As all experienced fly anglers can attest, missed fish are frustrating! You watch that large brown under the bank sipping caddis and wade into position. After several attempts at getting the fly to tuck under overhead willows, the fish slowly rises up and inhales your fly, you instinctively lift the rod expecting an eruption and…nothing! The fish shakes his head a bit and quits rising and it’s game over.
Nobody hooks every fish, but there are times when it seems you hook a lot more and times when you go on streaks and miss every one. I definitely have had my share of those times, and it can be very frustrating.
Something relatively basic that I discovered long ago and that is a primary contributing factor is a fly line tip and leader that has sunk. The scenario plays out so fast, you don’t actually see it and it happens a lot more on longer drifts.
Here is how I believe it plays out: You make the cast and the fly and line are floating just fine, you make mends and feed line as needed and the current takes the line in various directions. As the drift continues, the leader and tippet start to sink, especially at the knot connections which are heavier and more dense. As a fish rises to take your fly, you pause, then set the hook and the line pulls underneath and angles the fly down toward the stream bottom as the fish descends. Because the fish’s mouth is also pointing down at this point, the fly pulls out of the mouth much easier making it much less likely to hook the fish than if it were to pull straight up. This happens even more on bigger fish since their mouths are bigger.
To counteract this problem, it is important to keep your line clean and regularly treat the leader and fly line with floatant, paying close attention to knot connections. When you get your line connection and tip floating high, the fly pulls up and away as the fish descends. As a result, when you set the hook, the fly gets pulled up and is much more likely to hook the fish. I tested this out many times on the Green River in Utah where I spent many years guiding every day. We fished large dry flies regularly with the Green’s prolific terrestrial population. This gave me plenty of opportunities to test this out. If we were fishing along and one of my clients was missing a lot of fish (already a common occurrence when fishing terrestrials with the slow motion rises), I would stop and treat their fly line tip and leader with floatant and the hookup rate would go up significantly.
In my case, the floatant of choice is old school Mucilin which keeps the leader and line floating high and dry. There are some debates as to whether certian types of mucilin are hard on fly lines, but I haven’t noticed a distinct difference and know of no alternative line floatant. There are line dressings designed to treat your line and clean it which help, but those are not on the water treatments.
To this day, I go on plenty of fish missing streaks and I sometimes neglect this simple fix. When I reflect back on some of the large fish missed and realize, it makes me cringe and I always vow to pay attention to this little detail. Sometimes that works and other times I get so caught up in the moment of great dry fly fishing, that I neglect it. If you are reading this and have had this issue, I suggest you try it and will be pleasantly surprised.