The Drift

Were I asked, and often have been, “What is the most important thing to being a successful angler of trout and many other running water species?” I would say drift.  Understanding the drift is the most difficult and challenging part of fly fishing.  It truly is a skill that no one ever masters.  It is the search for that perfect drift where every other aspect of the sport comes together.  The drift is the culminations of everything fly fishing.  It is “presentation” in all fishing with the added challenge of moving water and current.

“Drift” can be defined many ways.  I like defining it as a feather floating where wind and water take it, totally unencumbered by the affects of the line.  This not only applies to the surface but the subsurface as the feather seemingly floats in the current.  It is basically putting a fly, in or on running water, in the feeding zone of a fish, unencumbered by any affect of being attached to line.  Sound simple???  Well it’s not…

Great drifts are a culmination of casting, approach, equipment, knot tying, mending, clothing, current understanding, environment, and sometimes least of all fly selection.  With all the modern gear, all the flies, and all the minutiae in the sport, it comes down to drift.

I have often commented on how the perception of the old days of fly fishing is misrepresented.  Modern anglers hear about buying fly gear at local hardware stores and how limited we were in our choices.  We did not lament over gear because we couldn’t.  We lamented only over how to catch fish.  To this end, we used all our resources and thought processes.  I actually think the “modern day anglers” have it much worse.  There is so much stuff out there to confuse the beginner into thinking success is about stuff that they often overlook what is really important. 

If an angler cannot put a naturally drifting fly in front of a feeding fish, all the promotional esoteric crap really doesn’t matter.

I’ll focus the discussion on wild fish.  Rest assured all the rules apply to stocked fish as well.  Let us all agree that fish are not smart.  I have often said this yet some people still choose to find comfort in thinking fish geniuses.  The facts will show that in a ratio of brain size to body size, fish aren’t going to be discerning a left hand whip finish from a right hand one.  Fish are not smart but they are very instinctive.  There is a difference.  One form of intelligence is driven by cognitive thought and is easy to quantify through testing.  The other is driven by nature.  I do not pretend to understand how an infant knows its’ mother immediately and to tell you the truth I don’t want to know.  Instinct is in all living things.  Depending on which expert you choose to believe, a fish’s cognitive memory is about five to fifteen minutes.  I really find the fish memory argument kinda hilarious.  Suffice to say, a fish’s memory is short.

All the skills in fly fishing culminate in the drift.  On any given drift not all the skills in fly fishing are used.  The order of importance in applying these skills varies from drift to drift.

The drag free drift is what we all seek to attain.  Mending is often the key to a drag free drift.  That said, not all drifts require mending.  Not all drifts even require casting.  Have you ever seen someone “Dapping” or how about dropping their fly in the water and letting it drift down stream as they simply let line out?  Neither technique requires casting.     

Environment is a key component in understanding drift.  A fish living in relatively sterile headwaters cannot afford to let anything go by that even looks like food.  Fly selection is of very little importance.  A fish living in a diverse food rich environment can be a little more selective.  Fish that live in a food rich environment; having very little diversity in the types of food can be very difficult to catch as they see thousands of the same bugs every day.  The drift for these fish must be as perfect as possible because they have spent their lives continually being re-enforced as to what is natural and what is not.  They do not have to eat something that does not look right and with few species of bugs, but in vast abundance, they can be very difficult to fool.    

Environmental predation can be a variable to fishing.  How much stealth is required to get to within effective fishing range of your individual casting/mending skill sets?  Add varying water clarity issues.  Achieving a perfect drift is of little consequence if the fish leave the country.  Wading skill and dress are the real challenges here.  Two things easily modified yet most frequently ignored by anglers.  I often tell new students; “If you do not become a great caster today, don’t worry, quiet wading will usually get you within range.  Wear earth tone colors.  Keep your shadow from leading (casting it upon or near the fish) or trailing you (being lit up like a Christmas tree).  Wade silently and make no wake.”  These instructions are simple and easy to self diagnose even for a beginner on day one.

