Caddis searching pattern - from failure to success

Willi wrote in message ...

Although, IMO, dead drifting nymphs is THE most effective technique day
in and day out, it's not a very fun way of fishing. Swinging wets and
some of the other nymphing techniques are much more fun. However, they
are not as consistently effective and it's hard, at least for me, to
determine when they are going to be effective.

Willi


As a general commentary . . .

As a follow-on to my last post -- I think that emerger fishing offers
the maximum advantage to anglers, not nymph fishing. The bulk of the
instar larval and pupal stages of burrowing/crawling mayfly and
cased/net building caddis are mostly unavailable to trout, living as
they do in the interstitial zones of gravel, pebble, and cobble or
burrowed into the silt. Before they're ready to emerge, they're only
available when dislodged or during biological drift. Grubbing trout
can get at some but we can't imitate that approach. Better nymph
opportunities lie with the free swimming larval forms that the nymph
fisher can easily imitate and use to enjoy success, but they only
represent a fraction of the total nymph population. However, it's
during emergence, when even pupae tucked under rocks must expose
themselves to predation, that our best shot exists.

The nymphing trout basically sits in its feeding lie picking off
drifting larvae, rarely straying very far. But the trout feeding on
emergers is far more bold, roaming about, and more likely to be
actively feeding, as opposed to the static trout that is
opportunistically feeding. These two conditions, exposed larvae/pupae
and actively feeding fish provide us with our best chance, however as
Mu points out, this is also the toughest form of fishing to get right.
I'm sure many successful nymph fishers unwittingly blunder into
emerger success by drifting their nymphs along with the emerging
mayfly larvae.

These two points together, with the tendency of caddis to emerge over
prelonged periods during the day and the season, are the reasons why
I'm try to pay a lot more attention to these emergence opportunities.
My recent Whitemans experience can't be taken too far but it is
encouraging that presenting a fly that is both visually and
behaviourally correct can get much better results than the "chuck 'n'
chance it" of blind nymphing.

Peter