Euro Nymphing | How To with George Daniel

hi I'm Tom rosenbauer and welcome to theOrvis guide to fly-fishing you know euro knipfing is one of the most effectiveways of catching trout in streams under almost any conditions and I'venever been very good at it so I've enlisted my friend Jorge Danielto show all of us how to catch more trout in streams using this deadlymethod oh yeah nice fish that fish has already refused that flight and you'regonna have to try it just a slightly different pattern the roll cast pickupis a great cast to use in a lot of fishing situations this is a beautifulwild trout from a small stream just a gorgeous little fish I say hit that Banklet's go to that grass bed the Orvis guide to fly-fishing is supported by Orvis fly-fishing adipose boat works global rescue crowd unlimited Oscar bluesberry there we go you may have heard itdescribed as your own imping check nipping polish nipping French nippingtightline nipping or as George Daniel calls it contact limping there are manydifferent variations of this technique but they all involve using weightedflies long thin tippet and a colored cider leader instead of an indicator day in and day out fishing with nips isthe most effective way to catch trout in any kind of water conditions your ownnipping is an especially efficient and effective way of fishing nips in mostwater types trout need to hug the bottom because that's where the current isslowest and they don't waste energy just trying to hold their position here theywait for aquatic insects to tumble by and often they don't move more than afew inches to capture their prey uro nipping gets your flies to the fishin the quickest way possible and also allows them to stay in the strike zonefor longer we're gonna show you the basics to get you started in this methodso George you're kind of my my nymph economy Nye I know you hate to hear mesay that but you're a guide you've written books on them fishing you dovideos you do presentations I mean to me you're the person who really broughtthis European nymphal to the average angler as opposed to thecompetitive angler how do you describe it what is the method sure the method iscalled a bunch of different things it's called the European nymph in Czechnipping polish nymph ain't there's really no geography and fly fishing sobut essentially I call it contact Memphis and the reason why I call itcontact nipping is that instead of putting in an indicator on the waterwhat we are doing is using in the middle part of our leader a broadly coloredpiece of mono called a slider and that's gonna be our strike aid and what we'regonna be doing is using weighted flies for the most part so we have a directline of contact we're not using shot usually when you have shot there's oftena disconnect Plus shot as you know tangles so what we're able to do iswe're put fishing the way of the fly which put creates a straight line fromthe rod tip to the nymph and essentially we're gonna cast and we're going to justbasically stay a front lead the flies throughout the presentation and as aresult you'll often feel a lot of strikes compared to watching yourindicator the aspect I like about contact nymph in the most is you're inthe driver's seat when you're throwing an indicatoron the water basically you can man you can manipulate the fly line but thebobber does all the work for you but when tightline nymph and we don't havethe drag of the indicator moving downstream as a result you are the oneresponsible for reading the current how fast or how slow and what's great aboutthis technique is you can go from a hydrology that goes from fast to slowand you have to really study looking at your indicator or your sight ordetermining how fast or how slow so it's a lot more engaging and for the mostpart people find it fascinating mm-hmm and it's just in my opinion a lot morefun and you get a longer more effective drift right because because the water isalways faster at the top then it is where your nips are and so yourindicator is always gonna tend to try to get ahead of the flies and pull them offthe bottom or what yes yeah and especially in streams that have a hugediscrepancy between super fast is slower currents on the bottom when you havesuper fast super slow in the bottom when you put an indicator on that surfacebecause the surface drag you automatically create an angle you need alot of weight and your tip at length is often exceptionally long just tocompensate for that angle between it too but with this we don't have as much dragso instead of having such a long angle we can fish more in a vertical linewhich allows us to fish a lot less weight but then also it puts us more indirect contact with the flies and your fly stays close to the bottom or youknow lower in the water come for longer right because a little indicator it kindof there's just that one moment that you know maybe that long right where theflies at the right at the regular speed and depth and then it gets sucked awayexactly in the other advantage with this technique unlike indicator fishing wheresometimes when you make a cast there's a disconnect you're throwing on manned orslack and you allow enough fly to settle there's no contact between the indicatorand the fly right so you have a sacrificial period to get the flies downbut with this