nymphing, trolling or long line?

[msp]

Not too sound like a total iiot BUT the strike indcatorless folk out there seems to know something I dont. When you do nymphing does your fly line actually leave your spool? Does it stay on the spool and you feel for takes on the monofiliment or do you leave your fly line hanging just above the water surface? If you leave it hanging just above the water surface do you still have enough "feel" to feel a fish taking the fly. If your flyline stays on the reel...well, I gues the movie "a river runs through it" does not appeal to nymp o maniacs.

[wernerm]

Hi msp,

I recently attended the Czech Nymphing course by Jiri Klima and there he demonstrated that you can CZN with as much as 3 or 4 metres of line out, or as little as having the fly line hang just above the waters surface. When you move the rod along with the flow you hold the line with your rod hand against the cork handle of your rod and 'feel' the bites that way. I know it takes loads of practice but thats how the masters do it. He showed me this personally and I saw him take about 10 fish in about 20 minutes on the Mooi. He also mentioned to me that you have to watch the tip of the flyline. Some of the fish were not more than 15cm in size as well. So it can be done. Hope this helps.

[Gael]

Well, to start with, there are many variations on the main theme of Czech or shortline nymphing, depends what you feel comfortable with. Though Jiri himself fishes with short leaders (6ft) and lots of fly line out, other members of his CZ team fish leaders more than twice the length of his.

I tend to feel that CZ nymphing is more about a style of fishing (and flies) than purely being able to classify it according to how long your leader is or how much fly line you have out.

The one variation you mentioned is where the leader runs into the reel (no fly line out at all) and is commonly called mono-nymphing. This can be a very effective method if you want to CZ nymph in high wind situations (no fly line being blown about). If there was one variation that was closest to the original form of CZ nymphing then this would be it, CZ nymphing was invented by the Polish (not the Czech) who were too poor to afford fly lines and thus only fished with mono and lobbed out weighted flies.

Then from there you can have fly line sticking out of the tip of the rod, how much depend on you preferred style and your leader length. Most here in SA hold the rod horizontal to the water, only a bit of the fly line out and using more of a feel approach to detecting takes.

Others, like Jiri, prefer to fish it further out, holding the rod tip up and change the angle of the rod through the drift, Oliver Edward’s DVD on CZ nymphing shows this method. The main method here in detecting the takes would be watching for movement of the tip fly line and marking the end of the line with stripes of permanent marker do go a long way to help this, though Jiri uses fluoro orange braided loops to do this.

So, after a long response, all your proposed methods can be considered a form of CZ nymphing, though sum work better than others under different conditions and best is to be able to do all of them.