Environmental awareness as defined to things out of place in a fish’s world is sometimes of concern.  High-Vis indicators, hard indicators, fly line colors are some of the things that the most wary of trout can be cautious of.  Fishing a straight upriver drift is always a bad idea.  Most times the angler will “Line” the fish.  This is done by laying fly line on top of fish as the angler tries to drift bugs to the fish.  I like to approach from below and off to the side and make presentations across and slightly up to likely holding areas or spotted fish. 

Understanding the dynamics of current is paramount to making good drifts.  I think this is obvious.  But let’s consider current from a different perspective.  Current defines many things including visibility and timing.  The swifter the current the less time a fish has to make up their mind to eat or not.  Also as current increases often so does water texture.  From small riffles to whitewater torrents, all currents make visibility of surface and subsurface objects more difficult as the velocity increases and turbulence mixes air bubbles in.  There are a lot of things that an angler can get away with in swift water that simply won’t produce fish in slow glass flat water.

Dry flies are pretty self explanatory when it comes to drag free drifts.  On the majority of trout waters, around the world, trout feed predominantly on subsurface bugs throughout their lives.  True enough, hatches do occur.  Some may be epic, but day in and day out, sustainable populations feed sub surface.  Aquatic insects in any stage of life are nearly neutrally buoyant.  That is to say, they neither float nor sink and if they do it is at a very slow rate.  Here in lies the dilemma.  Your nymph must drift in the current like the real thing.  Too much weight and it just hangs there.  There are all kinds of sub currents that cause the real thing to bob and weave as it drifts down stream.  The tolerance to unnatural movement of nymphs is determined by the fish not the fisherman.

In my opinion, most fishermen use way too much weight when fishing sub-surface.  The trick is to get to the desired depth with as little weight as possible.  I use very few metal bead heads.  I rarely put any weight within six inches of my fly.  I want my fly to “dance” in the currents.  I argued the use of light tippet with one of our sports legends.  He mistakenly thought I was concerned about fish seeing the tippet.  I informed him nothing was further from the truth; I was more interested in the free movement of tiny nymphs.  Example: Take a size 20 WD40 and tie it to 5X.  Holding the line horizontally, see how far you can move your fingers up the line, away from your knot, before the weight of the fly causes the line to bend down.  Understand that water is more viscous than air.  This physics lesson in leverage and moment becomes exponentially more of a factor underwater.  Your nymph looking more like “finger food” skewered on the end of a long fancy toothpick at a cocktail party than something neutrally buoyant drifting freely in or on the water.      

In a great drift your fly does exactly what the natural bugs do!  Fishing a great imitation will buy you a little drift buffer with fish.  Fishing a great drift with even the wrong bug can often generate bites.  Fishing great drifts with the right bug, well that’s what we all aspire to do. 

In the timeless “Chicken and the Egg” scenario or the ongoing debate as to what fundamentally allows us cast a fly line, drift and fly selection are locked in debate.  Which is more important?  I definitely lean towards the drift.  As the discriminating feeding patterns vary from watercourse to watercourse, drift remains the same.  Constant and always the challenge, proper drift is the eight hundred pound guerrilla in the room not fly selection.  I can only speculate as to why so many anglers are largely indifferent to drift; drift sells nothing…Attention is all too often the result of money exchanges, not necessity or natural truth…

The modern day fly angler spends so much effort in knowledge that goes kinda around the fish.  If as much time, research, effort and sweat was spent on the drift as is spent on casting, rod, reel, line, wader, tippet, fly selection and the like, folks would be catching more fish and spending less money.  

One of our sports more notable personalities said “You just can’t by a good cast” and I guess that’s true.  I will guarantee you; the only way to get good drifts is to spend time on the water, with the water and with the fish.  Let them judge you.  Ultimately I think folks make lousy drifts because they just can’t submit to a river and some stupid old fish.  They go, like “Dumbo” in search of a “Magic Feather” that will allow them to fly as a fisherman, to shops that promise the sale of “Magic Feathers.”  They just can’t or won’t pay attention to what nature’s trying to tell them. 

The perfect drift is left only to nature.  The best we can do is in the trying, with a humble understanding that we’ll always fall short of perfection.  Get my drift?
 

June 28, 2010

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