technique as long as you make a smooth presentation cast whichwe'll talk about your flies you're basically fishing your flies from thevery beginning to the very end mm-hmm effectively effectively yeah coollet's do it yeah that's a good catch your fish will coolokay let's go what brought it or another one a little bit better one your own nipping works best on shortercasts here George explains why angling the cast upstream is a great way to fishso if you're going to fish straight upstream one native answers with thistechnique and it allows you get close because this is a short rangepresentation European nymph even because basically we're keeping all the lineleader off the water we have a limited range and usually within 2025 feet isthe maximum range and by staying in position yourself directly behind thefish in essence that usually allows you to get closer to a fish the otheradvantage of a cast an upstream with this technique with the euro techniqueit allows you to make excellent placement of your line leader parallelto the flow of current is what we're trying to do often is get the flies downdeep in the water column and the way we achieve a quick penetration or a quickdepth of the Flies is cast it in line with the current when you cast acrosscurrents or down the cross your flies immediately go under tension they beginto swing but with this presentation what we're trying to do is get down deep andthis is why this technique is so useful in big waters like this where you haveraging Rapids and fast pocket water it allows you to penetrate the water comefast but the way you do that often is by casting in line with the current youintend to fish the great thing about this is because basically there's verylittle surface drag on the on the water the only drag that's occurring is thethin leader right below the cider that's on the water and as a result you'reallowed and able to fish lighter weight flies and water like this if you're ifyou're gonna be fishing indicators where you have a large buoyant object on thewater you would have to put a lot of weight on that indicator or on the rigbecause you got the drag of the indicator on the water but with this theonly drag it's the current is essentially the leader so it essentiallyallows you to fish the same water as you came with the indicator but because ofthe less surface drag you're gonna be fishing far less weight one of thethings I you know my mentor mr.

humpers always talked about is just fish infront of you first so before you even step in the water put the fly in thewater where you would initially step in and then you can work your way outbut as I'm working my way out slightly I'mcast in a cross stream all I'm doing just changed my body position so it'sjust maybe one or two side steps but again what I'm looking to do is everycurrent every seam I'm intending the fish I'm basically trying to move therod to parallel with the flow of water so I can get that perfect in linepresentation so we're gonna work in close first and then we can work our wayout and then we'll take a couple steps upstream and just kind of zigzag backand forth all the way through the presentation and the other great thingabout this presentation is this it gives you the ability to swing the Fliesthere are times of the year especially you'd like back home in Central PA whereI live most of our hatches occur April May and June I would probably say overhalf my strikes during those months occur on the swing so with this we candead drift or get the flies down deep on the bottom right here and then at theend of the presentation I almost always swing no matter even what the season isbecause there's usually always some fish just as soon as that fly goes verticaloften triggers a strike and then if there's no fish on the end of thepresentation the swing basically sets you up for your forward cast and strokeso there's no false casting so we just drift swing tension and then we have ourpresentation and that's in my opinion one of the beautiful things about thistechnique compared to like indicator fishing it's relatively easy to do thecasting in my opinion is a lot easier it's not really casting as much as it islobbying because essentially we have a weighted object all we're doing is justpulling that way the object through the air so all we need here is the tensionon the back cast the hand out in front of us and just flip it very littlemovement is actually need to make this cast work when George and I fished theFarmington River we had tough conditions the water was already high and more rainstorms drove the levels up even higher not great conditions for fly-fishingall right so we got it we got a nice little pocket in here right we've heardwe've heard there's some fishing here right neither of us know this river wellcorrect talk me through what you're gonna do here in this in this old pocketsure what we're seeing is some above average water flows and what we'retrying to do is just kind of hit some of the slower seams okay and right nowright off the bank right here you can just see there's a little shelf butthere's just a narrow little passage it's just holding some softer waterthere's a deadfall emilia above us it's also creating some softer pockets and weall know trout are looking for that salvation from the faster currents