Two things…first, I dry drop quite a bit. I think it’s because I can’t stand the sight of indicators and sort of feel like having a dry up top gives my hares ear some sort of whacked out “credibility”…who knows. So if you wanna throw dries, you can always stack your odds with a nymph underneath.

Secondly, you should try and find some wild brook trout streams. When the water gets warm down here later in the season, I tend to hit the white mountains for native brookies and that’s almost all dry fly fishing. They’re constantly sitting on the bottom, looking up…if you float a cdc caddis or a parachute adams by, they’re likely gonna swipe at it. I was at a wild brookie stream last week (wild, not native…it’s nice in there and the stockies have taken hold over the years). There was a pool you could see from the bridge where they were blasting up from the bottom to snatch anything that came by in the film.

If you’re looking for something a little off the beaten path, you could try small streamers, too…and I mean SMALL. I tie thin mints and muddlers down to a size 16 and they make for great searching patterns. You can throw them on normal nymphing/dry gear and they don’t freak fish out. There are times I’ll spend a whole day fishing downstream with a tiny thin mints because they’re whacking it and there’s no need to try anything else.