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View Full Version : Dead drift dry fly fishing for BC Steelhead



Bill Kiene semi-retired
02-15-2005, 10:15 AM
A good buddy of ours, Evan jenkins, was on a two weeked fly fishing adventure to the Bulkley River in British Columbia some years back.

While he was there it continued to rain every day making fishing impossible. He spent lots of his idle time in a local pub close to where he was staying.

In the pub he met some of the 'regulars' who fished here yearly.

One interesting one was an English gentleman who had fly fished the river for many years.

Naturally they discussed the fly fishing quite a bit. They talked about all kinds of terchneques as well.

The Englishman had actually evolved to a state where he only dry fly fished for them and was actually to the point where he only "dead drifted" his dry flies.

He said this was "thee way" to catch the best quality fish in the river. He thought that "swinging" or "waking" dry flies was not very "classy"?

Way before hearing this story, my good friend Chris Pasley was dead drifting his dry flies on the Dean River with me and having tremendious success.

It is pretty special to see a large wild BC summer Steelhead rise slowly to your size 4 Royal Wulff.

Rick J
02-15-2005, 01:12 PM
A number of years ago when fishing the Feather we found a bunch of fish in a back eddy that had no downstream connection to the river. These fish behaved just like trout and I got one 10# fish to come up and suck a size 14 elk hair caddis off the top!! I have a photo of that fish framed with the fly that my friend Brett did for me. That was the only one we got to eat off the top but hooked several using very small nymphs.