Classic Pro Tips: 10 Tips for Fall Streamer Fishing

It’s the season to get into some really big wild brown trout. They are setting up for the spawn right now, and this is some of my favorite fishing of the entire year. If you do things right, you could land the biggest trout of your life, . . .

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Video: How to Tie the Soft Hackle Streamer


The lifelike movement of the Chickabou and soft hackle feathers attracts all manner of fishes.

Of his Soft Hackle Streamer, Jack Gartside wrote that it was his favorite small streamer for all species of fish, in salt or fresh water. An enemy or orthodoxy of any kind, he was adamant that. . .

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Video: How to Tie a Pearl Zonker Streamer

The Zonker streamer has been around since the mid 1970s, when Colorado fly-shop owner Dan Byford came up with the pattern, based on some unconventional streamers coming out of New Zealand at the time. Like many streamers, the Zonker can be tied in a. . .

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Video: How to Tie the Picket Pin


This variation features a beard and leaves off the ostrich-herl collar

The Picket Pin was developed by Missoula, Montana-based fly tier (and saloon owner) Jack Boehme, whose career spanned the 1910s to the ’40s. He was pals and partners with Norman Means, who created the Bunyan Bug, of A River Runs Through It fame. The original Picket Pin featured a. . .

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Video: How to Tie the Black Ghost Marabou Streamer


The addition of marabou gives this fly more lifelike action than the Carrie Stevens’s pattern.

I cut my teeth fly-fishing on Maine’s Rapid River for landlocked salmon and brook trout, and it was on that steep, tumbling freestoner that I first fell in love with traditional streamer patterns. Of course, the Rapid begins at Middle Dam, just a lake’s length from Upper Dam, the spot where Carrie Stevens invented her famous. . .

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