Troutbitten Streamer Presentations #1 -- What We Control
This season is a ten-part Troutbitten Skill Series, all about Streamer Presentations. We've been looking forward to this one for a long time.
We spend a lot of our time dead drifting dry flies and nymphs. But with streamers, we’re trying to make them look alive. Instead of no motion, we move the fly. And this is exactly why we love to fish streamers. Because we get tired of dead drifting. And we love to think about everything we can do with a streamer to make a trout eat the fly.
A lot of angler say that streamer fishing is salesmanship. That's a great description of the process, because we need to convince the fish that what we’re offering is worth the effort.
But how do we sell it? What are the animations? What are the things we can do with a long fly, to make it look like a baitfish, like a crayfish, a sculpin, maybe a small trout or a fall fish?
This Skills Series will highlight a number of these ways to move the fly. We’ll talk about the Jerk Strip, the Head Flip, Jigging, Speed Leads, Lane Changes, the Crossover Technique, Swinging, Drifting, Gliding, Sliding and more, with dedicated episodes for each.
But, what can we control? Within all of those different presentations, what are the elements that make up a Head Flip, for example? How deep is a streamer during a slow slide? How fast is it going during a Speed Lead? While swinging or drifting, what elements can we adjust and which ones are actually out of our control.
Covering those elements is our goal with this first episode on Streamer Presentations. We’re here to put some details around the things we can control on a streamer.
- Head Position (the direction of the fly)
- Depth
- Speed
- And whether we’re holding one seam or crossing seams
Notably, we won’t talk much in this series about flies or even lines and leaders. Because the point is, you can get these motions, these presentations on a wide variety of lines — sinking line, floating line or a Mono Rig. You can use short leaders, long leaders, poly leaders or standard. You can fish it all. But the real question with streamers . . . is how do you want the fly to move?
The joy of streamer fishing is that everything works sometimes. Trout respond to many kinds of presentations out there, and trying to dial that in is a fun way to spend your day.
Resources
READ: Troutbitten | Category | Streamers
READ: Troutbitten | Streamer Presentations -- Jigs, Jerks and Strips
PODCAST: Troutbitten | Streamer Presentations -- All About the Head of the Fly
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