We’ve all heard the cliché that “10 percent of the anglers catch 90 percent of the fish,” but have you ever asked yourself why? To be a member of that 10 percent, you need to think a little more deeply about every aspect of your fishing. Here’s a great example. In this video, Joe Rotter from Red’s Fly Shop takes the fairly simple concept of the hopper-dropper and re-examines every aspect of it–from fly selection to rigging to presentation–to make sure that the nymph is where it needs to be to draw the most strikes.
This is the kind of information that can really take your fly fishing to the next level and help you think more critically about what you’re actually doing on the water. I guarantee that this short lesson will change the way you think about these tandems rigs and how you fish them.
Unfortunately with a hopper-dropper set up you have tied together two flies that are in water columns traveling at two different speeds. You have the choice of either dragging the top fly unnaturally slow or the nymph unnaturally fast. We often think of the effect of drag on dry flies but there must be an equivalent unseen effect of drag on nymphs. Hanging a nymph below an indicator does not change the hydrodynamics but we don’t usually worry about the presentation of a drift indicator. The tight line nymphers do have an advantage in that they only worry about minimizing drag on the nymph and ignore surface currents as much as possible.