Conditions for Moving a Dry

Two conditions make skating a dry fly most effective: big mayfly duns or caddis hatching within the past week or so. Both of these kinds of insects skate and flutter across the surface of the water, and a trout's memory of seeing this seems to last for at least a week. Luckily there are few weeks during the regular trout season from April through September that you can't find at least one of these kinds of insects hatching. On the Battenkill, a river that resists the best efforts of a blind-fished dry fly with conventional approaches, I had poor luck for years blind-fishing a dry until one day in June, during a sporadic March Brown hatch that was not bringing the fish to the surface. My Ausable Wulff started to drag at the tail of a big pool on the lower river near Shushan, New York. As the fly started to swing, a large brown trout pounced on it by whirling around, clearing the water, and taking the fly in a downstream dive. I had not seen a trout rise all day. Of course I hauled back on the rod so hard that I immediately popped the tippet.

Skating a dry fly. The fly is cast slightly downstream and then skated across the water with a very high rod, wiggling the rod as the fly is moved.

Over the next couple of seasons I refined my technique so that as soon as I saw the first March Browns hatching in the spring, I would clip a bunch of Ausable Wulffs or Gray Fox Variants flat on the bottom and would fish a skated fly from sunrise to dark, not caring if there were any flies on the water during any given hour or day.The trout would respond to the big skated flies as long as the March Brown hatch lasted, and then a week or so after I stopped seeing March Browns hatching, the fun would be over. And it is fun to see big trout fall all over themselves trying to catch a bushy dry fly careening across the surface. I have had similar success on New York's Ausable with either a White Wulff or a Gray Fox Variant when the Green Drakes were on, and on western rivers during the times Western Green Drakes were hatching — again, regardless of whether or not I actually saw flies hatching.This technique seems to work best if the water is a little above normal and slightly colored, as I suspect it spooks the trout when the water is low and clear.

Skating a Caddis

About the same time I was playing with skating the big Wulffs and variants, my friend John Harder was refining a technique that he feels is his most effective for catching trout on a dry fly when nothing is rising — the skating caddis. John has used this method on the Battenkill, on the Beaverkill, on Rhode Island's rivers like the Wood, throughout the Yellowstone area, and even on coastal cutthroat rivers near his home in Seattle. He can work magic with it, and as long as there have been caddis hatching recently, he can make a river that looks barren of trout come alive, as if the fish have been waiting for him to skitter his flies across the tail of a pool all day. John relies heavily on aVermont Hare's Ear for this kind of fishing, but he has also been known to use a Henryville or Elk Hair Caddis if he has given away all his Vermont Hare's Ears.

It's important to note that the skating dry fly does not work in all kinds of water. Luckily, though, this method works best in water types that are difficult to blind-fish in a normal dead-drift manner — tails of pools and other places where you find fast, slick water. Because smooth, fast water gives you such fits when trying to get a drag-free float, the skating technique rounds out your bag of tricks for prospecting with a dry. I've tried to skate dries on riffled water, and I feel that if you could get the right presentation in the riffles, it would work — but when you try to skate a fly through the riffles, the fly spits water into the air as it moves through the tiny hills and valleys. In order to fool the fish, a skated fly must slide over the surface without any added commotion.

Skating a dry fly, as opposed to just making it flutter an inch or two here and there, is a much more active, aggressive technique that you can use to cover a lot of water in just a few casts. Because you might be skating the fly twenty feet or more, then letting it dead-drift another ten, and then maybe skating it again, you can see why it is more useful on water that does not have any obvious places for trout, like the smooth tail of a hundred-foot-wide pool. In John Harder's skating technique you cast across and downstream, preferably with a rod not under nine feet long, matched with a light fly line-5-weight or lighter. As soon as the fly hits the water, begin to raise the rod tip smoothly while pulling with your line hand, almost as if you were going to single-haul. Twitch with both the rod tip and your line hand, so the fly dances across the surface, always moving upstream. When your rod almost reaches the vertical, drop the rod tip quickly to the water, throwing slack into the line; let the fly drift for a couple of feet, then try another skate.You can usually get two or three skates before the fly gets too close to you.The difference between this technique and the Sudden Inch is that with the Sudden Inch you use a small twitch in between long dead-drift floats, and with a skating fly you fish relatively long, broad twitches in between short dead-drift floats.

With a skated fly, it seems as though the less chance you give the fish of seeing your fly the better your chances of connecting. If, for any reason, the fly starts to dive underwater as it skates, and especially if it throws any water, it's poison.You might as well pick up the cast and try somewhere else. Once the fish have seen this business, they get wise to you instantly. Also, you seldom rise a trout on the tenth cast to the same spot when using this skating technique. I have seen trout respond to the Sudden Inch after a dozen casts, but the Sudden Inch is subtle, where the skated fly is nothing short of obnoxious. My friend Jim Lepage uses a skated Elk Hair Caddis on Maine rivers like the Penobscot, Kennebago,and Kennebec, and he has found that he can get a fish that has made a pass at a skated fly but not connected to rise again if he changes the color of the fly. Everything else that Jim has discovered about skating a caddis agrees with what we have found out in other parts of the country — it's best in the tails of pools, greasing the leader, the same skittering upstream motion — so I don't doubt it will work wherever trout are found.

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