>>685304the strength I find is in tying stuff specific to where you are and what you fish. I sometimes fish bull trout and they love sitting at the bottom of fast moving choppy water so I made my own weighted streamers that would be able to just sit down there with them and flutter away. Worked well for that particular situation and I was able to make something resembling a cutthroat trout which worked well since it is their natural prey and no one seems to make a fly with the distinctive orange slash they have. The ones I could buy were heavy but not fast current mountain river heavy.
Another time there was this really really deep clear pool and in a higher pool the cutthroats were spawning. Some of the eggs were washing down this little spillway down to the larger pool. Since the bull trout were so big they couldn't get up to where the eggs were. So there were a bunch of them sitting at the bottom of this spillway on the bottom picking off the red-orange eggs that were coming down. Anyway I saw this one day and for the life of me they weren't grabbing my streamers. So I went home and got out some salmon hooks and just wound them with this red-orange yarn and wound it with copper wire so it looked like a string of eggs. I went back the next day and I had like 5 fish on in around 15 minutes. I lost 3. It'd just be this massive run that just wouldn't stop. I mean these are massive trout too. There were some huge bastards down there. I figured on was about a meter long.
pic related to that particular situation. I had tossed the fly into about 14 feet of water. bottom just looked black. my fly was really light so I could see it. you can tell the bull trout by the white fins on the bottom. I saw the white of the mouth when it opened and just set. I think I had about 3-4 long runs and probably 10 small. Was trying to bring this guy in at this point for about 15 minutes on 4x. could barely hold the rod at this point.
