 00;14;20;10 Phil For many of us changed how we look at streamers and fishing, how we tie them and how we fish them. And Kelly has loves to, you know, look at conventional fishing and apply those techniques and theories to fly fishing as well. And he realized the importance of reaction bait. So he’s someone else that I would look to. And his philosophies have also been incorporated into my philosophies when it comes to using attractor patterns on lakes. 00;14;20;10 – 00;14;43;23 Phil Well, if you think about it as well, we start looking at flies. Attractor drives have been very popular. Dry flows and use. If you think about flies like the royal coachman, the Royal wolf, the Madame X Turks, Tarantula, Fat Albert’s royal humpies. These are large, gangly flies that are designed to trigger a response from a fish. You can fish these flies at times when they’re feeding on. 00;14;44;08 – 00;15;03;28 Phil Maybe they are in a match. The hatch scenario and, you know, all the imitative stuff, the emerges that cripples the specific adult patterns you may be trying to fish are just not getting a success since somebody comes in and drifts a bit. Gladiator actor through them and they respond to it like a kid seeing Halloween candy for the first time. 00;15;03;28 – 00;15;28;20 Phil So tractor drives have long been part of fly fishing and they also work well on lakes do at certain times. Attractor nymphs are popular, particularly with European style nymphs or contact nymphs or straight line nymphomania. So many terms for that nowadays. And it’s just a fly that’s looks a little unorthodox. It stands out in the crowd and it gives trout something else to keep on. 00;15;28;29 – 00;15;53;15 Phil It’s a very popular philosophy in Europe. It’s become increasingly popular in North America, particularly with competition anglers, which I mentioned earlier. So these flies feature hot spots, tag and bright tails and vibrant color beads. You know, a couple of my favorite flies I like to use are Lance Egan’s Red Dart and his Blue Dart, for example. These are a little larger flies. 00;15;53;15 – 00;16;32;20 Phil They’ve got some flashy colors in them and they really draw the attention of trout. And we can do that as well with our Stillwater Flies because we can add a splash of attraction to our flies as well. So we incorporate a tractor traits to existing pattern. So we may take, you know, I like to do this on perhaps more realistic patterns in the form of hotspots, little bright components, eyes beads, fluorescent beads have become very popular, as I mentioned earlier, competitive anglers when they’re fishing lifestyle techniques on lakes because you’re not allowed to anchor use a lot of attractive style patterns with long flowing tails or perhaps little hotspot beads. 00;16;32;20 – 00;16;59;11 Phil You fluorescent orange are true pinks as well. I tell you, if you check my YouTube channel, I’ve got a couple of patterns there. The striptease damsel that features prominent chartreuse eyes tied out of knotted vinyl or worm chenille. I also fish flies like my balance leeches, my CBO, Canadian black and orange. The orange stands for the fluorescent off orange beads. 00;16;59;17 – 00;17;21;25 Phil My Bruce Leech, which has been a long time staple of mine, originally tied with black blue Arizona semi seal, a black marabou tail and a gold bead has now in recent years tends to see more hot pink beads, fluorescent pinks, fluorescent orange and fluorescent chartreuse just to stand out in the crowd a little bit and get the attention of the trout. 00;17;21;25 – 00;17;32;13 Phil So that splash of attraction is one way of up in your game a little bit and perhaps catching more fish. I’ll have links to those flies in the show notes. 00;17;32;13 – 00;17;54;13 Speaker 2 When it comes to high quality flies that truly elevate your fly fishing game. Drift hokum is a trusted source you need. 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Well often you get weather systems can impact feeding patterns of trout they go on and off the bite you know during that period of transition and change is one system moves in and another one is pushed out, Trout can become very aggressive and feed aggressively. 00;18;52;02 – 00;19;11;01 Phil And conversely, they can also shut down and will not respond to natural presentations. So you go to using a tractor patterns is one way to snap them out of that slumber. Trout love them as we do. They often focus on tiny prey items that are almost impossible to imitate. We’ll talk about a couple of those in a second. 00;19;11;01 – 00;19;41;26 Phil And I see on a regular basis, at times when trout aren’t feeding, they will go suspend and stage in deeper water, not feeding regularly. Attractor patterns are great ways to provoke a response or a tractor. Techniques to provoke a response from these non feeding inactive fish. You can use a tractor patterns and presentations to target aggressive fish fish that are just, you know, an aggressive state of mind and and like a bit of a rabid dog or just in a mood that day or that portion of the day to chase things down and crush them. 00;19;42;08 – 00;20;22;09 Phil We also use attractors in a multi fly system if that’s allowed where you fish, you know, we’re fishing droppers, we’ll often incorporate in a tractor somewhere in that system, either perhaps in the upper position or on the point fly fish. See that larger, gaudy, more animated pattern come over to investigate. They may eat it or they may slide up or down of that fly in your in your presentation and your leaders set up and eat a more natural pattern so you can use a larger, more noxious fly to draw fish in, to eat smaller flies and pull them in simply because that fly attracted the fish and pull them over to have a look. 00;20;22;26 – 00;20;50;01 Phil Whereas if you were just fishing that small natural fly by itself, it might be more difficult for the fish to find and see. Recently stalked fish are suckers for attractors, you know, when I’m talking fished or stalked at a catchable size, you know, if you think about it, they’ve perhaps spent a year or two of their life, depending on the stalking practices in a pond, at a hatchery and things of lunch dropped in on a regular basis and life was pretty good. 00;20;50;01 – 00;21;09;08 Phil And then one day they’re put in a truck, taken for a ride, deposited into a new body of water, and they’re left to fend for themselves. So they have to figure out what is and is not food. So conversely, they are very good candidates to use. Attract your patterns and techniques on because they are going to put flies in your mouth because they’re not sure what it is. 00;21;09;08 – 00;21;30;26 Phil We’re going to talk about these triggers and curiosity is one of the triggers that we can use to catch fish using attractor patterns and the aggressive takes. When your fishing attractor patterns, we tend to fish a little larger flies. We’re turning the fish them a little more aggressively, move them faster through the water, a faster retrieve pace, if you will, and the fish respond with an aggressive, hard take. 00;21;30;26 – 00;21;52;10 Phil And that’s that’s a lot of fun. We do fish a lot of in lakes, as you probably aware, a lot of small flies like Chronometer. The best example that can a very subtle takes an almost six seven sense to recognize those takes and be effective attractor patterns tend to get taken with a little bit more gusto and every once in a while it’s nice to get a good yank on the end of the line and not be going. 00;21;52;10 – 00;22;11;05 Phil Was that or wasn’t there to take? So how are we getting fish to eat our attractor pattern? What are we trying to trigger out of them? One of the first ones, and these are no priority but first we’ll talk about briefly is curiosity. Fish are tactile feeders. Their hands. So are their mouth, are their hands. That’s how they sample things. 