Bernd Ziesche | Wednesday, 2 September 2015
Last week I was teaching fly casting in the day time. In the evenings Marina and I fly fished for carp and asp. We had a great fly fishing week with some fine fish involved.
Asp are usually in the best striking mood during the last hour right before darkness. We were fishing the river Elbe – a large German river passing by right next to my home town. My goal was to catch an asp on dry fly. Luckily we had one windless evening offering a total flat surface. I found a group of asp near a bank and indeed caught some asp on an attractor dry fly. Amazing takes with lots of action included. Asp on dry fly isn’t the most effective way to catch them, but sure it means a lot of excitement watching them hammering on the fly. If you want to try it, I recommend presenting the dry fly with serious movements against the current. The easier way is to RAPIDLY strip in a small streamer. Often white color works great on asp. If you have asp in serious size (60+cm) you may chose a streamer in 6-12cm length. For the smaller asp 1-5 cm will work fine. Popper flies can work well also but usually result in a fair number of none hooked strikes. Combining a 6wt. Barrio SLX (floating) fly line with my Hot Torpedo 6 worked perfect to present those flies. For the tippet I used nylon in 0,23mm (dry fly) and 0,25mm (streamer). Asp in my experience are not leader shy.
Tomorrow Marina and I are heading north to Denmark in order to teach fly fishing for Sea trout in the Baltic Sea. Weather looks quite good and hopefully we will meet some fine fish!
Some fine fish to YOUR fly as well!
All my best