sowe're just gonna go in there if some of these softer pockets and then I'lleventually transition over and try to hit that soft water below that largeboulder over there okay so you're gonna start straight upstreamcorrect yep start at the shallow and then kind of work my way out still wecaught some nice fish proving how effective uro nipping is under any waterconditions we've given you a brief overview of your own imping basics nowlet's get into more detail on how to rig up and fish and learn how anyone can useit to catch trout in a more reliable manner you can try your own imping with any flyrod but if you like the method you'll soon find out a specialized rod onlinewill make the process much easier so George you could do this with anyredline right correct you can but it's better to use something that's beendeveloped especially for this mess it's gonna make it more efficient correct Imean most fly rods are designed the cast fly line what we're doing is basicallycasting leader or a very thin diameter fly line so we really need just a softertip that loes with minimal amount of mass outside the rod tip soft tip butyeah and then you have a stiffer but to play fish and exactly so you can see theway this rod flexes its is really tippy really soft tippy and it's gonna beultra sensitive you'll you will feel a lot more your strikes with this type ofrod versus a traditional action rod so thatthat's pretty much it but you could use any longer 9 to 10 foot rod if you wantto do it you would it would work absolutely okay we use a we use a veryvery thin line and before when I've done this with a kind of a standard roundlike a 10 foot 3 weight or 4 weight I used a leader that was twice as long asthe rod so that the line always stayed right here and didn't sag because I knowwhen you have when you have a heavier fly line when you've got line out thereit sags and then it pulls it back toward you you don't want that so you want athin line and we're using shorter leaders then I have before here becausewe don't need it right because we've got that really thin fly line correct thethin fly line is basically mimicking larger diameter monofilament and if youdo have to make a longer cast you can put that line on the water and thenabsolutely so the advantage of these longer rods is the situation like thiswhere you trying to get across that faster current absolutely a friend ofmine did a Matt study I'm not sure if it's exactly accurate but he didtrigonometry looking at angles and basically what he was saying is whenyou're trying to hold monofilament or like a level line off the water everfoot you have extra in your rod allows you to basically hold it an additionalthree feet away from you so there's a huge difference between like an 8 footand their 10 for us basically 6 feet further back you can actually presentthe flies from and in raging water like this laying any line leader on the waterbetween you and that stop the current is immediately going to create the drag sowe're gonna do everything we can to keep Lion leader off the water and when I canreach I can hold that line right in that soft little pocket although it'spossible to hack away with any leader using this technique it won't be easy oreffective a long leader that incorporates a cider makes your fishingeasier you can either buy a premade your own nipping leader or you can make oneas George shows you we're gonna start off with a 9 foot 4x leader we're gonnacut down to approximately the O X diameter on that leader off of thatwe're gonna add o X cider material a multicolored sake color cited materialabout 20 to 24 inches and we're gonna do a blood knot every change color changewe're gonna do a blood knot to provide points of contrast to a tip a ringthat's it and that's it and then your tips can be three to six feet dependingon the speed and depth of the water okay but all we're gonna do is start off withbasically a nine foot 4x tapered leader we're gonna add an O X cider material sowe're gonna run our hand down the leader just nine four four X leader about fivefeet until we have the O X diameter in sight just eyeball this we're just gonnaclip this off we're gonna do is we're gonna attach our three tone soldermaterial the o x to the O X now what a lot of people will do is they'll cut thethese tags off flush well one of the things I'd like to do with this isactually leave your tags so what we're gonna do is leave a tag that's maybe youknow anywhere from like a half an inch to three-quarters of an inch right thereand when you look at this from a side angle profile it's gonna be a lot easiersometimes by just even having those little tags off to either side justgiving you a better visual every change color change just do a blood knotsome people like to do it every color change some may only use it once but Iprefer to him sometimes had several in my cider and again same thing gonnaleave the tag ends on half an inch to three-quarters of an inchand we'll just do that for the same thing between the white and the orange so our tippet our cider is gonna be 2024 inches in length now we're just gonna add a tip a ring this is just a standardtip it ring I think this one is about two and a half millimeter approximatelyit doesn't have to be exact and one of the things we want to do when we're nimfishing is