00;22;11;05 – 00;22;30;08 Phil You you may have seen video on YouTube or in other sources where you see trout in a river, you know, moving back and forth in a run or holding and things drift by. And they’re not food that could be a stick. The leaf or some other item that is not food. They put it in your mouth. They bounce it around in here for a few seconds or a half second. 00;22;30;18 – 00;22;55;11 Phil The food spit it up. So they’re sampling. They’re going, Oh, what’s that? And they put it in your mouth and they take so their mouth off their hands and they take sample bites. You know, I always talk about when I speak in some of my seminars in schools, if you think about a great white shark, which is probably the ultimate example of a sample bite, when they are transitioning from feeding on fish to more mammals in their diets, it’s a learned behavior. 00;22;55;11 – 00;23;13;16 Phil It’s not something that’s instinctive. So when you think about a surfer sitting on a surfboard, that shark looks up, that looks very much like a resting seal. They come up, they take a bite out of it thinking it’s lunch. It’s not. It’s Styrofoam. Unfortunately, a human body part may get in the way and then they they back off. 00;23;13;16 – 00;23;35;00 Phil And that wasn’t what they thought it was. So they’re taking that’s only an extreme example of a sample bite. So sometimes our attractor patterns and techniques, we are triggering them to take our fly out of a curious sample bite response. They don’t know what it is and they put it in their mouth. So that’s why, you know, when we talk about attractor patterns later on in this podcast, you know, a lot of them don’t look like anything. 00;23;35;00 – 00;23;54;28 Phil They’re gaudy, they’re bright, they don’t resemble anything in nature, but try to find them interesting and they’re curious about what they are. And they put it in their mouth. And I jokingly say, if a trout puts the fly in the mouth, that’s all we really want, and then we can do the rest from there. Another one that’s probably makes more sense or pops to the forefront is aggression. 00;23;55;14 – 00;24;21;08 Phil Trout are predators. All predators are aggressive. They have that naturally aggressive nature in them. And you can just trigger a reaction by the fly you use in the manner in which you present it to trigger an aggressive, predatory response to your fly. So typically, we are fishing attractor patterns at pace. We’re using aggressive retrieves. We’re triggering, often referred to in some circles as a flee response. 00;24;21;08 – 00;24;40;04 Phil If you’ve ever taken a bear aware course, you know you bump into a bear on the trail or out on your travels, you know, don’t make eye contact back away slowly, don’t appear aggressive. If you sprint and run away and get scared, which is a natural reaction, you could trigger that. That bear being a predator to go, whoa, food runs. 00;24;40;15 – 00;25;01;05 Phil You must be food and I’ll go get you and you suffer the consequences. So flea response, you’re triggering that, by the way. You fish to fire you basically angering or pardon my French pissing the fish off and it takes your fly accordingly. Another response is territoriality. You know, you bring a fly close to a fish, it gets a defensive response. 00;25;01;05 – 00;25;20;27 Phil It you’ve crowded their space, it snaps out at it. You know, if you’re fishing rivers and streams. You know, I referred to Kelly Gallop. He talks about putting his flies into places where trout may be resting and non feeding. You invade their living room and strip it away. You’re going to get that snapping dog response that chases it down and eats it again. 00;25;20;27 – 00;25;39;12 Phil All it matters is we have triggered a response of a fish, puts that fly in its mouth that is not necessarily retreating. So in summary, again, we can trigger a response out of curiosity. Trout’s not sure what your fly is, puts it in its mouth to take a sample and we can hook them. They’re aggression. They’re just predators. 00;25;39;26 – 00;25;58;22 Phil We make that fly, run away from them or swim by them, and they’re a predator. They just respond to it and they attack it or you get that a little close to them and they didn’t like that. You crowded their space, they get angry and they snap out it again. Three ways to trigger a response. And as long as the fish put it in their mouth, it’s all good. 00;25;59;14 – 00;26;19;03 Phil So I talked about, you know, one of the things that can be irritating with trout and why we use attractors is when they get focused on small things, that’s one of the beauties of trout. They, they eat small things are constantly grazing and snacking, if you will. They’re not a a fish that necessarily eats a big food item and then sulks off and digests it. 00;26;19;03 – 00;26;38;09 Phil Maybe like a northern pike that’s a big 40 inch fish is just eaten a 25 inch pike and is sitting in a shallow bay using that warm water to help the digestion process. They almost become like pork constrictors in a zoo about you guys, but in girls. But whenever I went to the zoo and looked at a big python or a boa constrictor, it never moved, right? 00;26;38;09 – 00;27;06;18 Phil Because it just been eating something and it’s all resting and digesting, right? It’s not actively moving around. So, you know, the trout aren’t like that. They tend to eat small things. And one of the things that they can eat, which can be quite frustrating when they’re on, is zooplankton, often referred to as Daphnia. Although Daphnia is a species of zooplankton, this is a calorie rich, easy to consume food source trout just swim through clouds of this, basically strain them out of the water with their gill rakers. 00;27;06;18 – 00;27;25;21 Phil It’s an easy way to eat and it gets them a lot of calories. They can get quite healthy and fat on these. It’s a common food source for trout to feed upon during late spring and into early summer when the water temperatures warm and trout spend less time in the shallows because the oxygen content due to the warming water isn’t there. 00;27;25;26 – 00;27;47;24 Phil When they go stage in deep water and again during late summer into early fall when again those trout have been out in that deeper water over the warm summer periods feeding and focusing on soil plankton and start to slide back into the shallows. You’ll see zooplankton feeding so we can use attractor patterns to take advantage of that. So plankton is light sensitive. 00;27;47;24 – 00;28;17;23 Phil It feeds on phyto and actually phytoplankton is light sensitive, so zooplankton tends to follow its prey. Phytoplankton stays typically in deeper areas, stays down out of the sun’s rays, and comes up at night when the sun has left the water and the prey follows them. So I often use a trout that has a heavy if I do a careful throat sample, has zooplankton, and as an indicator that they are feeding in deeper water and attractor patterns and attractor techniques may be in order. 00;28;18;04 – 00;28;44;15 Phil So that’s Daphnia. And there’s different times as Rotifers, as Copepods, as a family called Claudius Herons, which Daphnia or water Fleas, as they’re often referred to live in. But typically these are very small. They come in subtle colors, they can come as almost fluorescent looking colors of pinks, reds, oranges, light greens, chartreuse. So think about those colors when we talk about fly patterns. 00;28;44;15 – 00;29;08;29 Phil That’s why you’ll see a lot of those color combinations in the attractor patterns we to today, they’re active. If you ever do a throw pump sample of them, you’ll see zooplankton moving and darting around their members. A lot of them are members of the crustacean family again. So they’re rich in calories. So attractor techniques are often a way to get or attractor patterns are often a way to get fish to take your fly when they’re targeting zooplankton. 