The Sudden Inch. The fly is cast with an upstream mend or reach cast, and as it drifts downstream the rod is moved upstream just until the fly moves upstream about an inch. The fly is then allowed to dead-drift and inched again if the current allows.

IMPARTING MOVEMENT TO A DRY FLY is one of the most effective and exciting ways to fish dry flies, but it must be done under the right circumstances with special techniques that distinguish movement given to the fly by the fisherman from ordinary drag. Insects on the surface of the water move, no question, but when insects move they do it without creating a V-shaped wake that drag usually creates. When you purposely give movement to a fly, it should look like a skater gliding across the surface rather than a swimmer doing the crawl. If this is done properly, a skated fly will draw trout from six feet away, fish that might not be induced to take any other fly. It's more an active technique that you should use like a streamer fly to provoke strikes than a passive technique where you pitch a fly to a trout's suspected position and wait for him to inhale your fly.

Sometimes you need to add just a simple twitch to a dry fly to catch a trout's attention. In our Vermont streams in the fall the same debris that causes a migration of people from hundreds of miles away for a few short, frantic weeks while it is still on the trees is quickly shed with the first autumn cold fronts, littering the surface of our rivers with the flames of red maples, pumpkin oranges of sugar maples, burnished gold of beeches and aspens, and at the end of the season, rich brown of oaks. As soon as the first leaves hit the water, trout that would move two feet for a dead-drifted Ausable Wulff seem to lose interest. I suspect this is because during the summer, when there is little vegetable matter falling into the river, there is a good chance that something floating on the surface of the water is food, and it is worth it for a trout to inspect most items in the drift. In the fall the trout have so many false alarms, rising to the surface and either turning away or inhaling a piece of inedible plant matter, that it is difficult to catch their interest. Unlike the spring and summer, where two casts to the same spot will be all that is needed to rise a trout, in the fall you might cast ten times to the same spot without results, then twitch the fly gently, then try another cast with a twitch, and finally twitch the fly steadily as soon as it lands and keep twitching almost to your feet.You need to distinguish your fly from all the inedible junk on the surface.

Aquatic insects invariably move upstream when they twitch, so you need to position yourself where you can move the fly upstream, which usually means working downstream or at least getting across from the place you want to cast, so that when you move the fly it moves upstream. When casting downstream, cast with an upstream curve using the reach cast, and then raise your rod tip enough to move the fly an inch or so upstream; then quickly drop the rod tip so the fly drifts back downstream without drag. This is the simple but deadly Sudden Inch technique first described by Len Wright in his book Fishing the Dry Fly as a Living Insect. When casting across-stream to a position, try to throw an upstream hook using a curve cast or an upstream aerial mend, so that when you pull on the line, the fly moves upstream. You can also try to mend upstream after the line hits the water, letting the mending process move the fly, but I usually find that moving the rod and line enough to get a decent upstream mend makes the fly move too far, or it seems to pull the fly under the surface rather than skating it along the top.

The one exception to moving the fly upstream is when you are fishing with a hopper, as the trout are used to seeing a hopper move in almost any direction. If you get into a place where you think a twitched fly might work, but you can only cast upstream because of an obstruction, or in shallow water where you suspect you'll spook the fish by getting upstream of them, try a hopper.

This Vermont Hare's Ear is a great fly for skating. It's made from hare's ear dubbing and brown-and-grizzly mixed hackle, trimmed with scissors. These aren't easy to find commercially, but in a pinch you can trim any fly with bushy hackle.

Other than hoppers or big foam flies, the flies you use with an active dry-fly presentation should be those that will skate across the surface without throwing a wake or splashing, and this means a fly with stiff, long hackles, or trimmed hackle, and also a pattern that keeps the point and bend of the hook above the surface. If your hook penetrates the surface film, the fly will resist the skating action, the hook digging into the water like an anchor, and the fly will hesitate and jerk, throwing tiny plumes of spray, rather than slipping across the top of the water like an insect. Trimming the hackle flat on the underside of a long-hackled fly like a Wulff or variant isone way to create a good skater. Trimming the hackle creates a wide base of blunt, stiff fibers that keep the fly above the surface film. I know this idea is repulsive to fly tyers, who spend their winters haunting the fly-tying materials sections of fly shops for expensive hackle capes with a combination of stiff, long fibers and just the right color, but even the best-tied dry fly, made from the finest hackles, will have a variation in fiber length underneath the fly, with some of the fibers resting on the surface but others penetrating the surface film.Take a heavily dressed fly like an Ausable Wulff, one with hackle that is twice the hook gap in length, and with a sharp pair of scissors trim the hackle flat across the bottom. Make sure that the cut you make leaves enough hackle to extend beyond the point of the hook — you should be left with hackle that is about one and a half times the gap.

Other good skating flies are ones that are palmer-hackled, like an Elk Hair Caddis or a Stimulator. If the palmer hackle is stiff, is uniform in length, and extends beyond the gap, you can often get away without trimming the hackle flat across the bottom, but if the fibers show some variation in length, or if you see that the fly does not skate without making some commotion on the water, get out the scissors. One of the deadliest skating flies is also the simplest, and the dressing calls for tying in a full hackle of brown and grizzly and trimming the hackle. Called the Vermont Hare's Ear, it is simply a body of rough hare's ear dubbing tied down around the bend, with a clipped collar of hackle. Gary LaFontaine, in his incredibly thorough book Caddisflies, introduced one of the premier skating flies. The Dancing Caddis, an appropriate name, features a wing of elk hair that is tied upside down, so that not only does the wing cradle the point and bend of the hook to keep them out of the water, but also, because of the wing position, the fly lands with the hook pointed up every time. To add to the fly's skating properties, the hackle is also trimmed flat on the opposite side of the wing.

To keep your fly on top of the water, make sure that every part of your terminal tackle floats high on the water. If you don't pay attention to this, you'll make the fly dive underwater, ruining the effect. First, clean your fly line and apply a good line dressing. This is something I don't pay much attention to under most conditions, because with modern floating fly lines you don't have to dress them more than every dozen or so trips to the river for acceptable performance. But when skating a dry fly, you need every edge you can get. Next, dress your entire leader with either a paste fly floatant or line dressing, so the leader skims on top of the water as well. Don't worry about leader shadow spooking the fish, because trout will be chasing your moving fly and won't be bothered in the slightest by the shadow of a leader.

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