have a thin diameter tip it immediately off the indicator definitivethe diameter tip it to sink the quicker the sink rate and then also a tippet asyou know that's level and diameters gonna sink at a uniform rate rather thanunevenly so off this tipper ring I have a know X but I can go straight from ohx2 a 6 X or a 7 X tippet because I have this connection between the the tipperring the other thing I like about this and this is not going to kill lysine orone of the things I like about the tipper ring is it allows you to create along lasting leader because every time you attach tippet you attach it directlyto the ring you never cut back on the leader so like where I fish for examplein Central PA it's it's a cloudy location we don't get a whole lot UVloss sunlight I'll have leaders that will last me literally six to ninemonths before the UV breaks it down so the tipper ring is great for allowing anangler to keep a leader for a long time so that's just a basic leader againwe're just starting off with a 9 foot 4x leader cutting back about 4 feet to theO X diameter and then just attaching our three color tone cider materials and ateach color change we're going to do a blood knot won't provide points ofcontrast but then also to add tag ends so we can float the cider at a distancefollowed by the tipper ring and then to work tip it and then the tip itdepending on the conditions you can range anywhere from three feet all theway to seven or eight feet depending on the depth of the water that you'rebut right there is kind of the the basic leader formula that's gonna get youstarted Tippett and droppers often confusepeople but the concept is quite simple as George tells us here Tippett life is determined really by howclose you're gonna be fishing to you right and also the depth of the water ifI'm fishing up close and I'm fishing 3 foot of water on average and we're gonnabe fishing basically underneath the rod tip my tip at length is gonna be about 4feet if I'm fishing big water like on the Farmington where I can't get up onthe fish if I have to cast further out at an angle right usually the tippetlengths can be about twice the length of the average depth on fishing and fourfive six X depending on the size of the Flies and the water and correct normallyfour X is pretty good in basically high water normally back home normally 5 X 6X is probably my go to diameters and we have the clinch knot with our o X soldermaterial again the nice thing about the tip of ring it allows us to attach alevel section of tippet material and the idea with the level diameterseverything's guys think this quick sit great I like fluorocarbon just notbecause of the invisibility factor but because of the abrasion resistanceyou're gonna be pulling your tip it's going to be underneath the waterobviously going against rocks hard substrate and so forth and I find thatfluorocarbon is far more abrasive resistant than nylon so I lose far fewerflies yeah it sinks a little quicker exactly now you're just doing a standardclinch to doing a standard clinch not not an improved clinch knot an improvedclinch no I find that the standard clinch as long as the tag ends are pulltight I find it just to be just as strong as an improved clinch yeah now wecan fish one fly we can fish two flies you know if we're fishing three full ofwater you know we have a four foot section of Tippa right here so this iswhere my point fly is going to be I want to add a second fly I start off withfour feet and then what I'm gonna do is just run my hand up the leader towherever I want to add a dropper and we're just gonna add another section of5x using a surgeon's knot take off about 8 to 10 inches and wherever I want toadd that dropper we're just gonna do a to turn Orvis tip it not that's it that's your that's your upperfly that you're dropper that's my upper fly and your point fly is on the otherand eventually if you change your flies enough with a dropper you all you needto do is just when this gets short and stubby just trim this off and you canpull off another section of 4/5 X and then you can basically do a clinch knotaround the standing around the stamp part and slide it down and that justallows you to keep the dropper going there's a rainbow and it took the upperfly which is an ugly purple purple nymph with a big bead at the head more of arein more of what you'd think of as a rainbow fly instead of the mop fly yeahcute little rainbow looks like it could be a wild fish too it has nice colors onit clean fins we all agonize over fly choice but takea lesson from George he keeps his fly selection simple as instead of trying tomatch the hatch with a specific fly in your own imping you're just trying toget something that looks tasty in front of a trout it's much more about gettingthe fly down to the fish with depth control than it is about using theperfect fly pattern the George tuck a little bit about the flies use now youcan theoretically use any heavily weighted fly for this right they don'thave to be tied out Jacob sperm use a standard be dead prince or whatevercorrect kind of fish out but a lot of people use specialized flies actuallythey're not specialized they're more generic patterns right that cover almostnymph attractors exactly how do you rationalize what what fly to pickbasically what I'm