Middle Feather River Winter Fly Fishing
Tight Line Euro Nymph Jigging and Throwing Streamers on a Mono Rig
Thus far winter has been mild, with plenty of rain, but the temps in the last few weeks have been milder than normal. With the consistent rain showers, the water levels have been great and the river is flowing perfectly for streamer fishing! Overnight temperatures in the last week have been above freezing, which has made the fishing outstanding!
Big fish ready to eat aggressively!
I dusted off my fly-tying vise and started to tie up some custom flies for the Middle Fork Feather River and Truckee River. I tied up some heavy Jig Head Streamers, Euro Jigging Streamers, and some Heavy Jig Wooly Buggers for a buddy of mine. The nice part about tying your own flies is that you can customize them to suit the waters you are fishing and ensure the quality of the hooks and durability of the flies. I am planning on selling these flies in the near future, which I am looking forward to, more to come on that later…. Right now the fishing is too good….
This year I added another approach to my streamer fishing with Euro Jigging…. sounds fun and it is! I have switched to a full mono rig set up for all of my streamers fishing, which means the fly line is thin-coated mono and the flies are weighted to allow them to cast and get down deep into the water.
In addition to traditional casting and stripping streamers, Euro Jigging is the same as tight line nymphing but with a heavy jigged smaller streamer as your bottom fly. As you tight-line the tops of the runs you bounce the heavy jig fly up and down and it’s amazing how productive it is! The other really cool thing about the presentation is you can then let the streamer swing out at the end of each cast and start to strip it back.
Yesterday we caught fish on 3 three presentations in the same run! The jig drift, the swing and the strip! Once you have fished the top of the run and tail out, grab your other rod or simply swap out to a larger weighted streamer and you have a big ol bug you can toss and strip back in. Having all of these tools has dramatically increased my fishing productivity and the same goes for my clients as well.
Winter fly fishing is all about reading the weather patterns and timing them well. You are looking for a few days in a row where the temps have warmed up a bit stimulating the fish to to feed. If possible, the right amount of moisture to add some new water into the river and the right time of day! This last week we had the perfect combination of all of the above and ended up having one of the best days on the Middle Fork Feather River I have seen. The sheer numbers alone but add in the size and quality of the fish caught and brought to the net on the custom-tied flies topped it off!
Fishing right now in this weather pattern has been consistently producing during the warmer part of the days, 11-300 or 330 which makes for the perfect half-day trip! Until winter settles in and slows things down again…. I will be out fishing!
