Few anglers would question the fact that dry fly fishing is the most enjoyable form of fly fishing. There’s no doubt that the visual aspect of dry fly fishing is what makes it so popular. Your fishing a fly you can see versus a fly you cannot always see. In many cases you can see the fish take a dry fly. When that is compared to fishing flies you can’t see, to fish you can’t see, it is obvious which method is the most popular one. Although the dry fly usually refers to trout flies, they are also used to classify steelhead flies, striped bass flies, some saltwater flies, panfish flies and other types of flies made for catching fish. To make it simple, fishing dry flies is fun. In other words, a dry flies are flies that float on the surface of the water.
Dry flies are usually very light and made of materials that resist soaking up water. Materials from birds and animals such as deer and elk hair, CDC (Cul de Canard), rooster and hen feathers, and hundreds of other types of natural materials. They also use some man-made materials such as plastics, and of course, all dry flies have a metal hook in them. In fact, hooks made for dry flies are classified as dry fly hooks and are generally lighter than other types of hooks.
Keeping the dry fly dry by manually drying it is important. I like to use a soft cotton cloth but many other types of materials will work. You can also dry a dry fly by false casting it in the air several times. Just don’t do it over an area you intend to fish.
Most dry flies require floatants to help the material they are made of resist soaking up water and sinking down into the surface skim. These floatants come in liquid and powered forms. Those that use CDC have to be threaded differently with respect to adding floatant. CDC floats naturally without added floatant but specific floatants for it have been developed.
Dry flies can imitate mayflies, adult stoneflies, adult caddisflies, adult midges, terrestrial insects that get into the water, frogs, rats, and many other types of fish food. Probably the most used dry fly this day and time is the Parachute Adams. They are sold by just about every fly shop in the World and by Perfect Fly. We don’t promote them for wild trout streams over our specific mayfly patterns but we do offer them at a low price for those anglers than insist on using them. All of our Perfect Fly mayfly dun patterns use the parachute style of hackle. That is what made the Parachute Adams an effective trout fly. It imitates the legs of a mayfly dun much better than vertically wound hackle.
The single biggest problem in fishing a dry fly is getting a drag-free drift. This is especially true in pocket water type trout streams with conflicting currents. The different currents tends to grab the fly line and drag the fly faster than the speed of the water the fly may be drifting in. This can spook trout rather than attract them.
Copyright James Marsh 2013