looking at is I fish about a dozen style of flies no matterwhere I go mom I just have some varieties of pheasant tails hares earsto cover most of my may fly imitations I have some soft tackle patterns toimitate some catice along with some case caddis mm-hmmobviously I have worms and what they refer to as junk flies for dirty waterconditions or any time where fish are actually feeding on floating worms rightfor the most part I'm looking at a fly more from a depth standpoint okay I waitmy flies according to three distinct weight classes most of my flies in theheavier section here are tied with a 5/32 bead mm-hmm tungsten this next oneis tied with a 760 force one size smaller and the next box is tied with a3/32 okay so right there I have three ways of adjusting my death most of thetime I put the heavier fly on the point putting the heavier fly on the pointkeeps the entire rig tight from the rod tip to the nymph also when youofficially have your flying the point the lighter weight fly and a drop on thedropper your efficient two distinct levels in the presentation so keeps ittight and you fish two levels George we talked a bit about weight in flies andare there other considerations regarding the profile of the fly for getting itdown absolutely what we're trying to go for the most part is just trying tocreate as thin and as dense of a body as possible that's just going to quicklypenetrate through the water call hmm good cheap depth good and sometimes youobviously want the fuzzy flies floating more in the water column for mergers butanytime you're looking to achieve a deep drift as close to the bottom try tostrive for thin and dense bodies okay what would you consider a thin and densefly this is a style fly called the pert ago it's just a hard body fly it couldbe the body can be constructed of thread or a floss that's coated with a UV resinyep hit with a light but just something that's again just very thin in diameterthis is just a V rib nymph it's a hard body nymph but you can see the dubcollar yeah and that's gonna sink it muchslower right then the PERT ago okay okay greatgood to know all right so had to get out there inthat fast water try to get towards the ball wag casting with this method is differentand actually easier than traditional fly casting however if you spend a lifetimecasting conventional fly lines you need to break some old habits like I did soGeorge Tucker tell me about the cast obviously it's to me it seems stealthierthere's a quick flip boom the flies in the water you're not doing any falsecasting so you're not moving your arms a lot what do you what are you trying todo with the cast with the cast what we're trying to do is fling a decentamount of weight forward but do it in a smooth manner where the rod tip stopshigh and the line leader is off the water from the very beginning and whenwe're doing this basically everything you've learned about traditional castinggoes out the door because it's not casting as much as it is more of a flopuh-huh everything is a tension here so because we don't have mass in the leaderor in the line right all we need to do is we need to have tension on the backcast okay essentially that line hanging off the rod tip right these rods theselong Nipton rods are designed for just a short load at the tip all you need to dowith this cast and what I'd like to do is just keep my hand out in frontkeeping the wrist cocked back ya know what we're gonna do is just a smoothfling that's it either the finger or the rod tip goes over top but the key hereto have that sighter in vision in your insight from the very start is you needto stop above the rod tip high so when you start and you cast here the handsgonna start low and all we're gonna do is just flick it up and there's no bodymovement everyone wants to turn up our casts and when you power cast is theshock that the line leader get discombobulated flags is bad and thenyou don't have control here to the very end if you can just learn to let the roddo all the work for you you're gonna have control from the very beginninghere so all of this is again it's just keeping this elbow inand anytime you're fishing a heavily weighted flies or a heavily away a rigyou know the base of the 180 degree rule so wherever you want your flies to go inthe forward stroke we just need to bring the fly's back so it's a straight linefrom in front to behind hands in front and just a smooth flip now you've gotyour eye on the side or the side time it doesn't pile up and put on or anythingthat's it cuz it's smooth that's all we're doing here George critiques mycasting and presentation hopefully you'll be able to learn from thesuggestions he gives me so George we've had little gusts of wind here you knowkeeping the keeping the rod eye it starts to blow the cider around andstarts to feel a little like things aren't happening that's when the windblows what do you do I mean what do you do when you got when you got a sail outthere underneath your rod tip there's at least two things we can do one isobviously when is the biggest nemesis to the tight line or contact nymph anglerthe first thing we can do is just making sure that we maintain some degreeattention from the very start of the calves to the leader of the fliesanytime you incorporate an ounce of slack in that line the winds going tocreate a boat so you can see how there's a disconnect right there and that's aresult of you cast and turning simultaneously and crane kind of jerkymotion if I could just have a good I'm making a jerky motion just use me as asmy as as my mentor mr.

