How much credit should the fly get?

[Kevin James]

Reading through the posts here I've had a bit of a chuckle.

I'll play Devil's Advocate -

I reckon the fly should get a whole bunch of credit -
Just think, without a fly attached, you're not going to catch anything.......period...... unless of course you're impaling and drowning worms! (Let me put my can opener away!):biggrin:

The other observation here is everything is slanted towards trout!

The fly is super important in salt.
Slight imperfections such as too much flash in clear water, fly swimming on its side, too big for the baitfish in the area..... and you're going to struggle (read FAIL!), no matter how good your double haul is and how expensive your rod is.

I do agree a lot of it is confidence in what you have on your loop - and that bit on the end of the loop keeps you attached.

[yella]

I have experienced both that the fly doesnt matter and that it does. Days where any fly fished at the right depth and speed catches fish. And then I have experienced a few days where you change a fly and all of a sudden start catching even though its the exact same place and exact same weight etc.

I really want to say the specific fly doesnt matter much as its the depth, form, drift that matters most, because that is my experience 95% of the time. But then there were those couple of days where a change of fly made a huge difference.......

[JadeDsantos]

In researching his point, I discovered that the bare hook was effective on trout and this point was also discovered by many other anglers, one among them, Oliver Kite, who wrote about this in the 1960’s. Kite, who was a pupil of the late-great inventor of the Pheasant Tail, Frank Sawyer, and called it the Bare Hook Nymph. Kite thought it was a logical extension of the Sawyer Pheasant Tail Nymph, but slimmer. Kite was a student of Frank Sawyer (lived opposite to him and later had a falling out with his master) and learnt everything he knew about nymph fishing from Sawyer. Kite was a broadcaster, and one of his tricks was to catch grayling with this nymph while, blindfolded using the Sawyer “induced take.” The details of the Bare Hook Nymph are to be found in Kite’s book Nymph Fishing in Practice.

http://oneflyfisherman.com/the-case-...bare-hook-fly/

[Circus]

My 2c: The fly matters a lot in stillwaters, but is less important in rivers/streams.
Assuming a reasonably competent fisherman, who has found the fish, most river fish will take a reasonably-tied nymph. The colour/shape etc will matter far less than the technique.
By contrast, in a stillwater, even if you have the right depth, retrieve etc, changing the fly makes a more noticeable difference.

[Helios]

My 2c

I might be repeating previous mentioned opinions, sorry, an important factor that governs my selection of flies to fish at specific locations is what sort of time frame the trout has to gaze at the fly, if I am stripping streamers at a decent pace the trout is not afforded the opportunity to judge whether the fly is natural prey or a new prey source (mentioned fly) thus size and colour would be main factors that determine whether the fish will pursue, if the retrieve is slowed down or even static (referring to stillwaters) the trout will 99% of the time be selective and judge whether its prey or not, the last I heard trout are not the garbage cans of rivers and dams and thus do not eat anything and everything.

The point I'm getting to is that in my opinion the fly is very important but also the value in a selected fly is heavy dependent on the technique that is being used.