I have a confession to make. I think Euro nymphing is boring. Sure, I’ll admit it’s a highly effective way to catch fish, but in my view it has no soul. Tying one or two heavily weighted streamlined “flies” onto your tippet, then open loop casting them into a current seam and watching them dead drift is just plain boring. But despite all of that boring, repetitive motion, I catch fish after fish after fish. I’ll admit that Euro nymphing is not sexy, at least not in my hands, but man does it produce. It’s like eating plain oatmeal every morning, it’ll keep you alive and going, but it doesn’t have any flare or passion. I love catching trout, but I want the process to be romantic, not robotic.
I’ll admit that I don’t do Euro-style nymphing most of the year, but now that it’s winter, it’s my main fishing method. Like most places which trout inhabit, when winter sets in and the water temperature drops, the fish head to the bottom and don’t move very far to take a fly. So, I resort to Euro nymphing in winter to keep my fishing skills honed.
Euro nymphing often goes by different names. These include competition nymphing, contact nymphing, tightline nymphing, or the more sexy term “tactical nymphing”. They are pretty much all the same and involve using one or more heavily weighted, streamlined nymphs kept in constant contact with a tightly controlled thin line. The rod tip is usually held high and the nymphs are dead drifted through runs at varying depths. All of this combines to make a very effective method of catching trout.
Unlike tenkara kebari, in my opinion euro nymphing flies are sterile and most are lifeless. They are often colorful, many to the point of being gaudy, and generally don’t imitate any living aquatic prey. Still, they catch fish like crazy. Many are hard bodied and most are weighted with a disproportionately large tungsten bead. Why fish go after these colorful pebbles is beyond me, but they do. We often are in awe of a trout’s power of discernment when it comes to rejecting dry fly patterns on a spring creek, but in reality they must actually be really stupid since they’ll eat a perdigon nymph. Maybe they’re not as discerning as we think.
I do like Euro nymphing better than bobber (indicator) nymphing. I did that for years back before my tenkara journey began, but I found it also boring. The casts are sloppy and imprecise. I caught a lot of fish back then too, but I’m embarrassed to say that I spent a lot of time standing in beautiful waters surrounded by breathtaking scenery only to be fixedly watching a small plastic bobber float downstream.
I love tenkara. It saved my passion for fly fishing from withering away. I love the technical casting tenkara provides. Sure, I love to double haul as much as the next guy, but there is something about casting a light level line and unweighted kebari in a tight loop and placing the fly exactly where you want it to go, then keeping all the line off the water. It’s just magical. I also love the manipulation techniques which are intimately linked with tenkara. I love the flies, or “kebari”, and how they are designed to bring movement and lifelike impressionism to fishing rather than focusing on hatch matching or photo realism. For me, the dead drift is just that, dead. I love the life tenkara breathes into its artform.
Again I confess, I think euro nymphing is boring. But it’s winter and it’s all I’ve got until the sun works its way back north and warms the earth back to life. So, until the sun’s return, I’ll keep being bored by catching fish after fish after fish on party-favor colored flies which resemble little psychedelic ice cream cones, and I’ll keep dreaming of my tenkara days to come!
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