Humphrey says let's eliminate the jerk kind of dish soone of the things I would like to see you do when you're making the cast justlet the fly line fall behind you okay you're dropping your left shoulder justa little bit now what I would like to see instead of using a very shorterratic motion I want the hand extending out keeping the hand out and all we'redoing is just flipping the wrist and as soon as we flip the wrist all we'regonna do is just medially almost like a downstream reach cast just flip and justbegin sliding the hand downstream hold it high and begin sliding downstream nowyou have tension right from the very startright now in minimal amounts of wind that's going to be okay but that's thefirst thing it's just not giving the wind any slack in the presentation okayso immediately immediately and maintain the tension in often too with that windone of the things you can do is you can place that cider on that water becausethat cider has those knots mm-hmm it creates an anchor and it kind of holdsthat line tight on the water so that's the other advantage of the knottedsections the tag ends then that cider it creates an anchor for your cider duringthe wind and the big part after the cats made is kind of the line control becausesometimes all you're looking for is just a little hesitation that cider yeah andwhat happens that the biggest complaint about tight line imping is people willmake a cast and they hold their hand all the way out yeah and I don't care howold you are or how great a shape your and in about 20 minutes of doing thatyour shoulder is gonna be burning yeah and your hands gonna be shaking and whatI've been doing yeah so all we need to do one of my favorite things to do aslong as you can get fairly close uh-huh it's just usually use your hips so onceI make the cast I flip but I keep my elbow locked in this is very comfortableposition and all we're gonna do now is just actually utilize the hips and theshoulders to rotate so I'm using a larger muscle to lead the flies while myhand is in a comfortable position and what you what you'll see here rod tip isgonna be cocked up cocked up and all I'm doing now is just rotate but you can seehow smooth and controlled yeah that cider is during thepresentation yep and any hesitation on that cider I know is the reason I setthe hook okay now sometimes I know what you kind ofsort of make a false case or false case or you dump it in the water behind youyeah so sometimes again it's all about your angles right if your presentationends here and I want to cast straight across all the way I do it that's allI'm doing is just changing my just dumping it behind you you have to getsome tension just changing my anchor points okay so I can make the castokay that's it huh yeah and the other flip of the wrist the flip of the wristand the other thing we can do too and instead of doing a highly overpoweredtuck yeah we're throwing shock in there yeahone of the ways we can increase the speed that the flies enter the waters byjust simply hauling on the line uh-huh so it's just again it's a smooth flipbut all I'm gonna do is this haul you can see how those flies just drop like arock now so the hall what does the Hulk do the halls being longer a little bitlonger cast the hall it can give you a little bit longer cast but what itsgonna do is gonna speed up the presentation of the flies entering thewater allowing the Flies so and you go when you go to pushes them down inexactly so in skinny water yeah my flip might just be a smooth this subtle fluffflipped like that cuz all my flies enter too fast right and then when I go intodeeper water and I want my fly's to get down fast I'm gonna incorporate the hallthat's same but just gives you the Tuck exactly and the flies come in kind ofunder this cider exactly get buried quickly so those are instead of addingweight or going to I have your fly the first thing I like to do when I'm makinga depth present change is just changing the speed with my flies into the watercall okay harder line control is to know how fast your retrieve line is the fliesdrift George alternates between a hand twist retrieve and normal line strip I noticed you liked a hand twist theline as it comes back I do in these slower pockets uh-huhthe hand and twist gives you a lot more control in my opinion uh-huh and I likehaving my hands in front of me so often just like a strip set so fish doesstrike I also had the line hand and also the right to set the hook okaysometimes the faster water if you have faster current I'll make one or two longstrips with the line hand getting control and as a drift slows down thengo into a slow steady hand and twist retrieve okay the thing I like about thehand and twist retrieve as well is we're fishing jig flies so one of the thingswe can do actually with the rod tip without jigging of the rod tip I canactually overpower the hand and just like this I can literally jig the flieswith my hand you can see how that ciders bouncing up and down yeah and all I'mdoing is just animating those flies you