Trout Fishing - using nymphs

Getting into the swing of things

Herb Spannagl has intermingled specialist fly-fishing tactics to produce a method that has proven devastatingly effective.

Over time, fly fishing has become sectionalised into distinctive disciplines: dry fly, wet fly, nymph and streamer, to name the most recognised.

Each of these disciplines uses tried-and-proven techniques that have changed little from one generation to the next, and while tradition can be very comforting, it can also be a barrier to innovation, experimentation and change.

The most successful fly fishers are those who challenge tradition – those with an ability to think outside the square.

Take nymph fishing as an example. It is one of the newer techniques of this century-old sport, but already there is a general interpretation that nymphing calls for a ‘dead drift’ presentation. Dead drift means your offering needs to move at the same speed and direction as the current it is travelling in. If it does not, the dreaded ‘drag’ sets in, alerting a drag-sensitive trout that all is not as it should be. Anglers know this, so use an array of casting and line-manipulation techniques to maintain a dead-drift presentation for as long as possible. It works so well that it has become the go-to technique for upstream nymphing.

Two much lesser known and rarely practiced nymphing methods – until the arrival of Czech nymphing – are the ‘induced take’ and the ‘Leisenring lift’. The latter technique has been developed for fishing small wet flies, but is equally applicable to downstream nymphing. Both techniques actively ‘swing’ or ‘lift’ the nymph(s) and simulate the ascent of an insect nymph from the river bottom to the surface, where it will hatch into the winged adult.

I discovered nymphing in the mid-sixties more or less by default. At the time I was living in central Hawkes Bay, within a couple of kilometres of Black Creek, a delightful spring creek that wound its way alongside the limestone hills west of Waipukurau. The creek was full of feisty rainbows rising in the gravel channels between beds of trailing weed.

As the good book said in those days, rising trout were best fished for with the dry fly, which I tied from the hackles of my own bantam chooks.

Often the rise started well before dark, allowing me to place my fly over rising fish, where, to my frustration, I would often see them taking something else right next to my fly. Most of my success came when the light had faded so much I could barely see the expanding rings, and was striking more in hope than certainty that the fly had been taken. I began to wonder if the fish I was catching had simply made mistakes in the dark or if there was something else at work.

My bantams were ordinary fowl, so did not have the spiky-fibred hackle of birds bred for fly-tying purpose. Consequently, the soft hackles got really floppy after a few dozen casts, causing the fly to float in the surface slick rather than above it. I am now convinced that they are made more attractive to those trout feeding on emergers in this soggy condition, as such fish often completely ignore the hatched adult duns.

By sheer coincidence, I found Skues’s controversial book on nymphing – The Way of a Trout with the Fly – in the Country Library Service bus on its regular visit to our village. Skues’ knowledge of the subsurface life of aquatic insects made so much sense that I clipped the hackles off my dry flies to purposely make them sink. From there it was only a small step to add wraps of copper wire to speed up their sink rate.

In those days the Tukituki River was loaded with rainbows, creating spectacular rises on any reasonably calm evenings. My favourite pool was straight downstream from the Pourerere Road Bridge. At the peak of the rise, the long pool was dimpled with 50 or more rise forms, making it hard to decide which fish should be cast to first.

This slow moving pool was quite wide, and long casts were sometimes required to place the nymph upstream of the last rise form made by fish slowly nymphing their way upstream. On one occasion the current developed a belly in my line, which began to drag my nymph just under the surface. I was just about to recast, when a V-shaped bow wave appeared behind the nymph, and moments later my line tightened on a good fish. As they say, the rest is history, with swinging tiny nymphs becoming my favourite way to fish the ‘Tuki’ evening rise. During the day, I also successfully swung nymphs through the riffles that formed over layered papa outcrops.

A group of us regularly fish the Murupara area in March. During the day we stalk fish in the Whirinaki, and come evening we seek out an accessible shingle stretch on the nearby Rangitaiki River. One year my mate and I found a very productive beat that we fished with the swinging nymphs on four evenings, resulting in 47 trout being taken. Later that trip I also drifted my kayak from Murupara to the Rabbit Bridge, and caught many fish using this method from every shingle beach I landed on.

