Strip, Strip, BOOM: How I Became a Streamer Junkie

The author with a streamer-eating brown trout. Photos: Kubie Brown

I’ve always been a bit of an aggressive guy. Not to the level where I go around knocking off cowboy’s hats or picking fights with the biggest hombres in the bar, but I grew up roughhousing with my brother and cousins, and I still enjoy a bit of a scrap. In high school, I boxed, wrestled, and played football a bit, and in college, I became completely obsessed with playing rugby and even dabbled in MMA. This all shaped me into the kind of guy who enjoyed going toe to toe and was thrilled with the idea of full-contact competition. Then one day, I took up fly fishing.

It surprised me as much as everybody else that a person with such a pugilistic personality would take to such a delicate and graceful art. Yet the more I stood quietly in gentle, serene flowing rivers while sending slow, tight-looped casts toward rising trout, the more the gladiatorial edge of my temperament seemed to ebb. Still, that fiery thirst for battle would still occasionally rise to the surface, and it eventually led to my becoming completely addicted to streamer fishing.

The First Strip

As cool and beautiful as it is to see a trout rise to sip a fly from the surface of the river, it doesn’t compare to seeing an angry leviathan come rocketing out of the shadows to smoke a streamer. There’s just something primal about the moment that sparks deep-seated feelings of fear and excitement left over from when we lived in caves to hide from predators. And when you have a certain personality, streamer fishing ignites something in you that may have led some of your distant ancestors to charge out into the darkness with a rock to take on a sabretooth tiger. Streamer fishing appeals to that inner lust for combat in all of us.

When I first started casting a fly rod, I suffered through the same tangles, dragging drifts, and splashing casts that everybody else experiences. However, after I practiced casting for hours at a time and read a dozen books on entomology and fly patterns, I finally started catching a few trout on nymphs and dry flies. Eventually, I grew more confident and began to enjoy more success. Yet, what I didn’t realize was that there was something missing. There was an unrealized gap in my fly-fishing education and  passion that would immediately be filled the first time I fished with a streamer.

Sometimes the streamer action is best when the weather is the worst.

It was a quiet day on the river, and I was spending it practicing my casting and working on my presentation. I had been drifting small dries and nymphs for most of the morning and had caught a few small trout when I suddenly spotted a huge brown trout hanging in the soft water near the tailout of a long pool. My excitement rose to a whole new level as I had never caught a trout of that size on the fly. I probably drifted a dozen different patterns past the big brown’s nose without any reaction from the fish, when I mistakenly hooked a small rainbow at the end of my drift. The big brown’s personality instantly changed as it came alive and charged like an angry grizzly, chasing the little rainbow all the way to my rod tip before going back to his lie. I felt a thrill I hadn’t felt in a long time and realized that if I wanted to catch that fish, I would need to change tactics.

I hadn’t fished streamers much, but I understood the concept. So I tied on a small Muddler Minnow I found in the bottom of my fly box and cast it back toward the brown. The fish came rampaging out of its lie and absolutely hammered the fly, and I set the hook. Fighting the big fish on my 5-weight made me feel like I was going 15 rounds with Mike Tyson and when I finally brought the fish to hand, I was exhausted and ecstatic. The blood was pounding in my ears, and adrenaline was pumping through my veins as I shakily unhooked the big brown and released it. And just like that, I was obsessed.

The Bigger They Are

Every good streamer angler knows that if you want to catch big trout, you’ve got to fish with a big fly. After catching that big brown, I started fishing streamers regularly, and it made me into a bit of a trophy hunter. While my friends caught a ton of 9- and 10-inchers on nymphs and dries, I’d be behind them swinging Buggers and stripping Bunnies in search of the one 15-inch beasty living in the pool. However, it wasn’t until a couple years later, when I started working in the fly-fishing department at Orvis, that my definition of a big fly and a big trout truly changed.

