No More Flies – Doing a “Sment” in 2025

The first article I ever read in Tenkara Angler was a post in 2020 by Matt Sment, “If the Fish Don’t Care, Then Neither Do I”.  It was Matt’s reflections on six months on the fishing road, during which time he worked down through his mixed bag (er, boxes) of flies. Matt didn’t try to match hatches, but just picked a fly (often at random) from what was left of his dwindling inventory, and pinned his fishing success on skills rather than gear: reading water, stealth, accuracy of casting, and an enticing and effective presentation of whatever was on the end of his tippet. His article and his experience made an impression on me, and I pocketed away the intention to try it someday.

Well, I’ve decided that 2025 will be that ‘someday’:  Whatever flies I have on hand now are what I’ll fish with, wherever I find myself, until next December 31 (and given how many flies I have, this experiment might continue until December 31, 2026, or longer…).  

It will be my test – my ‘can I walk the walk?’ – of a thesis I’ve developed in the course of my learning journey in tenkara and trout (a journey which of course will always continue).  I have a friend who is a moderately experienced traditional fly fisherman, and for the years we’ve known each other and sometimes fished together, whenever I report a good trout outing, he invariably first asks, “What did you catch ’em on?” (just as I once often did of others – and sometimes still do!).  But the more I fish, the more I see that of the factors within my control, choice of fly probably has the least influence on my success or failure.  And so a few years ago, in response to another of my friend’s ‘What did you use?’ queries, I sat down and summarized my reflections, my working hypotheses, in an email reply, which included this:

“Anyway, I’m getting better, but still on a steep learning curve.  At this point of the curve, I’ve found that paying attention to the following, in priority order, has paid the best return for me:

1.  Where.  Can’t catch trout in a stream, or in a section of a stream, where there are no trout.

2.  How. Mainly, stealth – how to get a fly near a trout before the trout sees me. That’s probably the biggest part of my ongoing learning curve – figuring out how not to spook them. Also, how to present the fly somewhat naturally – and not spooking them with the fly line, etc.

3.  When. High noon on a sunny day maybe not the best for brown trout (but I’m not sure brookies care much).  Darker the better for browns it seems, but doesn’t seem to apply to brookies – have never caught a brookie in the dark, even in pools where I know they are.  My guess is they (as prey) go into hiding from the larger, active browns when the light gets low.

4. What.  This seems least important – what pattern of fly.”

Since I wrote that some years ago, my take has not changed on either the identity or the order of the priorities. My appreciation of the importance of #2, stealth, has increased, and when I work a stream now I carry an image of the trout’s “Snell’s window” pretty much constantly in my head. I don’t fish the hatch so much as I fish Snell’s window. Likewise for #3, “When”; as my understanding of its importance has expanded, I’ve added to my ‘kit’ things like fishing a falling barometer.  And if I really want some stealth, I’ll go fishing when rain is splattering the surface of the stream (sans lightning!) – a frequently productive marriage of “When” and “How”. 

I purchase my flies (or sometimes get gifted some; note – in the year ahead I’ll still gratefully accept the occasional fly offered to me by another angler; times will be hard, but not that hard!). I’m not a tyer, at least not anymore.  When I was 10 or 12 years old I was laid up once with the mumps, and my dad, on his evening drive home from his office job in Milwaukee, stopped at the Hobby Horse store in Brookfield Square shopping mall (the latter is still there, more than fifty years later) and bought me a fly tying kit. Thoughtful of him (fishing was then my sole passion; I hadn’t yet bumped into hawks and falconry), and I was excited to give it a try while waiting for my face to resume it’s normal size and shape, and thence back to school.

In the days and weeks that followed I tied some rather clunky streamers, and even managed to catch a few bluegills or crappies with them.  But I had no mentor to teach me the finer points and patterns of the tying art (my dad didn’t go there, his involvement ended with gifting me the kit), and of course this was eons before YouTube. I branched out into balsawood plugs for bass and pike, and may have even managed to catch one of their intended quarry on one, but that marked the extent of my career in the self-provision of artificials. And at this stage of my current visit to the planet, I’ll defer until next lifetime getting sucked back into the vortex of fly tying. My to-do list is long enough.

Consequently, for implementation of my 2025 plan I won’t need to put a fly vise into storage; I’ll just need to stay off the websites of Big Y and Fly Shack, and divert my eyes from the extensive inventory of colorful hairs and feathers on hooks whenever I visit my home fly fishing shop, Driftless Angler in Viroqua. Maybe there’s a 12-Step program for fly acquisition.