00;29;08;29 – 00;29;29;06 Phil Years ago, when they’re on zooplankton, we basically shrug their shoulders and almost gave up. Now, with the advent of the popularity and our increasing awareness of attractor patterns and techniques, we can cope with this challenge. The other thing we see a lot of times, and this isn’t always prevalent in lakes that I fish, but when they are they can be quite frustrating. 00;29;29;06 – 00;29;59;19 Phil And that’s a cousin of the corona mid called k arborists. chh0bor U.S.. These are often nicknamed glass worms. The larva is clear and translucent. It’s free living. It often has two black spots at about one third and two thirds marks on their body. They are predators and they feed a lot on zooplankton. So it’s quite common when fish are targeting zooplankton that they’ll also ingest cobra’s larva as well. 00;29;59;25 – 00;30;25;09 Phil The larva transforms into the pupa, the pupa, or also typically the bodies. The abdomens are transparent, the thorax is are dark or light brown in coloration, and they have two signature little horns on their head. They look like cranham and pupa at first glance. But the two keys rather I look for when fish are on cobras is those prominent little black horns and no white gills. 00;30;25;09 – 00;30;51;11 Phil White gills are common to Cranham and pupa, but not to Cobra’s pupa. And also they’re quite active. Kratom and Pupa tend to ride much like a snake on her snake charmer music, whereas cobras are quite active. They’ll take a little rest and then they’ll wiggle, you know, almost like little jumping beans, wiggle and move around. So when trout get on a translucent food source, they can be tough. 00;30;51;11 – 00;31;11;00 Phil So attractor patterns and techniques are one way to shake them out of this and try and get a few fish to your hand when you’re fishing. So let’s talk about attractor patterns now. Let’s get into that and then we’ll get into some of the presentation techniques. Attractor patterns tend to be large and gaudy, and by gaudy I mean by colors. 00;31;11;00 – 00;31;31;22 Phil We’re talking a lot of fluorescent colors. They’re designed to stand out in a crowd and easy for for fish to find and target them. And probably the most famous attractor we have in our arsenal is the boobie. Now, this is a fly name because of the prominent round eyeballs form eyeballs that are tied in at the front of the fly right behind the hook. 00;31;32;01 – 00;31;56;00 Phil It was designed by an Englishman, Gordon Fraser, in the 1950s. It’s a little controversial in some circles. It’s been banned on several English still waters. I think more for the presentation techniques that were involved in this. Some of the English fisheries are, I believe, are very traditional based and would rather you fish more natural patterns and techniques and not just strip attractor patterns around. 00;31;56;08 – 00;32;17;12 Phil In fact, you know, the stalking practices in many English lakes, they’re stocked not seasonally like a lot of our lakes in North America, tend to be stocked in a spring. In the fall. They trickle new stockings in throughout the season. And these fish, as I mentioned, Stockfish, are susceptible to attractor patterns and techniques. And it’s common. If you want to catch fish, use attractor patterns. 00;32;17;12 – 00;32;44;04 Phil It’s actually got a nickname in England called Stocky bashing. But the buoyant nature of this fly, those round foam eyeballs, you have to use a full sinking line to drag them down. You can use them at the surface as a disturbance fly. The weak that they create when you retrieve them can attract fish. But typically we’re fishing them on fast sinking lines to drag them down in the water and then stripping them back aggressively, using 4 to 6 inch strips with pauses. 00;32;44;13 – 00;33;09;20 Phil And those that fly, the form causes that fly. When you strip it, the fly pulls down. When you pause, it rises up. It wobbles, it shakes, it’s got marabou in it. Scotty material, the body material. Talk about in a second Fritz or Chanel’s. And but you got to keep the pace up on it. We’ll talk about the perils of buoyant flies in a second, because buoyancy is a feature common to a number of popular attractor patterns. 00;33;09;20 – 00;33;35;24 Phil And you will see a theme that many of these attractor patterns have come out of England and have emigrated their way into North American Stillwater, fly fishing, probably the most popular color we use here in North America is tequila colored with white or yellow foam eyeballs on them. A The signature fritz or chenille translucent chenille bodies and a little marabou tail. 00;33;35;24 – 00;34;01;23 Phil So tequila is a yellow back end, a yellow tail and bud section on the fly, and then a fluorescent safety orange or fluorescent orange front section as well. Just again, not your typical insect. I don’t think there’s anything in lakes that looks like that. But when trout see one wobble by at pace, they react to it sometimes. So the core of this fly and many of these flies is a product called Fritz or different kinds of signals. 00;34;01;23 – 00;34;21;18 Phil It’s a synthetic body material. They’re strong cause they’re translucent. So we we pack them on the fly. We do as many wraps as we can get on there. This material, when it gets wet, has subtle movement. It’s translucent. Light will pass through it. I find the best way to tie with some of these materials is to wet the material first. 00;34;21;23 – 00;34;51;17 Phil So I’ll cut a length off. I will dip it in a glass of water, stroke the majority of the water out of it, but it’s still wet. I’ll tie material in and then start winding it forward and close touching turns sweeping those fibers back to build up a dense underbody. One of the tricks you can do as well is is using white threads and the white eyeballs, not necessarily as a part of the fly to represent something, but white reflects light and further lights up these translucent materials. 00;34;51;17 – 00;35;12;08 Phil You can also do mylar under bodies as well to help make those materials pop. But we’re using, again, a lot of gaudy colors in this fluorescent orange is sunburst orange shell, pinks, biscuits. You’re going to see a lot of these unique colors and their names that come over from England and Europe, where these flies have become really popular. 00;35;12;08 – 00;35;35;08 Phil So you really need to see the packaging to understand what watermelon is, what biscuit is all, those kind of colors, but very popular material. And the form of course you we get round form cylinders are very popular. You can also buy block foam and use a cutter. And we are using a to create a tube, if you will, typically in the 5 to 7 millimeters diameter. 00;35;35;19 – 00;36;09;14 Phil We then cut them to a short length. I often use the distance from the hook eye to the point as a gauge, you know, 10 to 12 millimeters length. And then you round the eyes. You can do that a number of ways depending on the form types. You’re harder phones you can take once you’ve made that cut and sometimes will pre round the eyes a little bit once we’ve cut them with a curved pair of scissors or just a regular pair of scissors, you get the edge of the form in the back jaws of the scissors and just sort of rotate the form as you’re cutting around to, to round those edges. 00;36;09;20 – 00;36;33;20 Phil And then you can, if you’re really an eye fanatic, you can further round them. If you’re using hard foam use a Dremel tool, a concave bit. I think the number is 932 to round those further. If it’s a softer form, which I tend to use, I don’t want to use a super high buoyant form I like. It’s got to be buoyant, but not, you know, really hard forms can be really buoyant. 