Fly Fishing

I mentioned the other day that one of my favourite techniques – one which was taught to me by the great Oliver Edwards when I was in my early teens, fishing the River Ure at Masham – on Northern rivers early in the season (April / May / June) is fishing a small team of three nymphs upstream, in fast flowing water, below about knee height.

In order to do this, you will need to learn how to tie simple droppers onto your leader, and you may either want a brightly coloured Minicopm, or to use some other form of strike indicator, for the takes are gentle, and many – one of the main reasons I love this method is that, on the right day, you can get so many takes using this Upstream Nymphing method.

So this is the first part to get right here – Tying your droppers.

Tying Your Droppers

You’ll want a leader length of about 6ft then your three droppers, spaced about 2 feet (1 metre) apart – giving you a total length of 11-12 feet – just a bit longer than your rod. You need no more than this as you want to remain in control of your flies. Any shorter than this, and your leader may not have time to sink deep enough from your floating fly line.

Water Knot

Tie your droppers using a Water Knot. To do this is fairly straightforward:

1. Cut your leader to the 6ft length you want;
2. loosely tie two half hitch knots using the end of this to your tippet material, cut to the 2-3 foot dropper spacing required;
3. Make sure you leave a “tag” long enough to act as a dropper pointing towards your point (away from the “rod” end!);
4. Tighten the whole knot in your mouth, as your saliva will make the knot slide into place much more effectively;
5. Test the point fly AND the dropper knot before moving on to the next dropper – this is important, you’d rather it was you that broke the knot than a trout or a grayling!
6. Cut away the bit of the material pointing in the “wrong” direction (back towards the rod);
7. Repeat for the middle dropper.