The Audacity of Big Fish on a Fly Rod

If you’re serious about doing a little fly fishing, I have some really stout 1/0 & 3/0 hooks (Owner Aki hooks) and a decent amount of tying materials. Clousers and Decievers, along with some Enrico Puglisi style flies are probably good bets. I also have some medium sized 1/0 & 3/0 rabbit strip flies, which I tied for Tarpon (Black Death & Purple Death flies). I like the Puglisi flies, as they are made of synthetic hair and don’t hold the water (lots lighter for casting). Barbell eyes are good, as they will get the flies down several feet pretty quickly and keep them down, as you strip the flies in (and you’ll be stripping as fast as you possibly can in most cases). You may want to get or tie a few offshore poppers as well (I have not tied any and don’t plan to, as they are a pain and take too much time). I have a good 12wt reel (Nautilus CCF 12 with a 12wt sink tip line & an extra spool with a 12wt floating line) which should pair nicely with your new 12wt rod.

What kind of rod did you get (is it really, really fast and does it have a very stout butt section…….it needs to be fast and stout to double-haul a heavy 12wt sink tip line)? Oh, by the way, be practicing your double hauling technique with a heavy line and heavy weight (think of a fly that weighs about as much as a small wet sock) on the end of a really heavy fly line. You’ll need to be able to double haul and throw almost all, if not all of a fly line, with only a few false casts. The sink tip is like a shooting head and you only need the sink tip plus about 5-10 feet of the running line out, in order to throw the entire fly line; if you double haul effectively (you may already know this stuff from your salmon fishing trips). Ian and I discussed the fly fishing possibilities a bit and I agree with him. Landing a good sized fish on a fly rod takes a long time compared to the heavy gear we usually troll offshore. We should have a fly rod rigged and ready to go and only use it if we get into schools of smaller fish or we’ve caught so many fish that nobody cares if we hook something sizeable on the fly rod and we’re out of commission for an hour or two, fighting the beast.

One last thought – The Clousers and Decievers should work well in the shallows on snapper & most other inshore species, so we should be able to throw a few flies in the evenings, even if we don’t throw any offshore. When I was fishing the Yucatan a couple of weeks ago, we did this. Throw the fly, let it sink and then make the first strip and expect a strike on the first strip or the first drop between the first & second strip. The almost immediate strike was really consistent. If I didn’t have a strike with the first 4 strips, it was time to pick it up and recast.