00;36;34;01 – 00;36;50;28 Phil You can use a lighter, careful application of heat, just move the lighter in and out against the edges can help melt and round those eyes even further. And of course, you can buy premade boobies. They’re already ready to go. Usually they’ve done the work for you. You’re going to pay a little bit more for them, but you get nice, consistent eyes. 00;36;51;07 – 00;37;10;07 Phil Or you can buy these boob tubes or foam cylinders or booby forming blocks, cut your own and make your own. And it’s the kind of thing I do when I’m doing this. I sit down in a session and pre make a whole pile of ice. So the next thing I will talk about it also incorporates a lot of material is the Blob. 00;37;10;13 – 00;37;33;28 Phil And the blob was originally designed, as I understand it, to be an attractor pattern in a team of flies. I remember I talked about attractors can be used to draw fish into your flies. You’re more natural flies and it’s typically in the upper position in a two or three fly system. Again, if you’re allowed to use multiple flies in the waters you fish, it can be weighted or unrated. 00;37;33;28 – 00;37;58;29 Phil The original was an unweighted fly tide entirely out of Frits. It has a no foam on it. There’s no buoyancy in this fly whatsoever other than those synthetic materials that are used for the body. Now we have evolved this to use beat head versions under indicators when they’re targeting zooplankton or just an attractor in the waters. Fish in western North America primary as well. 00;37;58;29 – 00;38;19;08 Phil I’ve also used them to good effect in Argentina as well, hanging a blob under an indicator it can be a deadly way to fish, both to suggest a cluster of zooplankton or just again, you’ve got that curious response to what is that gaudy thing hanging in front of me. Let’s go take a bite out of it and see what it is so you can fish this fly static under an indicator. 00;38;19;16 – 00;38;49;15 Phil You can use a slow hand with the trees on an indicator, or you can fish this on from floating lines to the fastest sinking lines and strip them through the water as well. A variation of the blob is a fly called Fab, and it’s basically a blend of a bob and a boobie. And it’s got a pretty interesting history as it was told to me that in competitions, eyes with in certain competitions in England flies with form in the front was banned. 00;38;49;28 – 00;39;18;06 Phil And so a Scottish team, as I understand it, looked at this problem and asked well what if the form is located in the back of the fly? And I guess that slipped through the loophole. So this often features taking those boobie, the boobie caught or the boobie form five or seven millimeter, tying it in like a tail. I was taught to split it as well with a straight edge, which increases the buoyancy and it’s tied in the back. 00;39;18;06 – 00;39;37;21 Phil And then it’s got that regular Frits or you know, Crystal Chenille body, depending on the manufacturer, what they call the products to use. And this fly has a different action. When you strip a boobie, it kind of pulls down on the strip and rises up and kind of wobbles and shakes through the strip. The fab as you strip, it moves horizontally. 00;39;37;21 – 00;39;57;27 Phil And when you pause it, the back end kicks up. It also tends to sink a little faster than the boobie. So sometimes a boobie doesn’t sink fast enough for the situation you’re fishing in. The fab is often an excellent choice. If you want to get your attractive flies down a little faster. Truthfully, it’s arguably one of my favorite attractors. 00;39;57;27 – 00;40;24;04 Phil So where does the name Fab? What does it mean? Well, it stands for a full Mars blob. So if you can visualize that, a blob with that chenille body with a split form tail at the back, it’s an excellent fly for a washing line presentation, which is when you put it’s a dropper set up where you put a buoyant fly on the point that allows you to hang regular normal flies, imitative flies off independent droppers. 00;40;24;04 – 00;40;47;06 Phil So they hang like clothes on a washing line. It is a deadly Stillwater technique that I use all the time. I love to fish it whenever possible and wherever legal, if to again to referring back to the use of multiple flies because similar to an indicator, it allows you to present flies at a set depth depending on the buoyancy of your point fly and the fly line you choose. 00;40;47;06 – 00;41;17;13 Phil So it’s an excellent presentation. Now, one of the things when you’re fishing buoyant flies I’ll touch on is there’s always a parallel to doing this because trout, you know, can take a buoyant fly deeply and we don’t want that. And what tends to happen is when you pause a buoyant fly, whether that’s a boobie, a fab, a spun and clipped your hair drag in a foam based water boatman and back swimmer, if you pause them, that fly is going to, you know, start to rise up. 00;41;17;18 – 00;41;43;21 Phil And that puts a little bit of slack in your leader and you lose contact with your fly. The fish puts their mouth on that, feels no opposition and tends to swallow it and gets deeply hooked. So you’ve always got to be cognizant when you’re fishing. Buoyant flies, whether you’re fishing an imitative, spinning clip, dragging a water boatman or a bad swimmer with a foam back because fish often target those insects at the surface or an attractive pattern like a fab or a boobie that has form in it. 00;41;44;03 – 00;42;08;24 Phil You want to fish them, be constantly in touch with them, use active retrieves. Don’t let them pause too long to stay in touch with them. If you let them just sit there, they can take it deeply. And that was one of the issues in my research years ago about boobies. And it was a lot of times anglers, bank anglers would fish a short leader, tie on a boobie maybe 4 to 6 feet, just so the fly will hang just above the bottom structure, weeds, debris, that kind of thing. 00;42;09;01 – 00;42;28;02 Phil Fast thinking like chuck, it out, let that line lie along the bottom and just let the boobie sit there and wait for the fish to swim up, eat it, swallow it, and you land it. And of course, in that situation, the fish most of the time swallows their fly rather deeply. And in a catch and release scenario, that’s going to be tough to remove that deeply hooked fly from a fish. 00;42;28;02 – 00;42;47;02 Phil And if you don’t want to be reaching around the gill rakers of a fish and causing it to bleed, because once those skills start to bleed, it just the fish continues to bleed, the blood doesn’t clot and the fish will bleed out and die. So if does happen, the lesser of two evils is to literally cut the tippet off the fly and leave the fly in the fish and let that fly. 00;42;47;09 – 00;42;49;07 Phil Hopefully over time work its way out. 00;42;51;07 – 00;43;13;10 Speaker 2 Onto Mark Lodge offers a world class experience with one of the finest rainbow trout and brown trout fisheries in the world. Their family owned and operated Missouri River Lodge offers comfortable accommodations, delicious home cooked meals and personalized service that make you feel like family days on the water are capped off by appetizers, beverages, dinner and stories on the back deck and around the campfire. 00;43;13;24 – 00;43;41;08 Speaker 2 Book your stay for an unforgettable fly fishing adventure where memories are made and fish stories are real. 