Divers, better for monsters.

Fly fishing for predators is the most fun you can have in the world of fishing.  Knowing the monsters you have casted at could take you line spinning deep into the backing, and maybe even take all you line with it.  Eighty bucks out the door.

What flies get predators to act like they do?  Well, its normally big, ugly, often flashy, and more often… cute.  My girlfriend has often call most of my most effective patterns cute.  And often lake I’m picking them out of the mouth of something big and mean.

My favorite fly for getting monster to be monsters is hands down the Dahlberg diver.  The fly is just a big bunch crazy with a lot of noise and a bunch of bubbles.  Bubbles are good, or more over, sound good.  The sound calls big predators to feed.  Bass, pike, Muskie, even trout and many more tend to come to call from this sound.  When you rid this fly with a sinking line, you get a dying swim then float that screams easy meal.

My most used and most popular divers are small.  I call then crappie divers, or smallie divers.  There are on average one and half to three inch long divers trimmed so small you can throw them on a five weight without any trouble.

They seem to work great on hybrids.

One pattern I have been using is a gar rope lure designed to tangle in their teeth.  There are fish out there with jaws like cinder blocks.  Then there are fish with a jaw like solid steel and only as wide as a size two hook on a fish over fifty inches long.  So you have two choices.  One, rig a fly with a small and super strong as well as sharp trailer hook, often having to be a treble hook to get the chance of putting the hook into the jaw.  Or two, you rig up a rope fly with loops, and strong tippet to bring in the beast.  I use both, not at the same time, but I find a nearly 95% tangle rate on the rope and a 50% rate on the treble stinger.   The other issue with a treble hook is it sucks to ditch a cast and put that into the back of your head.  Rope flies tend to need less shots after words.

But they work!