Fly Fishing - Chasing ASP

Last week two friends and I where fly and spinn fishing for asp. There is always a lot more to learn when comparing different angling methods like fly and spinn fishing. So I am glad one of my friends likes both fly and spinn fishing. We have been fishing a lot of new spots on the large river Elbe. Fair to say we found some pretty promising spots in order to catch a serious asp!

But it's also fair that yet we saw significant more asp chasing baitfish than we managed to hook up!

After having tried many different fly patterns, many different retrieving techniques both combined with different fly lines (floating and sinking ones) I could land two fine asp though. Good fighters for sure - lots of fun involved.

Last week I spent most of the nights searching the www for information about fly fishing for asp and getting in contact with the people providing it. During the days we were fishing of course. In between I was designing new flies to then try them directly.

We also studied the food behaviour of the typical summer food for asp in this river.

It was a fantastic week for sure and we learnt a lot about large asp. I think we are getting much closer to the 80+cm asp which at least I am clearly after. The bigger asp get, the smarter they are or better to say the more experienced they get. Asp are excellent in looking up lures (and flies) and then refusing for different reasons. Yet we have identified some of the reasons but probably not nearly all of them.

Since everyone told us to strip as fast as possible, we are now going to try to catch asp by dead drifting our streamers (and other patterns) below a strike indicator. Asp love to take small baitfish which got in trouble due to heavy temperature changes in the mill waters available for example. I think there might be a truly succeeding strategy to be found here.

I'll keep you updated next Wednesday! Time to fish now!!! ;)

Fishy week to all of you!

All my best
Bernd

Some impressions of the past days...