I’d been working in the department for a few months and was spending most of my evenings swinging small streamers on the Battenkill River, when a man named Joe came into the store and walked into the streamer section. I casually went over to talk to him about the flies. He looked at our boxes with a bit of disdain and when I asked him why he didn’t want any of the patterns he just shook his head.

“None of them are big enough,” he said.

The old adage “big fly, big fish” is certainly true in the streamer world.

I looked down at the bins of 3, 4, and 5-inch long flies and asked Joe what he was talking about. As it turned out, Joe was from Arkansas and spent his days guiding clients on the White River where he regularly caught some truly gigantic trout. “You’ve got to understand,” he explained. “Truly big trout are predators that aren’t going to eat bugs. They’re big fish that want big chunks of meat, so that’s what you’ve got to give them if you want to catch one.”

Intrigued, I grilled Joe on the possibilities of fishing big streamers on the Battenkill and after a bit of negotiation, he agreed to take me on a float in his raft when I got out of work. That evening, I saw a whole new level of fish on a river I thought I understood. Casting monstrous streamers that wouldn’t look out of place on a shark-fishing trip, Joe and I moved some brown trout of a size that I never knew existed in that river system, including a 25-inch monster I landed right before the takeout.

After that evening, I became a big-streamer junkie who cast the biggest flies I could find in search of true monsters. No matter where I fished—from New England to Montana to Patagonia—I brought a box of big, articulated flies to try and tempt a giant into battle. While I caught fewer fish, I usually caught or at least moved a trout of a caliber that I never would have known about had I been fishing strictly with dry flies or nymphs. Soon I began to push the envelope with my streamer size and action, as I wondered just how big a trout I could find. Eventually, when I had played out all the commercial possibilities, I began to tie my own.

Forging Your Weapon

Tying streamers is almost as addictive as fishing with them. When you’re twisting up a big streamer, you’re free to experiment and improvise. Like a contestant on Iron Chef, you can take your pile of ingredients—from marabou and bucktail, to schlappen and flash—and create a recipe that’s entirely your own.

Every time I tie a streamer, I’m imagining the trout that’s going to eat it. With every turn of thread and every loop of material, I can almost see the big hooked-jawed beast of a trout exploding out of the darkness to inhale it. Of course, it doesn’t always happen that way, but when I began tying and fishing my own streamers I began to gain an understanding of the shapes and movements big trout like.

The tying desk of a streamer fanatic can be quite chaotic.

Like an angling version of Dr. Frankenstein, I would sit in my basement with hooks clamped in a vise and forge my own combinations of feather and flash. Then filling my bathtub with water, I would “swim” the new creations and watch them come alive. Once I knew how they swam, every new streamer I created became an arrow in the quiver for the monsters I was hunting, giving me a weapon of choice for every lake, river, and stream.

Soon enough, I was fishing with streamers almost exclusively. The flies ignited something in me and made me remember a feeling that had long since gone dormant. It was the spirit of competition and the thrill of battle. Every time I went down to the river and tied on a streamer, I wasn’t just going fishing, I was going to pick a fight.

The Warriors Code

Of course, fishing streamers isn’t really like going into combat. You do have to endure some brutal conditions and maybe get a bit battered and bruised from casting and stripping a 7-weight all day. Yet in the end, you come home without injury, regret, or an upcoming court date. Still, streamer fishing involves aspects of conflict that, in the end, are the very reason I’m so obsessed with big-fly fishing.

Every cast you make is a challenge to the water’s inhabitants and a call for the biggest and toughest trout to come forth and meet you head on. Whenever I hook a big trout on a streamer, I feel instantly transported into a dogfight, and even when that fish doesn’t appear, I’ll keep pounding away at the water hour knowing that one day he will. It’s that knowledge that makes streamer fishing such an addiction for me and it’s what keeps me from tying on a dry or nymphing through a juicy looking hole. For even though I don’t catch a lot of trout on streamers, I intend to go out on my shield.