Our environment at Chile West is changing day to day as we travel to new fisheries and different climates, so we change the methods we use to fish. We fish it all, from big, wide, deep rivers, to small shallow rivers or creeks, to lakes. We fish from boats or wading and the variety of water is unlimited and so you must have all the tricks in your bag, from big articulated streamers, little wooly buggers, huge foam beetles, little elk hair caddis, and large stonefly nymphs to tiny soft hackles.
So you ask “How will we fish?” Well, that is the question that day to day, sometimes hour to hour, our guides at Chile West have the answer to.
We may start the day floating the river and “bangin’ the banks” as we call it. With this technique we cast big dries or streamers as close the bank as possible. If using a dry fly, you would “twitch” the fly a little to give it some action while it floats along the edges; with a streamer you would strip the fly back off the bank. The idea here is that the fish are waiting for terrestrials to fall in the river from the over-hanging forest. This method takes accuracy and is fast-paced; everything is moving – the boat, the current and the flies!
The next run in the river may be slow-moving or a back eddy with trout sipping on a seam. Here we might change to a dry/dropper, probably a small nymph, casting to the seam or foam line. The fish will be submerged under the surface, waiting for the food that collects in the seam. You can sometimes see the fish come to the nymph, not to say they don’t eat the dry as well. This can be like sight fishing from the boat! Depending on the size of the river, some back eddies can be rather large. One can spend hours in an eddy if the fishing is good.
We may stop and wade-fish a run, starting from the bottom and working up with a dry/dropper technique, casting upstream and letting the dry and nymph float naturally in the current or just “nymph” the riffle.
The next run, we might “swing”. This technique would be used with a streamer and a sinking line, casting across the current at a angle downstream and letting the fly literally ”swing” in the current. As the fly starts to slow, we would strip it to keep it moving, each cast moving down the run a bit.
If fishing a lake, we might fish a dragonfly dry, casting to the reeds and letting the fly float until a fish takes it or we might fish a small wooly bugger on a medium sinking line and strip the fly off the reeds or structure.
In any one day, we might use the same technique and the same fly all day, or all of the above!
Whatever the situation, our team at Chile West has seen it and is ready for it.
Leave a Reply