Streamers

Streamer fly fishing typically relies on long shank or articulated shank hooks and fly patterns tied to imitate baitfish. Fly fishing streamers are versatile and effective when crashed against river banks and stripped quickly to mimic a panicked forage and induce strikes from territorial fish, drifted and stripped in a 1-2-3-pause cadence drifting down current or left to float weighted subsurface and carried downstream as an injured or dead baitfish to attract opportunistic feeders. It's said that there is no wrong way to fly fish a streamer, and there certainly are more ideas about how to fly fish with a streamer than can be mentioned here. It might be surprising to some that fishing for trout with bucktail streamers, made from the long hair of a deer's tail, were often trolled behind rowboats in open water and increased in popularity with the advent and affordability of outboard motors. In the Pacific Northwest, ocean fishing for salmon with bucktail streamers is a niche approach. Conventional bucktail streamers take many different species – the colorful and storied Mickey Finn in various sizes grabs large and smallmouth bass, salmon, steelhead, sea trout, pike, and others. Its more naturalistic cousin, the Black-Nose Dace streamer, appears as a prey species: minnows, darters, and even hatchling bass. Moving along to a different material, marabou (the downy feathers of the common domestic turkey), give large streamers and the Wooley Bugger irresistible movement in the water. The rabbit-furred Zonker streamer has its devotees. Of course, the Clouser Minnow and its dumbbell eyes positioned just right on the hook cannot be left out of any streamer flies discussion as anglers may have caught more species of fish using it than any other.