When bass drop off the shallows in fall and your flies keep coming back untouched, the problem is that your Clouser is riding a foot or two above fish that have settled onto a mid-depth flat. The good news is that you don’t have to rebuild your box or buy a sinking line to fix it. Most of the depth you’re missing can be added at the fly and the leader, with beads, eyes, split shot, or a pinch of tungsten putty, and dialed in run by run until the fly is ticking bottom where the fish are.

Before you spend a dollar, though, it’s worth making sure depth is the problem.