Rainbow and Brown Trout Fishing Flies

     The adult dragonfly represents a steak meal to a trout. This fly is an insect hunter and eats a lot of little bugs. The trout would have to eat allot of those same insects as the adult dragonfly in order to match what the dragonfly represents as food.

Jumping Trout

     So why spend all that energy in eating little bugs when all you have to do is be an expert jumper and on target. Well, that is what the brown and rainbow trout has mastered in Chile and Argentina. It took me a while to figure out why the trout at Lago Yelcho in Chile liked to jump four feet into the air. When I first fished Lion's Bay (a quiet and grassy bay), and saw all the trout sailing through the air I thought this was going to be easy fishing. We were going to be catching some real big rainbow's. Well, two years later we finally got the right fly.

     These fish had developed the precise technique of stalking and jumping for the adult dragon and they did not want to take anything else. Their were so many dragons flying around that the trout could not pass up the opportunity to stalk a hovering dragon and shoot him down with that missile effect of his whole body coming out of the water. We actually saw a large fish following a slow moving dragon and when the fly stopped and hovered, out shot a large rainbow trout and the dragonfly was gone. We knew that we would have to make up a good imitation of a full size dragon and that is what we did.

Casting and Presentation

     Over the years there has been a lot of different ties for the adult dragonfly. Some had posed some problems with the casting, as the wings tend to twirl your leader when the fly is in the air and so you are constantly straightening out the line.

      You can get very precise with presenting this fly to a hunting trout and waiting for the take is longer than you would expect, but it will happen and you better not be looking at the beautiful scenery.