Nymphing For Cyprinids - Part I

Many fly fishermen think, fish that doesn’t belong to the family of salmonids, shows little interest in fly fishing. Maybe it is like this cause fly fishing for these species is not enough publicized but the trend is increasing. Of course, a cyprinid do not fight like a same size salmonid and certainly will not jump out of the water like a trout is doing but they can be great fighters especially big fish.

Best time to catch these fish is now during hot summer days. The desired results can be obtained with any fly from streamer to dry fly. For me cyprinids were and are some outstanding fish, first of all maybe cause were the first species of fish I managed to catch with the fly many years ago and second cause it is so challenging to catch the real big fish.

As long as the weather was stable and the water clean, we decided to take advantage of the situation and get out fly fishing. My transylvanian buddy joined me and we went in the morning to the portion of river I fished more than a week ago. I watched the water surface for a few minutes without to see a rising fish, so I decided to use heavy nymphs fished Czech style. My friend opted for a combination of wet flies. The results were not long in coming and fish made their first appearance. The diversity of fish species captured made the game really interesting. We caught several cyprinids but most of them were chub and ide. My friend managed to fool some chub with a dry fly. Terrestrial patterns do their job in most situations. Time spent outside has been a true blessing, rods were often bent and to be honest we had a lot of fun also without salmonids. 

I fished two nymph patterns. A black one with silver BH and flashback and an orange BH nymph. I’ll present the flies in one of the next posts and hope I animated you to go out to catch some chub or ide with the fly rod!