Warmwater

Join Sleddy and a guest for a night chasing bass on big mayflies.

The musky figure-8 | Photo by Jim Shulin The musky figure-8 is a continuous boatside move you run at the end of every retrieve to turn a following fish into a strike, drawing the fly through wide, deep turns that a straight retrieve can't produce. On a fly rod it looks different than the conventional version: you retrieve to the leader knot, not to the rod...

To get a bass fly down without switching to a sinking line, add weight at the fly or the leader: a denser or larger bead, dumbbell eyes, or split shot and tungsten putty pinched about a foot above the fly. Sink rate depends far more on a bead's diameter and density than its raw weight, so a same-size tungsten bead can nearly triple the sink of a brass one...

The easiest panfish popper to tie is a glue-and-go foam bug: you seat a pre-formed foam body onto a kinked-shank hook with a drop of super glue, add rubber legs, and color it with a marker — no thread wrapping, dubbing, or hackle required. That makes it the best first fly for a kid or beginner, because it skips every hard tying skill while still catching...

Screenshot from Pike / Musky Fly That Works! Step by Step Fly Tying Instructions A standard musky fly runs 10 to 12 inches, and in fall many anglers push to 12 or 14, not because a musky suddenly refuses small prey but because the largest fall forage runs big and a bigger fly filters for the biggest fish. Cooling water raises feeding activity and brings out...

Night fly fishing for bass is the answer to a summer heat wave, when daytime water in the shallows climbs into the upper 80s and largemouth stop feeding up top until dark. Fish topwater flies in the first few hours after sunset, work them slowly on a floating line and a short, stout leader, and choose dark patterns that push water. A bass hunts the dark far...

I arrived early to teach fly fishing classes at a boys summer camp, which meant I had one precious hour to fish this beautiful, crystal-clear river myself before the kids showed up. With only a little time to explore, I grabbed my fly rod and went looking for bass and panfish in some of the clearest water I've fished in a long time.

Screenshot from Fly Fishing the Largest River in North America A multi-day river float is one of the most enjoyable summer smallmouth float trips you can take in the heat of the season, because moving water keeps bronzebacks feeding when trout streams sit behind thermal closures and lakes turn warm and oxygen-poor. Five systems anchor a strong summer float...

Carp on the fly | photo by Brian Bradfield To catch carp on a fly, stalk feeding fish in skinny summer water: move in low and quiet, pick a head-down tailer rather than a cruiser, and drop a weighted fly into a plate-sized zone right at its head using a drag-and-drop, then set with a soft trout-style lift. Summer is the best season for it, because warm...

Find the right fly line for fishing bass poppers | Adobe Stock The best fly line for bass poppers and big deer-hair bugs is a dedicated bass taper — a short, front-loaded head that runs about one to two line sizes heavy, paired with a heat-stable summer coating. A trout line built to set a size 18 dry down softly can't finish the turnover of a light...