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Sorry, a whatsit or a jelly mop is a basically a blob often tied with a bead head, tungsten bead or a brass bead. 00;44;58;05 – 00;45;21;01 Phil I use tungsten beads most often because this is a fly. You can fish under an indicator. And when I’m fishing bead head blobs. And in this case what’s it’s under indicators. So again a whatsit is basically a blob with a mop tail that mop that microfiber tail, once it gets wet it just has seductive movement. The trout find hard to resist in rivers and lakes and probably everywhere else. 00;45;21;01 – 00;45;44;10 Phil If you tried that for other fish as well, they probably like it. We want to fish those flies for fishing them under indicators as tight connection as we can on the leader. So I like to use tungsten beads that when the fly hangs on the leader or the dropper is going to hang tight. If the fish takes that fly, I’m going to be able to recognize those take quickly and efficiently and hook that fish and not have the fish take the fly deeply. 00;45;44;10 – 00;46;07;22 Phil So I strongly recommend if you’re going to hang blobs and what’s it so jelly mops under an indicator to use tungsten beads to get that more direct connection, you get the mop tails if you’re not familiar with them from floor mats, car wash mitts, just mops. Many fly time manufacturers such as Semper Fly, who I work with, have a product called Monster Chenille. 00;46;08;02 – 00;46;26;27 Phil They make their own now. So now it comes in different colors. It comes in a tractor colors that comes with little tractor highlights in it that you can cut to length and you singe the ends. Or you could cut a mop finger again from those floor mops, dust mops, car wash mitts and tie them in. It’s available in a wide range of colors. 00;46;27;12 – 00;46;46;18 Phil Again, you get them from fly shops or you can go prowl Wal-Marts, grocery stores, automotive stores for, you know, one of my best stories. I was in Costco years ago and I saw the most beautiful fluorescent. Oh, no, it’s a sunburst orange mop. And I saw that and I threw that in the it was actually a car wash. 00;46;46;21 – 00;47;06;12 Phil It I put it in the shopping cart and I get up there to the end and starting to put that stuff through the checkout. My wife catches it and goes, What’s that? And unfortunately, this beautiful car wash, it came with a $25 worth of other car wash accessories I didn’t really need, but I really wanted that mop. So unfortunately she made me put that back. 00;47;06;12 – 00;47;22;19 Phil I felt like a little kid who had taken that cereal box out of the cereal aisle because it had the cool toy in it. It made the promise of a parents. I would eat all the cereal so I could get the toy inside. But of course, I never did. All I wanted was the toy. So anyway, so that’s one of my favorite stories when it comes to looking for mops. 00;47;23;19 – 00;47;49;09 Phil Another pattern that has become really important in my repertoire is the APS worm. It’s Peter Applebee, another Englishman developed this fly for fishing blood, worms, and it’s essentially a small hook, a size ten or 12 hook with super floors, stretch floors, sexy floors, span, flex legs tip. You can tie like a fork tail out the back to antenna out the front. 00;47;49;09 – 00;48;13;27 Phil And if you really want to add animation, which I like to do, you tie a set of legs along each side at the midpoint, it’s tied with fluorescent glow, bright floss as the body. It’s slender. And a friend of mine who I had on a previous YouTube live event, Reece from Wales, put a link to that video in the show notes as well. 00;48;14;09 – 00;48;33;23 Phil He said to me, You know, Phil, you need to finish these on intermediate lines, type three lines, and let them sink and strip them back. And when you strip this at 4 to 5 inch strips with pauses, those legs because they’re long there. Peter used to tie them using a wooden matchstick as a guide. That’s how long each of these legs are. 00;48;33;23 – 00;49;02;14 Phil So that kicks and moves and goes anywhere. So that’s the ABS worm I have. And again, all patterns I’m talking about are on my YouTube channel and I’ll put the links to them in the show notes. I took a version down on a jig hook with a tungsten head turner bead, and I tied it in the same manner, but I wanted it on the jig hook for Argentina because it’s rocky bottoms and red is a popular color down there for flies like red, copper, johns, things like that. 00;49;02;25 – 00;49;21;13 Phil And so after day three, I thought, I’m going to give this thing a try. Is tied on like a size 12 standard jig hook, these long legs. I cast it out, floating line 12, 9 to 12 foot leader. We were always fishing around the edges, pretty shallow and started stripping it back. And I had three fish between 15 and £18. 00;49;21;13 – 00;49;39;05 Phil Follow this thing almost into my boots and then they saw me and turned away. I flopped it back out there, gave it to strips and they ate it. So when the takes on this are very aggressive. This is a favorite pattern for me to fish. When I’m fishing in deep water, I’m using sweep lines. We’ll talk about those in a second. 00;49;39;05 – 00;49;56;07 Phil Just it just again, this flies just like it’s having a seizure in a some kind of an attack down there in the water. And I’ll tell you, it has a definite on off switch. You can fish the beat had a version. The shower spider, I call it under an indicator as well. But when you fish it, I fish it for ten or 15 minutes. 00;49;56;07 – 00;50;13;17 Phil If they want it, they’re all over it. If they don’t eat it, take it off, do something else. It has a definite on off switch, but I love fishing apps, worms and shower spiders, typically in cast and retrieve fashion, those legs kick. You can tie them in reds, you can tie them in olives, you can tie them in amber. 00;50;13;17 – 00;50;37;23 Phil And it takes to this fly when they want it. It’s hard. It’s aggressive and that’s part of the appeal of an attractor of attractor patterns and techniques. Another fly you can think of is an ecstatic worm. Ecstatic is a chenille like material that simple fly makes. It’s like a blob. It’s got a bead head on it, but you leave a long tail of the body material. 00;50;37;23 – 00;51;03;26 Phil So when it gets wet, it moves and swims. You want to sense the end or touch the cut end with a little bit of superglue. You can fish it under an indicator or you can fish it on a long leader and very slowly and just using image tip or a floating line in deep water and just watch for that fly like to twitch and move sometimes attracted takes are not always aggressive. 00;51;03;26 – 00;51;23;16 Phil You think of blobs on an indicator, but most times we’re stripping these things and it’s just a long, bright leech looking fly tails about 2 to 3 times the shank length sticking out again of the body material. And then you tie that tail in, trim it to length, singe the end, or a little superglue to protect it from unraveling within the bounds of the material. 00;51;23;16 – 00;51;46;09 Phil Up the shank, tie it off behind the bead and you’re good to go. The one thing about these attractor patterns for the most, they are not complicated ties, but you’d be amazed how quickly you can fish a fly box with attractor patterns. I never thought I’d see the day when my attractor patterns and sizes and colors and different types of attractors would rival the sheer volume of chronomat patterns. 00;51;46;09 – 00;52;11;11 Phil Primary pupil patterns. I love to take on the water with me as well. Balanced flies. Typically balanced. Leach’s, for example, are another candidate for attractors. A friend of mine, Dave Green, tied a pattern we jokingly call. He called it the candy corn. It had an olive rabbit or squirrel tail. It had an iced up body, orange ice, double and a front head section of fluorescent orange ice tub with a gold bead. 00;52;11;22 – 00;52;34;09 Phil And we all kind of laughed and snickered at that when he first tried it out. And then after about 2 hours of him catching fish and not we had some of these candy coins in our box as well. So again, balance flies. As I mentioned earlier, you can have a splash of attraction or you can make an entirely balanced, attractive fly attract your current image are something we also do as well. 00;52;34;09 – 00;52;54;22 Phil And people often feel that chronometers are images or buzzers, depending what you want to call them. All the same thing we’re talking about. The pupil stages primarily are always typically thought of as a as an imitative approach to fly fishing. You know, Chronometers are the number one food source of trout in productive still waters. And we use a lot of natural techniques. 