Bernd Ziesche | Wednesday, 17 June 2020
Having watched many fly fishermen fly fishing for Atlantic salmon in very different rivers throughout several countries it seems fair to summarize that over 90% of fly fishermen are fishing the classical down stream swing only.
Having said so, all these fine fly fishermen are swinging quite similiar type of flies usually. Those are flies which are not having much action compared to what most spin fishermen offer.
At the moment my good friend Florian and I are swinging our flies in the Skjern river in Denmark. The borders re-opened on Monday and of course early Monday morning we started our trip to Denmark. We couldn't have waited any longer!
The Skjern river has relatively slow current speed compared to many Norwegian salmon rivers for example. The slow current definitely puts spin fishermen offering their high action lures in a clear catching advantage. Most spin fishermen need half as much fishing time per salmon as do we fly fishermen. Yesterday for example 16 salmon were landed by spin fishermen while 4 were landed by fly fishermen. These simple facts have been on my mind for many years.
Fly fishing for asp in clear none moving water I often was facing a very similuar situation when comparing action lures with the average flies. That forced me to develop some action flies.
These days now I will be trying some of them for Atlantic salmon.
Yesterday a nice rainbow trout hammered into my multi action fly. She seemed to really like the action!
Since Florian will be swinging the classical Skjern flies (much less action) we hopefully will compare our flies thruout the week. "Hopefully" because there are not exactly many fish in the river right now and it's hard to know if and if so, how many salmon are seeing our flies. Such a comparison would need the whole season to be sure about the difference, I think.
Well, at least I am trying my best to fish a bit outside the box this time. That to me brings a lot of extra excitement always! I'll keep you updated... ;)
Great fishing week and hopefully some travelling to all of you, too!
All my best
Some pictures as every week...