Early Season Fly Choices for fly fishing Tasmania's Central Highlands’ Lakes
While many of us are fierce fans of Tasmania’s dry fly fishing, there’s an inescapable reality that there are periods of the season and locations around the State where we must accept that wet flies are our fish catching tools.
It’s a simple reality of the life cycle of our trout that their diet is mainly influenced by our insects - amphibious insects and terrestrial insects. Early in the season, while some of Tasmania’s lakes will offer up hatches of tiny midges or the occasional dun hatch, most of our fish are enjoying a “submerged” diet. They are generally not “looking up” for insects on the surface, but rather have their heads down and are fossicking in the weeds and the silt for their food.
In many waters the fish (and the fishers) are also contending with the consequences of winter rains and snow melt (although there hasn’t been too much of either this winter.). Some waters are still silty. And lets not forget the reason behind the season closure - our waters have been closed to allow the fish to spawn. In fact, at the moment the rainbows are underway, but with the majority of our trout being wild brown trout, we need to remember that many of them have recently exerted massive effort and energy to produce the next generation of brown trout. It’s a tiring process, and has a tendency to keep the bigger fish down deeper in our waters where their focus is on recovery and replenishment of their bodies.
And so the issue of fly choice becomes important. During the dry fly phase of our season, we will happily pursue the “match the hatch” principle as best we can, watching natural insects being eaten and hunting through our fly boxes for decent imitations of those natural flies. But, early in the season. with most of the eating happening sub-surface, knowing what the fish are eating is a little less obvious.
Thankfully, that’s not as large a barrier as it might seem, as the reality of much of our wet fly fishing is based on experimentation. The experimentation is generally based on experience and optimism. Experience reminds us of what has been effective in the past. Optimism is the loyal confidence that many fly fishers have in particular flies.
And so that takes us to our basic fly choices and how we work with them. If I was asked to recommend three early season wet flies I would find that relatively easy.
Number 1 is the fur fly. The Rob Sloane fur fly is a Tasmanian tradition that is trotted out to chase frog-feeding trout in lake margins. A relatively simple fly that is essentially little more than a clump of rabbit fur tied onto a hook that serves as a great imitation of a frog. It suspends just under the water surface and it pulses when you move it. You don’t move it much, and you move it strategically - when you know there’s a fish nearby and you want to attract its attention. Catching tailing trout on a fur fly in the margins of a lake is regarded by some as just as exciting as casting dry flies to rising trout.
Chris Bassano’s Version of the Rob Sloane Fur Fly
Number 2 is more a group of flies than a specific fly, and this is where personal choice and experimentation becomes critical. Many years ago this “group” would have been defined as the “wooly buggers”. Flies that were always tied with marabou tail, chenille body and a palmered hen hackle along the body. They came in a few colours and with variations in size, but with little additional finesse.
The “wooly bugger” era has transformed into derivatives of the traditional tie, but with “enhancements” that the modern fly fisher is convinced makes them better. Those “enhancements” have given rise to variants like “The Magoo” and the “Humungous” which have generally still retained the marabou tail but have introduced all sorts of variations around the body and that often add “sparkle” into the tail. Some of these are now longer and leaner than the traditional '“bugger”, others have bright squat body profiles. Almost all of them incorporate flash.
We can blame the manufacturers of fly tying materials for much of the variation. My collection of fly tying materials contains more and more bright shiny stuff. The outlets recognise that fly tiers are like those birds that are attracted to anything that shines or glistens, and so every time we walk out of the fly shop at this time of the year, there is invariably a wire, a dubbing, a bead or a strand of something worthy of a christmas decoration.
And, sure, we can laugh at ourselves, but the “experience” and “optimism” I referred to earlier is generally backed up by success.
My fly box has flies in this group that vary on the basis of underlying colour - black, brown or olive. They vary on how they are weighted - unweighted, weighted with lead wraps under the body or weighted with tungsten beads on the head of the fly. The don’t vary much in size - generally tied on size 10 or size 12 hooks, although one significant useful size variation to consider is the length of your flies. Good marabou these days has long fibers and produce long flies, but you should always be ready with versions that have shorter tails, just in case the fish are not taking aggressively, in which case they may hit your fly but miss your hook.
The final critical variation is in the colour of the enhancements. I use some bright beads - flouro reds and oranges, shiny pink, gold and brass - and I use some dull beads - blacks, browns and olives. Strands of Crystal Flash in all sorts of colours adorn my tails. Reds, rusty orange, greens and purples all get a gig. My bodies often use dubbing that has a sparkle - peacock is a great option but other variations work. The last variable element tends to be the rib - wires of different colours or holographic tinsel.
Obviously this second group is the most significant area of experimentation, but the Number 3 in my list of recommendations is, itself, also a product of modern experimentation. I simply call my third fly choice the “sparkle” flies. One of the few flies I tie that I have bothered to actually name is my “Mardi Gras” fly, which probably helps give the true sense of these flies.
They are very very simple flies to tie. Clumps of gold or other shiny tinsel-like material tied along a hook with little other decoration. There may be a simple tail, or a simple body, but 95% of the fly is just flash.
The final important part of the “fly selection” process comes down to what you use and when. In the most simple terms, we know when to use the fur fly - we use it when we know there are fish feeding in the shallows and when we can hear frogs croaking. We’ll also use it to prospect in locations where we think there should be fish in the shallows, but we just can’t see them.
My second and third choice flies are actually fished together. Occasionally I will fish a gang of three flies, but generally I fish two. One of my “wooly bugger” derivatives will take pride of place on the point - i.e. at the end of the leader. And one of my sparkle flies will be fished as a “dropper”, about 1.3 metres up from the point fly. Remembering that most of our Tasmanian lakes are shallow fisheries, this means that, whether you’re fishing with a floating or intermediate sinking line, you will have one fly close to the bottom of the water column and a second fly much nearer to the surface. The flies work together - one might be the first fly the fish sees, but the other might be the one they utimately take.
Often, it is the bigger, wilier fish sitting deeper in the water that takes the point fly, while it is the more reckless, often smaller fish that will slash at the bright dropper fly. It’s almost a “domain” issue - the big guys rule the deeper water, but the smaller, quicker fish can afford to attack the dropper fly without encroaching on the territory of their senior peers.
Will it work? I hope so. It does for me, but, of course, not always. As with all Tasmanian fishing, we have to accept that sun, wind, temperature, fishing pressure and water levels are all going to be factors in what the fish ultimately do, but in terms of a starting point, I still believe that these three flies are going to give you a bloody good chance of fooling a fish or two!