00;52;55;00 – 00;53;24;01 Phil But there are times when they are feeding on chronometers and you can’t get the fish to eat the natural stuff, but you put something out that’s a little different and they’re all over it. So we’re exaggerating things in here. So we’re exaggerating the size. Our tractor chronometers tend to be larger. They are often tied in gaudy colors, lines, fluorescent orange beads on them, things like that, pink beads and how we present them, we tend to fish them a little bit more aggressively. 00;53;24;01 – 00;53;49;21 Phil Typical Chronomat presentation techniques are very slow pedestrian retrieves to match the slow wiggle. But often when we’re fishing them, particularly on our indicators, we’re doing long 12 inch poles, which raises the fly up and and settles it down. That rise fall motion attracts fish to the fly. They see it, they eat it. So a little more aggressive. So sometimes fish want two of these three items size, color and presentation. 00;53;49;21 – 00;54;14;16 Phil Sometimes they just want one. Sometimes they want all three together. An example of this Many years ago I was doing an used to schools out in Manitoba. We were all fishing in early spring, crow ornaments were definitely on the menu. We had got to a lake. We started fishing. We caught some fish on current amidst the throat samples we took revealed they were feeding on consignments and decent numbers, but our catch rate didn’t match what we saw in the throat. 00;54;14;16 – 00;54;35;15 Phil Samples and the bugs we saw coming off. And one of my students arrived late, anchored up amongst us, made his first cast under an indicator and boom, he’s got a fish on. And we’re like, Oh, great, beginner’s luck. Well, after about the six cast with the six fish, we’re starting to perk up like prairie dogs and say, Hey, what do you do? 00;54;35;15 – 00;54;53;00 Phil And so this gentleman, his name was Dave. So I said, We said, Dave, what are you doing? And he said, Well, Phil, I’m using one of the flies from yours. And Brian’s online fly fishing stories, Stillwater fly fishing story, and I’ll put links to that in the show notes too, if you’re not familiar with it. And he was using one of Brian’s bead head chronomat bombers. 00;54;53;00 – 00;55;19;22 Phil This thing was a size 12, two x, three X, or maybe even a ten black body, red rib, prominent white bead. The fish we had pumped had been feeding on size 14 and 16 was kind of somewhat gunmetal. Gray These chronomat were just in transition, starting to elevate. So definitely not ten three x, but man, those those trout, when they saw that big fly hanging down there, they were all over it. 00;55;19;22 – 00;55;40;10 Phil So again, a bit of an example of how size increase size can attract fish over and they take it even when they’re focused on feeding on natural stuff. So a tractor current image, bright, gaudy ones, slightly larger fish aggressively can be a real game saver at times. Particularly, we would do this when trout are feeding on current image. 00;55;40;12 – 00;56;02;06 Phil As I jokingly say, they’re feeding on current. It’s just not yours. This is one way to get them to feed on. Yours is using an attractor. Chronomat fished a little bit more aggressively than you’d fish It’s normally. So when we’re talking about attractors it’s talk a little bit about presentation. Typically we are using sinking lines anywhere from an intermediate through the fastest sinking type seven. 00;56;02;06 – 00;56;24;25 Phil These are to drag buoyant flies like boobies and fabs, even blobs down into the depths. Remember, one of the times we like to fish attractor patterns is when fish or staging in deep water. Of course, we can also use floating lines. A boobie on the surface can wake and attract fish to the surface. You could be fishing during a hatch situation. 00;56;25;14 – 00;56;47;07 Phil Maybe the small cranium is coming off or cat us or or calibrate us mayflies or whatever mayfly species you have in your local lakes. And you can use a boobie or a fab on the point to create a little bit of wake. And again, one of the benefits of an attractor pattern is it can bring fish in to have look and then maybe see your more natural presentations and take that as well. 00;56;47;29 – 00;57;07;25 Phil We also use sweep lines and the washing line technique, which I talked about earlier. The washing line again is a drop or technique where we have our buoyant fly like a boobie or a fab on the point to help control depth in conjunction with the fly line. We make a flying we make to suspend other flies of independent drop or so they hang like clothes off a washing line. 00;57;08;02 – 00;57;26;06 Phil And it’s a very common technique to do in when fish are on current image and you want to use cast and retrieve techniques and fish are feeding in shallow water or the upper part of the water column using image tip, but you can use it on a clear intermediate, a type three, a type six or type seven if you want, you can have that buoyant fly on there. 00;57;26;12 – 00;57;52;28 Phil It’s a way of controlling the depth of your presentation to target a specific depth by blending the choice of the buoyant nature of the fly you’re using in conjunction with the fly, and you choose to prospect that specific depth. We tend to fish attractive flies aggressively using CAS and retrieve techniques 4 to 6 inch strip paws retrieves or the roly poly where you tuck the rod and reel under your armpit to hold it in place. 00;57;52;28 – 00;58;11;09 Phil Rod tip down and use a hand overhand motion to pull the flies through the water aggressively. Now people ask me all, when you’re fishing that, how do you set the hook? You’re fishing aggressively. You’re going to essentially strip straight these flies as the fish takes the fly. You just keep stripping until you pull that fly into the into the fish’s mouth. 00;58;11;09 – 00;58;32;28 Phil It hooks itself and the fight is on. We also use a lot of lock style techniques. I love fishing style. Well, I’ve done a we touched on it in a couple of presenters sorry, previous podcasts with David Olson, for example, put links to that as well. It’s the way you have to fish in lakes in competition. You’re not allowed to anchor the beauty of locks styles. 00;58;32;28 – 00;58;59;19 Phil You can cover a lot of water and always present your flies to fresh fish. So I mentioned the sweep line. We’ll come back to the lifestyle in a second. A sweep line is a line that has differing densities throughout its length, so the ones I use from reel typically come in two formulas a fast and a slow. The slow features a two inch per second seven foot tip section, a midsection that sinks at about four inches per second and a back end. 00;58;59;19 – 00;59;32;22 Phil That sinks as the running line sinks at four inches per second. The fast features that same seven foot intermediate tip, a type six midsection head section, and then the type four back section. And what these lines do is encourage your flies to be retrieved through the water in an arc. So this is a favorite line for me when I’m fishing off a point or off a drop off into deep water or when I’m locked styling drifting over deep open water where fish may suspend five feet down, ten feet down, 15, 20 feet down. 00;59;33;00 – 00;59;53;01 Phil This line allows me to sweep my flies through and the sweep motion is enhanced when you put a buoyant fly on a point in kind of a washing line configuration to sweep those flies through the water column and figure out what depth they’re feeding at. And typically, if the fish are higher in the water, you’re going to get more of your takes early in the retrieve. 