Ironically, just now when I copied the link to Fly Shack’s website to insert above, I found splashed across their homepage, “Know the hatch BEFORE you get to the stream!”.  Not something I’ll pay much attention to in the year ahead. So how crucial is choice of fly?  Views on this vary of course, and the answer is likely contextual to the type of fishing and its location (and season). I’ll soon learn how true it is for me and how I fish. Of course, like all of us I have a cohort of favorite patterns that seem to work better than others – call them my personal prejudices. I have a modest stock of these as I begin this experiment (in case of interest, I’ll share my list of favorites at the end of this post). I also have a kaleidoscopic mess of odds n’ sods, which I’ll eventually get to when the supply of my all-stars dwindles – and that’s when this will get interesting.

One of my favorite TV shows growing up was “The American Sportsman”.  In two or three segments each Sunday afternoon, hosts Curt Gowdy and Grits Gresham took viewers around the world hunting and fishing with special guests the likes of Fred Bear and Bing Crosby.  For some reason I clearly remember one segment better than all others: Fly fishing for stream trout, with a guest that, in the mists of memory, was probably a character named Phil Harris (he was something of a regular on the show), and his wife.  In this segment, fly and trout experts Gowdy and Harris are not having much luck matching the hatch, and the segment concludes with a somewhat cheesy and sexist finale (they were products of their times) – the inexperienced wife lands the day’s biggest trout “on a fly that matched the color of the ribbon in her hair.”  I can just hear Matt Sment saying, “right on!”.  We’ll see if I can find success of a similar nature.  

I got a more recent and telling lesson on the degree of importance of fly selection. Several years ago, not long after I started fishing the Driftless Area, I was keen to encounter brookies and asked a more experienced trout angler friend for his counsel. He opined that brookies, with their small size and comparatively small mouths, were delicate feeders, and so I should go with something small, with some color – a #16 Royal Coachman is one option he recommended.  Well, he was at least right about color… 

About a year later I happened to listen to a conversation on the radio with a University of Wisconsin professor of wildlife ecology, Scott Craven. Craven mentioned that the day before he’d been stream fishing somewhere not far from Madison with his grandson, and the kid landed a 12″ brook trout.  It was badly hooked, so they took it home to eat – and found its gut stuffed with four 10″ red-bellied snakes! – and the trout had still been feeding!  Death by gluttony, and so much for the delicate appetite of brookies. Have a look (with thanks to Prof. Craven for sharing the photo; lordy, would have been something to watch the brookie catch, subdue and swallow each snake…):

In the year ahead, I sense that this endeavor will make me a better angler, for at least two reasons:  First, as I start to experience reduced ‘fly confidence’, I’ll have to develop more confidence in my presentation, accuracy and ability to read water.  Second, as the supply of my favorite patterns dwindles toward the vanishing point, I’ll need to pay heightened attention to my casting form and accuracy, to keep the last of my best on the water and out of trees and fringing vegetation.  

In any case, this will be fun… 

Herewith is my ‘one small fly box only’ selection of favorite patterns. It’s what I would take if limited to one small box for all the fishing I do, from the Driftless to the Alps. A palette of favorite flies is surely as individual as the angler – and I invite you to mention some of your faves in the Comments below (which I’ll now have to resist buying to try in the year ahead!). My selection might change in the coming months, as I’m ‘forced’ to use and to make work patterns I heretofore largely ignored. But here’s where I am today, my fly box for the lifeboat:

• Prince Nymph (#12 and #14), both beaded and unbeaded, depending on conditions;
• Pass Lake (#12 and #14); with another nod to Mr. Sment for introducing me to this winner;
• Oxford Wool Kebari Sakasa (#10);
• Red-assed Monkey (when I can beg a couple off someone who ties them);
• Egan’s Red Dart, tungsten bead (#12 and #14); this, along with my local Pink Squirrel in tungsten, are my go-tos for sounding fish in deep lies;
• a micro leech (#12), in something dark (black, olive, brown, dark purple), with a bead, for prospecting the bottoms of pools (turned onto this by Rob Worthing);
• a gray & pink scud (#12 and #14), tied by my friend Nick; this is my personal “killer bug”; this thing nails trout – such that I’ve named the fly ‘Nick’s Scud Missile’; I once watched a brown shoot 10 feet across a pool to take it; 
• Dead Drift Crayfish, #10; given that I’m a sometime catch & eat angler, I’ve had the chance to learn that larger brown trout, at least in the Driftless Area, and especially in winter, eat a lot of crayfish; so much so that they may be keying on them, at least in winter; of all the crayfish imitations I’ve tried, this Dead Drift is my favorite;
• and of course, ye olde Woolly Bugger (#10 and #12), black or olive, in beaded or not depending on conditions.
   

Hoppers?  Yes, I use them (I’m partial to Dave’s Hopper), but mostly for fun; I’ve found I don’t need hoppers to be productive.  
 
No dry flies among my top echelon, no streamers, and no components to rig dry-droppers – although I do use all at times (my friend Nick also ties a mean Blue-winged Olive). It’s possible that the infrequency with which I fish dry-droppers reduces my catch, but it also reduces tangles and other hassles, and that’s a deal that works for me – keeping it simple.

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