Line Control and Presentation


Most fly fishermen approach a piece of water they intend to fish and at the very least spend a few seconds analyzing the situation. They look for obvious structure, depth, bottom contour changes, surface currents and hopefully a feeding fish or two. The next step is to plan that all-important first cast into that new water. What is very often, and I strongly believe just as important, left out is analyzing and planning where your fly line will land.

My fellow guides may disagree a bit, but just about everyone who fly fishes understands the importance of mending. Mending accomplishes a few important things: It provides a drag free drift, prolongs the drift and presents the flies to the fish well away from the fly line. There are a few critical concepts to make your mends more effective. The first is, mend as soon as possible. This is especially critical to dry fly fishing. If your mend comes too late your fly is likely to be pulled under by drag seconds after landing. Next is, mend often. Most of the time a series of small mends will be more productive than one or two last second desperate mends that ultimately create more drag on your fly.

A good rule of thumb that I like to teach is to mend gently enough to not move your strike indicator, or the end of your fly line. Often this is not possible, but keeping that goal in mind helps to make the mends more gently. An underlying topic to mending is slack in your fly line. The proper amount of slack is often difficult to visualize. However, if there is far too much, or not nearly enough slack, that is easy to see. Slack is a topic for another day though.

I want to address the two concepts mentioned above about mending. Ideally if you mend early enough you can achieve that long, drag free drift with no additional mending. The best way to mend in many situations is to have the mend made before your fly line lands on the water, the aerial mend. There are many types of aerial mends, but I would like to focus on the one that is the most useful and easiest to learn. This is the reach cast.

Let’s look at a simple situation where the reach cast can be very useful. You are nymphing a shallow riffle with a more or less uniform current speed between you and your intended drift line with the current flowing from your right to left. To make a reach cast stop your rod tip a bit higher (This part of the cast, with a bit more power will give you a tuck cast. A tuck cast along with a reach cast is a killer combination when nymphing.) and as the line straightens sweep your rod tip upstream making the fly line land above the leader and flies. The amount of rod sweep will vary according to the current speed and a little experimenting will quickly get you in the ballpark. To get a more accurate drift line it may be necessary to let some line slip through your line hand as you make the rod sweep. This will require a few more feet of fly line to compensate for the reach as well as some practice to accurately hit your intended drift line.

There is a rather common misconception about mending that very often creates more drag and bad presentations. This is the habit of always mending upstream. There are many situations that require a downstream mend or reach cast. One of the most common places is a slower, inside corner at the bottom of a riffle. This transitional zone, from faster to slower, shallow to deeper water is a key location to find feeding trout. Often there is a very visible seam line that clearly shows the inside corner where you can expect to find feeding fish. The photo below shows a classic example of this and happens to be a favorite spot on the Big Horn River. My friend in the photo agrees that a classic hole like this along with a proper reach cast is likely to produce a bent rod.

The red line shows a clearly defined seam line and the vertical blue lines show the sweet spot for this hole. This seam line clearly delineates the outside, faster water from the inside, slower water. The prime spot to concentrate on is the inside, slower water. This is where the trout can stage themselves to lie in wait for drifting food items without expending greater energy holding in the faster currents. If the food is abundant, and the fish are actively feeding you can expect to find fish holding along the entire seam line. This is especially true on rivers like the Big Horn. On this particular day we hooked fish far upstream into the corner, as far as to the left of Chuck.

The desired outcome in a spot like this is to get a long, drag free drift through as much of the prime holding water as possible. Many fly fishermen simply throw a more or less straight line cast to the seam such as depicted by the green lines. What happens in this situation is that your strike indicator or dry fly will be in a faster current line than your fly line and leader. This will cause almost instant drag, and a very short drift. Another common fault is to cast too far out in the faster water too soon, the green lines beyond the red line. Again, this is a topic for another time.

To achieve a long, drag free drift here a much better tactic is to position yourself slightly more downstream and to use a downstream reach cast to build the proper mend into the cast, the yellow line. Now, the "belly" of the fly line is in the inside, slower water and the fly or indicator will drift downstream in the faster current. The reach cast will allow your nymphs to get to the stream bottom and stay there for a much longer and natural drift. As your indicator, leader and tip of the fly line drifts downstream faster than the "belly" of the fly line will straighten out. Often you will not even need to make additional mends throughout the drift. If more mends are needed most of the time they are just subtle downstream mends.