Fly Fish - Types of Fishing Flies

Dusty Wissmath: Hi I am Dusty Wissmath and this is an introduction to fly-casting. Right now, we are going to talk a little bit about the flies. There s actually two major types of flies; naturals and attractors. A natural is a fly that actually imitates something found in nature. This one you can see imitates an ant. We have also got attractors, I doubt that you have ever seen anything that looks like this in nature. So naturals imitate something that you will see in nature, they imitate a living creature and an attractor is just that. It doesn t imitate anything in particular but, the trout the bask, whatever fish you are fishing for. Anything that looks like food or it may hit out an aggressive or territorial response. We say, in those two major categories. There are a couple of other categories. First a dry fly. Dry fly is a one that most people think about when they think about fly-casting. The dry fly is designed to sit on the surface of the water, it has stiff hackles and a long tail and those hackles on that tail, balance the fly with a hook on the surface tension. It s designed to imitate, is the adult face of an aquatic insect, or a terrestrial insect that s fallen in to this stream. Next, we have a streamer. An streamer actually imitates a bait fish, a Mino, it could also imitate a crayfish, something like that. With a streamer fly, you got to remember that it s going to be underneath the surface of the water and so all these feathers are going to be slicked back and when we fish this, we actually have to animate the fly. We have to impart action to it, so we are going strip one, after we have cast a sly under the water, and each time we strip it, it s going to move to through the water like a fish. With the dry fly, it sits on the surface of the water, and we usually don t impart any action to it. It s designed to act like that bug on the surface which is just subject to any current that we may have. So we don t add any action to that dry fly. So that s a quick introduction to the flies that we use when we are fly fishing. And I hope today you have learnt something that s going to help you, as you learn this sport. We will see you on the water.