On the way home, I made a detour to Turangi to see if I could roll cast with my 7’6’ #5 rod and a double-taper line across the tail of the Upper Birch Pool, which at that time held a prime lie hard against the far bank. It was late afternoon when I got there, and while I was bashing out trial casts that never quite made the distance, a Japanese guy arrived with the standard Tongariro nymphing rig, sporting the usual canary-sized indicator. I had met him during the winter, and as we were talking fish started to rise across the tail. He began fishing with his heavy rig, but as I expected, he could not get a bite.

As I had left all my nymphs in the car, I borrowed a size 12 nymph from him, which I then swung through the tail. To his astonishment, I hooked nearly a dozen rising fish. While I only landed a few, there was no doubt that the fish were taking emergers just under the surface, and were chasing my swinging nymph in hot pursuit.

A few years before, while holidaying in the Nelson area, I had spent half a frustrating night knee-deep in the Motueka surrounded by dozens of brown trout steadily rising to emerging caddis in the moonlight. I dead drifted, skipped, danced and dragged my dry sedge fly across the pool without getting a single take. In desperation, I swung a small unweighted nymph through the busily-feeding fish and hooked several fish in short order.

Don’t get me wrong, I love stalking fish, especially browns, with the dry fly. Seeing them come up to slurp the fake is, to me, the pinnacle of fly fishing. However, when it comes to fishing the evening rise, over the years I have found that in many situations swinging the nymph just under the surface is often more successful than dead drifting a floater.

Swinging nymphs isn’t only successful on slow moving, flat-land rivers. In the headwaters, large nymphs live in the bouldery rapids above deep pools holding large rainbows. Come evening, the rainbows line up under the turbulent run-in to intercept the drifting nymphs. To catch them in the racing current, they have to rocket up at such speed that spray flies everywhere as they crash-turn at the surface. The first time I saw this unusual phenomenon was while fishing on the Upper Ruakituri River. I was tracking my tiny indicator all the way to the tail of a pool when I heard what sounded like a small explosion at the head. At first I thought my mate had tossed in a large rock, but when I looked around, he was still fishing two pools further down. Next minute there was another spray eruption, but this time I saw it was a large fish slashing through the bouncing water.

I hooked a deep-bodied 3kg rainbow on my next cast in the same spot I’d seen the slashing rise.

Swinging a large nymph across such broken water often results in violent takes that have broken 5kg tippets and straightened hooks. However, once it gets too dark, this spectacular action stops and the fish shift back to the quieter water. There, the moving nymph silhouettes are still visible to the hunting trout, which often turn out to be large browns.

So how do you go about deploying this technique? Luckily, this is not rocket science – if you regularly fish streamers, you are off to a flying start.

However, let’s get the gear question out of the way first. Use the same rod and line you would use for dry fly or upstream nymphing. If you already have a tapered leader connected, use that, but put on a couple of metres of stronger tippet material, since most of the takes will happen when your rod tip is low and pointing towards the fish. Otherwise, three metres of level mono will keep the floating fly line far enough away from your target fish.

For this type of fishing, I mostly use slightly weighted size 14 nymphs tied on Series A Black Magic hooks. In headwaters or after dark, I go up in size, as these have a more visible silhouette against the night sky.

Swinging nymphs is almost identical to wet-lining streamers. Position yourself upstream of a rise form, then cast so your nymph lands 2-3m above and say a metre beyond the rising fish. A reach cast allows you to place the line in a more favourable angle for controlling the swing’s speed.

As soon as the cast has landed, pull the nymph into the path of the rising fish and immediately release the tension on the line with a little mend, allowing it to sink a tad while dead drifting towards the fish. When you think the nymph is close to the fish, re-establish slight tension, which causes the nymph to rise right in front of its nose. The speed of that rise/swing should be slow, which you can control by selecting the right upstream position relative to the fish by: following the swing with the rod tip; releasing more line; and by making small mends.

You can prospect a pool by interrupting a steady swing with small mends, which allows the nymph to sink and then rise again when the line tightens.

These days I use fluorocarbon leaders, which have a higher density than mono – but still degrease them regularly to ensure they stay submerged. Leaders that float, particularly those with joining knots along their length, create multiple fish-scaring mini bow waves as they plough across a quiet surface.

So there you have it. Swinging nymphs is a new take on an old way of swinging wee wets, and is particularly applicable when fish are feeding near the surface but are ignoring your floaters.

You can practically use the same dry-fly tackle, and the only change you need to make (apart from tying on a nymph) is a half turn to point your toes downstream. 

Rhonda Hill with a rainbow caught swinging a nymph after dark.