00;59;53;10 – 01;00;13;13 Phil As that fly sweeps down through to the mid portion retrieve and the end of you retrieve when that line swings back up in a more vertical manner, which many fly fish are particularly competition. Fly fishers like bringing that fly vertically up through the water. You can get an idea of where the fish are feeding. So if they’re taking it late in the retrieve, they’re down deeper. 01;00;13;19 – 01;00;33;22 Phil You may be able to change up your presentation and use a fast sinking line to consistently target that deeper zone or something under an indicator. For example, sweep lines are a great line for, you know, exploring the water column vertically and figuring out where the fish are. But a lot of times I just use them as is and they work very well. 01;00;33;28 – 01;00;59;13 Phil The key thing with a sweep line to get all of those densities working for you, you have to be able to cast into the running line. So you get those three different densities working for you. If you only can cast the head section only, then you’re only getting that intermediate tip. In the case of the real clean sweeps I like to use and that heavy head’s head section in there, you want to use a long cast to get all three densities working for you. 01;00;59;29 – 01;01;26;08 Phil Again, just touching back on the washing line, it’s that buoyant fly on the point used in conjunction with your fly line choice to suspend other flies of independent droppers. So they hang like at close of a washing line, allowing you to target a specific depth using cast and retrieve techniques. I typically want to keep my flies about 3 to 5 feet apart to each give them time to move in their own space and attract fish over to them. 01;01;26;08 – 01;01;45;13 Phil But the only time I really compress by my drop or spacing in any scenario is when I’m fishing dries at the surface and I’ve got rising fish and I want to cover a rise. I want to drop as many flies as I can in the vicinity of the fish, or if I’m fishing baitfish where trout are in the shallows, crashing through schools of baitfish, breaking them up to target individuals. 01;01;45;13 – 01;02;10;03 Phil Those individuals are going to try and reform into schools as fast as they can to get the benefit of that protection. Being in a school to overwhelm the Predator, its targeting system can’t seem to accommodate a lot of fish together, but two or three separated from the school is a lot more manageable for them to attack. Then I’ll compress those flies, you know, have two streamers close together to suggest a people reforming. 01;02;10;03 – 01;02;34;08 Phil If you think conventional anglers using umbrella rigs or Alabama rigs, that’s like a umbrella frame, if you will, that’s got soft plastics on each of the arms of the umbrella that looks like a small school of baitfish bass. Fishermen love to use that very effective lure. Washing line also works well fishing in shallow waters, too. You know, a lot of times fishing, boatmen and back swimmers will have a podcast about those guys someday. 01;02;34;15 – 01;02;57;19 Phil But, you know, the washing line works well. You could be in late fall fishing into ten feet of water. You’ve got five feet of weeds growing up off the bottom. You’ve really only got five feet of fishable water between the surface and the wheat tops. A washing line system is a great way to control the sink rate of your presentation, allowing you to successfully explore and prospect that five feet of open water and catch fish. 01;02;58;03 – 01;03;16;19 Phil I mentioned lock style locks, Style is controlled drift and we’ll do a separate podcast on this because there’s so much more to it I’m going to touch on in the next few minutes. It’s a common practice in Europe and in competitions. You’re using a big underwater parachute called a drogue or a sea anchor that slows and controls your drift. 01;03;16;19 – 01;03;35;01 Phil If you drift a boat just by itself, it’s going to spin and rotate, and you spend more time fighting the boat than you do fishing. When you deploy the drogue, it’s going to make that boat drift downwind with the wind at your back square and controlled and allow you to cover water. You are still using gas and retrieved techniques. 01;03;35;01 – 01;03;58;11 Phil You are not trolling, you are casting downwind, allowing those flies to sink and then retrieving them back just like you would if you’re fishing from an anchored position. Proponents of this method and I love to do it when in when it’s right to do and it’s just fun to do sometimes something else to do other than anchoring, you’re always presenting your fly to fresh fish because you are your flies perceive you as opposed to trolling. 01;03;58;11 – 01;04;28;06 Phil For example, you move through the area first and your flies follow. And in certain scenarios, like shallow, clear waters, you can scare those fish away and not catch any fish with long style. Your flies always precede you and you’re always covering fresh fish. You are not covering fish that have come around you and anchored. Sometimes when you anchor you can have some great success and then all those fish in that close proximity, your anchor boat sort of become aware you’re there because they’ve been hooked a few times or hooks probably helped once and let go and it dries up with life style. 01;04;28;06 – 01;04;50;06 Phil You can cover a lot of water and always find fresh fish and it’s a great way to cover large expanses of water, a large shoal down, a large drop off or over deep water when it’s, you know, safe and unwise to anchor. So it’s a great way to cover. I mentioned large shoals and drop offs when trout are holding and deep water when anchor tactics simply aren’t working. 01;04;50;06 – 01;05;05;29 Phil You need to move around. You need to find fish. You can drift through areas and find concentrations of fish, go through there a couple of times there seems to be a pocket of fish holding there and of that one particular piece of structure or something, perhaps then maybe you can come in and anchor up and work to those fish more effectively. 01;05;05;29 – 01;05;25;00 Phil But the lifestyle helped you find them. Again, I mentioned deep water. When it’s impractical or unwise to anchor nobody, you know, I fish some eastern lakes where they’re 80, 90 feet deep and the trout are suspended feeding on zooplankton 10 to 15 feet down. And the one thing about trout in deep water is they can meander. There’s no structure to hold them. 01;05;25;00 – 01;05;43;03 Phil So lifestyle allows you to drift through them and catch them. And of course, I don’t want to anchor an 80, 90 feet of water doesn’t make sense. And basically you can walk still any time. So but something I do a lot when I’m fishing attract your patterns. You can also use it lifestyle techniques from float tubes are pontoon boats. 01;05;43;03 – 01;06;05;23 Phil You just take a conical style sea anchor there like a cone and attach it to the rear anchor of your pontoon boat. That’s what I most often do it. And with the single attachment point, you might have to do a few kicks at your friends down in or the odd rod pool to drift is drift square, but you can drift down wind just like you would out of a boat that uses a larger square drogue we call a paratrooper. 01;06;05;23 – 01;06;26;08 Phil Again, we’ll we’re going to get into I’m going to have we’re going to talk about lifestyle in detail on a future podcast. Well, one thing about I’ll say about lifestyle as well is because there’s more casting, you know, in anchored techniques, your cast, you allow your fly to sink and and then retreat as a fly with lifestyles, a lot more casting, more repetitive casting. 