mean but they're staying the samecurrently so they're not looking like they're gradually exactly one of thedownfalls with the rod tip and the jig up is you put slack in them and theflies at the drop but you're exactly right you can pop it in there and then Ican you over basically manipulate the line hand I can manipulate those fliesmove the flies to still keep them in the water column one of the fine points Ididn't catch onto right away is that in order to stay in tight control of theflies at all times you need to lead the downstream progress of the flies withyour rod tip otherwise you'll develop slack and won't detect stripes I meanstart low you're starting way too high low pitch it up there you go you need tostrip in line quick strip and I'll leave just like lead put downstream reachthere you go okay I didn't realize you needed to be ahead of it that much yepabsolutely now you're right now you're in the ball game and in deepwater you need to develop some slack first so at times a lower rod tipearlier in the drift can help if George what am I doing wrong here it justdoesn't it doesn't feel right so doesn't feel like I'm always getting down andthe one thing I would just change it's nothing wrong but we just need a switchbased on the conditions that you see how when you're making the camyou're immediately pulling back on the rod yep you're engaged you creatingtension we got deep water okay dirty water yes you're on the bottom so weneed basically a sacrificial period time together flies down a little soonerright not there rather than here okay so when you cast yeahdon't let meet you lift up on the rock but instead just stick to can't make thecast but then just point the rod tip towards the cider and actually hold therod tip and draw in the line with the line hand don't let that sight or drop alittle bit and then you can engage for the rod tip moving downstreamokay so point strong on the belt line now elevates now we're ticking bottom alittle sooner a little higher up and we have control from the very start okay soall in line good now you can elevate now I see how yeah bother so much earlieryeah yep so we're just creating a little bitmanageable slack earlier on forget we're flies time to hit the bottom the angleand distance between the cider and the water surface is critical depending onwater depth and speed you need to vary this depending on conditions and everytime you move just a bit this can change what kind of angle are you looking atbetween the cider and the tip it so look right now I'm I'm trying to start higherand then I'll work my way lower but we have have a fairly middle grade streamright here so we go from shallow to a little deeper so initially when I'mmaking my cast my setters gonna be a shallower angle and the skinnier waterwhich means my flies are shallow but as soon as I go into the straw pop I'mgonna be elevating my rod tip so mice undergoes a little more vertical whichtells me my flies are gonna be a little deeper in the water column so so you'reelevating there we're gonna elevate here just a little bit we're gonna beginleading the flies immediately here in the fairly shallow and then assume thatgo into that drop off we can go vertical now we're taking bottom whoof it was a nice gradual drop-off went fromlight to dark so with this technique basically I made a cast kind of juststart dredging my fly right along the shallow but as soon as we started goingover that drop-off I just pause hesitated allow that fly to sink about afoot foot and a half and then regain the lead and he was right on the drop whenit took so this was just allowing me to kind of work the contours and with anice pan is such a gorgeous fish we have a lot of wind all we're gonna doagain starting with a rod tip and a level height we're gonna make theforward cast stroke point this right the right decider one long draw but keepingpart always keeping part of that cider just lifted off the water okay all we'redoing just a little bit just a little bit so instead of casting and doing allthe line control with the rod tip keeping a higher rod tip allowing thatone to basically push that sail around all we're gonna do is we're gonna squareback up make our forward cast a stroke stiff armhand out one long draw of the line hand keeping the site are tight and then wecan resume leading the fly in the presentation but that just keep sayingstight and reduces the overall length of the line off the water so George how do you tell the differencebetween bottom and a strike because they're both a hesitation right they'reboth a hesitation and to be honestly I think still the best thing was in theworld are not able to always distinguish between the two okaythe big thing is is having confidence in the way of your rig if you have too muchweight on there and you're constantly hitting bottom you know for me I like tohit bottom maybe like two or three out of every 10 presentations where I'm kindof snagging on the bottom that seems to be a nice ratio okay so when the flydoes hit or hesitate or the slider hesitates I know this set but if my flyis snagging the bottom each and every time I quickly lose confidence andstudying the hook so that you hold you hold the right a little higher thencorrect and that's and that's the great thing about with this technique is allyou