Surface Flies for Smallmouth
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Casting a floating fly and watching the take, whether it’s a
busting strike or a simple gentle sip, still gives me goosebumps. Smallmouth are a great gamefish because they attack
flies on the surface, and nothing beats the visual excitement of fishing a floating fly for smallmouth in clear water where you can watch the fish follow and swallow your fly.
Surface flies are such an important part of fishing for smallmouth that fly fishing for smallmouth bass used
to be called popping bug fishing. Most people never bothered with sunken flies for bass.
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Surface flies can be used to match the hatch when aquatic insects such as mayflies and caddis or terrestrials such as
hoppers and ants are on the water. They can also be used to match minnows swimming close to the surface because they are
crippled or perhaps feeding on the surface on emerging bugs. But surface flies can also be used when nothing is going on.
Few things in nature that move across the surface of the water can’t be eaten by bass. Who knows what the bass takes your popper for,
but one thing is true: A lure chugging across the surface is often hard for a bass to resist, and even when you aren’t catching fish,
casting and watching a popper chug along the surface of the water is fun.
Many different styles of surface flies have been designed to be fished in a certain way, at a specific water depth, or to present
a different characteristic. Each style of fly is best suited to match particular water conditions, the mood of the fish, and the
way in which the fly is retrieved. As with many other things, however, there are no hard-and-fast rules; flies designed as streamers,
such as the Muddler Minnow, can be fished on the surface, and flies designed for the surface can be fished on sinking lines.
I’ll talk about poppers, divers, floating minnows and sliders, and trout-style dry flies. These are the styles of flies that have
been effective for me over the years. Other anglers have good luck with surface flies with small propellers added, like the Jitterbug
bass fly; blades to make them dive, like the Rapala lures; or the Crease Flies designed by Joe Blados.
These flies work, and as with all things in fly fishing, fly selection has as much to do with the angler’s preferences
as it does with the fish. I like to keep my fly selection as simple as possible.
Smallmouth, like trout, rise selectively to insects on the surface, but more often than not, they can be induced to
take most any fly.
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Smallmouth take a wide range of surface patterns — from trout dry flies to deer-hair divers to foam poppers
such as this Pencil Popper. Jack Hanrahan photo
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For my smallmouth fishing, I switch between an EZ Popper (shown here) and a Floating Minnow,
depending on how the fish react to the flies. An EZ Popper creates a lot of disturbance; the
Floating Minnow is more subtle.
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For smallmouth bass, flies designed to look like the natural usually do not work as well as the ones that
mimic their movements. Surface flies that imitate struggling insects or crippled baitfish disturb the water’s surface, and they
provoke strikes even though they really do not look like baitfish. Bass respond well to movement, so a fly skittered or twitched
on the surface often gets the fish to bite. But the type of movement often can make a difference. At times, noisy surface activity
spooks smallmouth, whereas quiet presentations entice a hit. You can control the way the surface fly moves through a combination
of retrieves and fly design.
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Bob Clouser is a Susquehanna River fly-fishing guide and owner of Clouser's Fly Shop in Middletown, Pennsylvania. Excerpted from Fly-Fishing for Smallmouth (Stackpole, January 2007, 226 pages, hard cover). Article copyright © 2007 by Bob Clouser
Fly-Fishing for Smallmouth on Rivers and Streams
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