Bernd Ziesche | Wednesday, 11 August 2021
Asp are insane fish when it comes to only eat on one extremely particular food source. Exactly that forced me into solving a lot of riddles about how to catch them over the years!
Always when I thought to truly have encrypted how to successfully catch asp, they put me in a new different feeding situation for which I yet didn't have the key.
During the past 8 years I caught around 1000 asp from small to big. My toolbox now holds a serious number of different strategies, different flies and different tackle setups. Fair to summarize I often caught asp when other anglers failed to catch them.
During the last 2 weeks I saw asp chasing single baitfish, that were swimming a quarter inch subsurface to sometimes just touching the surface. Those baitfish were mostly changing between standing still, showing tiny little twitches and very slowly moving a few inch. All that was done in a none straight overall path!
Now how do I imitate such baitfish behaviour?
For that I built some special flies made of balsa wood and similiar stuff (that I found on the Baltic beach some years ago). You may have a look at those my new flies in the pictures below.
I have done a lot of innovative fly design in my fly fishing career. These flies are truly special. Brilliant castability, fantastic movement and perch love them a lot, too as I found out immediately. And yes, I nailed those asp as I was targeting to!
Solving such a riddle (where I couldn't succeed with all my other asp strategies) is so much excitement and fun. I love it. This is what fly fishing is all about to me. It's not always the easiest way to catch fish, but for me it always was the most exciting way for sure.
Between fishing and designing new flies I was teaching single and double hand casting last week.
I hope you are into fly fishing, too this week!
All my best
As always...