need to do is essentially your slider this colored piece ofmonofilament that we're using we could use it as a depth gauge so just kind offigure out how high or the angle your ciders off the water if you're snaggingbottom on a regular basis all you need to do is just basically hold it a littlehigher just work in smaller increments you okay so I noticed that as I'mwatching your seder it is bouncing I can see it kind of little hesitations butyou don't strike to those because you it doesn't doesn't it isn't a longer pauseis that correct and that's why I'm using a longer slider and sometimes with theselittle tags but one of the things you'll notice when you're drifting when theflies are drifting on the Bob and your shots just literally just or your yourshot or your flies are kicking along the bump you'll see just like a nervoustwitch uh-huh and often when you see that nervous switch hold tight for youknow half a second per se that's usually an indicator that it's either stuck inthe bottom or efficient help a fly okay so I'm looking essentially for thatnervous twitch to end okay and again that's why it's really important to getyour weights kind of dialed in so you maintain that nice little ticking motionfinally you can further modify your presentation by adding weight sometimesyou can do it by going to a heavier fly but you can also add split shot weighton the leader is not allowed in competition fishing but it's just finefor us civilians as I'm working the shallow shelf we were ticking bottom butas soon as I went another four or five feet out we got some depth a little morecurrent and I stopped ticking bottom so all I'm gonna do is just switch to a flywith one bead size heavier mm-hmm you know there's there's those times ofthe year as you know time where it doesn't really matter what you do whatlevel you put the fly they come up out of the bottom but then there are timeslike right now where you've got up you've got almost force-feed them so nowyou got to switch again we're gonna switch again or we're kind of maxed outwith the size of the beads right now this is a 5/32 you know now we're justgonna add a tiny little shot okay between the two flies between the twoflies and just more closer four or five inches above the the point fly or thebottom fly you know you can even modify your presentation by switching to a dropshot rig which puts the weight on the bottom and stalls the flies suspendingthem above the weight what are you gonna try what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonnaI'm gonna do a modification with a drop shot I'm just not seeing as much actioneither on the surface or on the swing right now so I'm gonna I'm gonna trystall my flies in the in the column slower so we're gonna use the drop shottight line system contact nipping but we're gonna put shot on the bottom andjust really crawl our flies on the bottom but at a much slower path thanwhat we were doing which we were basically drifting just a few minutesago okay so when you rig for that you took off your bottom fly bottom fly youtied a surgeon's knot yep with another section to it and left a dropper foryour second fly correct and then you put an overhand knot in the end of the tipit correct and then you're gonna put a shot on the bottom we're gonna putseveral shots several shots on the bottomso they're the shots gonna roll along the bottom and your flies are gonna stayjust above the box okay so anytime you are fishing a drop shottechnique with a lot of weight or a very heavy point fly the amount of tensionbetween the rod tip and the fly is immense so when the fish strikes you'realmost 90 percent positive it's going to be a fish with drops with the drop shotin a heavy rig just because the amount of tension so right here you can you canreally with this with the amount of weight that I'm using right now yeah wecan basically feel our way through this whole situation knowing when a fishstrikes versus when bottomed occurs learning to catch trout with the gyroknipfing technique is almost like learning to fish all over again and Ireally enjoyed learning a new skill and getting outside of my comfort zone withGeorge's guidance I finally put it all together in conditions where I neverwould have thought I'd be very successful there's a fish there we gothere's a nice decent fish by the hedge shakes in this heavy water this rim thisriffle dumping in here a little soft water on the side here I was hopingthere'd be something sitting in here and there was took the mop fly which hasbeen the deadly fly for all of us nice little brown trout barbless hook on theroof of the mouth so just grab him here keep him in the water and make thatbarbless hook out of his mouth beautiful fishbeautiful little fish you're right buddy thanks for watching the Orbis guide tofly fishing I hope you've enjoyed this episode on your own in f—ing withGeorge Daniel I know that I have learned a ton in this show and I know that I'mgonna be able to go out on a river and use this technique when things are toughand have a lot more confidence in catching fish I really feel a lot betterabout it and I'm sure that you do after watchingall these great tips from George the Orvis guide to fly-fishing is supportedby Orvis fly-fishing adipose Boat Works global rescue crowd unlimited Oscar blues brewery.