01;06;27;00 – 01;06;47;07 Phil So you tend to want to make the tool do the job. So maybe you’re using five and six weights for your lifestyle, for your regular anchor techniques. Lifestyle, you tend to use six sevens and even eight weights are not uncommon. So it’s all about letting the raw do the work and not you, the angler with your effort. You still want to be enjoying yourself out there and not work yourself to death. 01;06;47;17 – 01;07;21;18 Phil Our presentation tactics differ a little bit. The faster you’re drifting, the faster the sink rate line you have to do. You can on a light wind eight fish indicators quite effectively. You’re still going to cast that fly out. Let it sink. Use countdown techniques so you can consistently target different depths and retrieve the fly so you can still fish the washing line and one of the things when you’re fishing lifestyle and I mentioned it during my Thinking Line podcast, is fishing, a technique called the Hanging Fish Love to fall off flies, particularly attractive flies that you’re moving at pace. 01;07;21;27 – 01;07;46;16 Phil They latch on, they get interested, they follow. And at the end of the cast, when you raise the rod to cast those flies, sweep up and change direction and change speed, and that triggers the fish to take them. So when I’m fishing attractors, I always do my retrieve and at the end of the retrieve, I always do a slow rod raise and bring the flies right up at or near the surface and let them hang for a few seconds, a number of seconds. 01;07;46;24 – 01;08;11;03 Phil I can do a fast rod, raise a slow rod raise, and you’re basically triggering that fish that was following the fly to take the fly. If you add the hang not only to attractors, but any time you’re using cast and retrieve techniques, you’ll add 20 30% to your catch rate. Now, it’s always not always easy with sinking lines because they’re dark to know where you are in the end of retrieve and when to induce the hang. 01;08;11;21 – 01;08;37;05 Phil Many line manufacturers now incorporate hanging markers towards the front of the line to let you know when you’re getting near that and to retrieve. And it’s time to start incorporating the hang into your presentation. The lines I helped design with real fly lines, the fathom series. We incorporate a hanging marker at the 20 foot mark. This allows you one of the benefits of having the line at the 20 foot mark. 01;08;37;05 – 01;09;07;20 Phil If you just want to cast again. If you stop, you retrieve. Right When that mark hits the tip of your rod, you have 20 feet of line out. You have enough line to roll that line up to the surface, initiate a false cast, load the rod and present the fly again. The other benefit, because we like to use long rods, nine and a half, ten foot rods when we’re still water fly fishing is I can incorporate the hang at the rod tip halfway down the rod or when that hang marker I see it or I feel it at my rod hand and I’ll experiment with. 01;09;07;20 – 01;09;35;17 Phil But typically I’m going to incorporate the hang when the rod is. The marker is in my right hand when I’m using long leader setups, floating lines, Midge tips, perhaps slow intermediates or hover lines. If I’m fishing faster, sinking lines where I may have shorter lines, shorter leaders on, you know, single fly, often faster to sink rate shorter the leader so your leader and flier in the same vicinity as your line when it sinks And then I’m probably going to hang that fly at the rod tip a little further away. 01;09;35;17 – 01;09;54;21 Phil There’s still an element of stealth and separation you want, so you don’t spook the fish when you raise the rod and it looks up and sees you sitting or standing there. So again, we talked about a lot here today. We’ve talked, you know, why would you want to use attractors again, just to review whether systems that impact feeding behavior choke off the bite. 01;09;54;21 – 01;10;27;11 Phil A tractor flies and techniques are a great way to continue to catch fish when they don’t seem to be feeding. When trout focus on my new prey items, we talked about zooplankton and clobbers a tractor. Flies are often a great way to shake them out of that food when they stage in deep water. Those weather systems or water conditions or environmental conditions, a move the trout into deep water where they’re suspending, stripping a tractor flies through them, using full sinking lines or whatever line it takes to get to the depth you believe they’re to be holding out. 01;10;27;19 – 01;10;45;11 Phil Maybe you’re experimenting, maybe you’ve got a sounder and you’re marking them and they’ll sweep lines really come in that you can sweep lines through. So that’s a great place to to think about attractors again. We use them to target aggressive fish. So maybe you’ve got fish that are chasing your flies in and all that kind of stuff and just seem to be all over the place. 01;10;45;11 – 01;11;05;08 Phil This is a great time to try a tractor and have some fun with them and really take advantage of their aggressive nature at that point in the day or that day. Again, remembering that an attractor fly in a multi fly system can be used to pull fish into the fly. So you know that the fish see that larger Gaudi or mobile fly moving into through the water. 01;11;05;08 – 01;11;29;13 Phil They come over to investigate, maybe they eat it, maybe they don’t. But then they look around that fly and see your other more natural flies there and take one of those and that larger Gaudi or fly pulled those fish in that may not have had the chance to easily see your smaller flies. And again, probably the most fun thing about this is when a fish typically takes a fly, an attractive fly, it’s a hard, aggressive take, and that’s a lot of fun. 01;11;29;13 – 01;11;48;08 Phil So many Stillwater techniques are subtle in nature, subtle techniques. If you think about chronometer small nymphs, fish are not going to take those typically very aggressively and you can mistakes and it’s you know takes a bit of focus to get those fish. It’s nice every once in a while to get a good solid tug and catch fish that way. 01;11;48;08 – 01;12;14;29 Phil So again, hopefully enjoyed today’s podcast, The Power of Attraction, and you can get more information on this through my Orvis Guides Stillwater Trout fishing book as well. I’ll have that in the show notes. So again, I hope you enjoy today’s presentation. I hope you’ll consider adding a tractor flies and presentation techniques to your Stillwater repertoire and if you’ve got any questions, be sure to send me an email. 01;12;14;29 – 01;12;45;26 Phil I look forward to reaching out to you through another podcast. Thanks for listening. As with my previous laterals on podcast episodes, I hope you enjoyed today’s episode and found the content helpful. Be sure to check out the show notes for the pattern, images and recipes I mentioned today, along with links to Devin Olsson’s podcast, where I mentioned we talked about previously lifestyle fishing and my YouTube channel for detailed video tutorials on the attractor patterns I mentioned in today’s discussion. 01;12;46;17 – 01;13;06;01 Phil The next time you’re on the water and fish are ignoring your match, the hatch efforts consider using a tractor patterns and techniques to shake them out of their slumber. As I mentioned in my podcast, if you want to learn more about a tractor patterns and presentation techniques, I recommend picking up a copy of my Orvis Guide to Stillwater Trout Fishing if you haven’t already. 01;13;06;16 – 01;13;24;13 Phil You can pick up your autographed copy from mine and Brian. Can Stillwater fly Store. Please follow the link in the show notes to get your signed copy today. Until next time, I hope we get a chance to get out on the water and enjoy Stillwater fly fishing as much as I do.