Dry fly fishing on lakes needn’t depend on mayfly and caddis, writes Philip.

“Well, I can tell you one thing, I’m not pulling wets today!” It was a lovely spring morning at Lake Bellfield in the Grampians, and as the electric quietly drew us out of the drowned trees and into the sunlit blue of the open water, my brother made the announcement with a finality no doubt borne of a long winter doing just that. Mark has many flyfishing qualities, but his stamina for pulling (flogging?) wet flies is not one of them.

We can argue all day about whether that’s a strength or a weakness. I’m not the greatest flogger myself, but I can keep pulling on the promise of an invisible tug, long after my brother has wandered off to try something different. And here’s the thing: usually, Mark then somehow finds a trout that will eat a dry fly; and frequently a number of them. Often enough, he catches more than the wet fly floggers could dream of.

Now, I must add in here that Mark has an exceptional skillset for dry fly fishing on lakes. In particular, he is probably the equal best I’ve witnessed (along with Christopher Bassano) at spotting lake trout; both by seeing the fish’s surface disturbances (the term ‘rises’ is too simplistic), and by polaroiding them. No doubt there are others in that league – I just haven’t fished with them yet. Meanwhile, both can cast as close or as far as necessary, with speed and accuracy, in any wind. Unlike pulling wets, dry fly fishing lakes tends to have little margin for error in time and space.

So, because it can be more technically challenging than pulling, many anglers mistake dry fly fishing lakes – other than at mayfly time – as less effective. In fact, it can be extremely effective, and on occasion, the only way to consistently catch lake trout.

‘Best’ is a strong term, so let’s say some of the best flyfishing I enjoyed last season, was casting to trout feeding on terrestrials. From Tasmania to the Snowy Mountains, trout eating (or looking for) beetles, hoppers, jassids, ants, termites and moths were often the main game – especially (but not only) outside of winter.

Dry fly threshold

I suspect few of us would deny the sheer enjoyment of catching trout on dry flies. But when does dry fly fishing lakes become an indulgence (not that there’s anything wrong with that!), as opposed to a really good option to catch a fish? The line is fuzzy, and again, depends in part on ability. For all that, I’ll lean towards fishing lakes with terrestrial dries when the trout are visibly rising to the same of course, but also, when I know there’s been enough terrestrial insect activity, it’s likely the trout will respond favourably to a dry fly, even if they’re not actually rising at the time.

In all cases, this threshold is more probable after midday – and through to evening and beyond. Most days, it takes until things warm up before the fish get serious about the surface.

Beetles

Around my home in the central Victorian highlands, terrestrial season starts with cockchafer beetle falls on evening in late winter/ early spring. Or at least it can start then – the falls aren’t completely reliable, as the cockchafer grubs, which live in the soil beneath pasture, don’t cope well with waterlogging in wet winters.

However, when the beetles do emerge and make their twilight flight, if there’s water in the way – like a nice trout lake – that’s where many of them end up. Trout love cockchafer beetles, and once they figure out that this chunky bounty from above is not in fact too good to be true, they fixate on them. So much so that, once the cockchafer falls really get underway, you can pick up fish on a dark, fingernail-sized foam beetle even if there are few if any naturals around. In keeping with the unpredictability of cockchafers, the season can last for just a couple of weeks, through to several weeks – the latest I’ve seen them is early October. Don’t plan a trip around cockchafers, but if you’re on a central Victorian lake fringed by pasture in late winter/ early spring – such as Newlyn, Hepburn or Tullaroop – keep your eyes and ears open on evening for little dark kamikaze blobs whizzing past and plopping onto the water. And carry some nice fat foam beetles in your box, just in case.

Once the weather warms up, beetles of all different shapes and sizes became more prolific, and stillwater trout seem to become more familiar with them. The beauty of beetles is that imitations can be quite simple, and with a splash of colour on the back or on a short post, easy to spot on the water: just carry a range of sizes, and a few colours like black, brown and green.

Something to be aware of though, is certain species appear to be unpalatable. The commonly encountered plague soldier beetle, and a red beetle I sometimes see in the high country, are two beetle equivalents of fool’s gold. After the initial excitement of finding them on the water, comes the slow realisation that the trout are only eating them occasionally, or not at all. In the case of the soldier beetle, CSIRO notes state that its ‘bright colours… are a warning… as they exude a white viscous fluid from their glands that repels any predators thinking of getting too close.’

Hoppers

Do grasshoppers provide the cream of stillwater dry fly fishing with terrestrials? That would be a big call over jassids and gum beetles, but we all love fishing a big dry, and once the hoppers are about, lake trout don’t forget them easily.

The challenge with hoppers is, the dry heat of summer which really gets them hopping, can correspond to lower water levels, plus elevated water temperatures which can discourage surface feeding. This may restrict the best hopper fishing to alpine lakes, and to waters where there isn’t too much distance between the grass and the water – in other words, a limited littoral scar.

However, there are some tricks you can use to reduce the temperature issue, and the impact of a wide littoral scar. In both cases, steep banks are your friend. A steep drop to the water increases the chances of a leap by the hoppers going wrong (for them), especially with the aid of a decent offshore wind. Meanwhile, deep water in close means trout in cooler water at depth, can still swim through the warm surface water to eat off the top and back down again, with minimal exposure to risky temperatures.

The final point to make is, if there are active hoppers about (or there have been in the last few days), the trout will know what they look like to the extent they will come from nowhere to eat an artificial. So, although seeing rises or polaroiding fish will always be handy, if you can hold your nerve, fishing that hopper blind along a likely shore, will often work.

Jassids

I spent most of my fishing life thinking of jassids as a once-a-decade miracle, rather than anything regular or reliable. The larger red and black jassid remains in that class: absolute trout candy, but something I’ve encountered only a handful of times in my fishing life. In more recent years though, I’ve been introduced to the much smaller cinnamon jassid. The last two years running in the Tasmanian highlands, we’ve found millions of these jassids on several lakes with forested shores. Though not much bigger than a fat matchhead, the trout busily eat them – and fortunately, they will also eat a small dry like a size 16-18 Red Tag, foam beetle, Possum Emerger or parachute Adams if it’s placed right in front of one. The meandering path of rising fish can make this difficult, but persistence will be rewarded.

So, are abundant cinnamon jassids two years in a row an ecological blip, or a sign of something more regular? Time will tell, but in the meantime, in recent years, we’ve also occasionally found cinnamon jassids – and trout rising for them – on the mainland. Worth keeping in mind.

Termites and flying ants

While the former are more common than the latter, both bring the trout up like few other terrestrial insects. Usually appearing from mid-spring through to mid-autumn, calm, thundery conditions favour both, while light to moderate smoke from burn-offs or bushfires seems to help flying ant falls. But either insect can surprise – I’ve seen massive ant falls on flat, full cloud days, and termites late on calm, clear and mild afternoons.

Finding the rising fish is one thing; catching them is another. Usually, the angler’s enemy is the sheer number of insects, and their diminutive size. Like the cinnamon jassid feeders above, ant and termite feeders can wander at random through the slicks of food, making the necessarily pin-point presentations hard to pull off.

While there’s no escaping the need for ‘on the button’ casts, fly selection is more of a variable. Sometimes a deliberately larger ‘footprint’ fly like a Claret Carrot seems to do best; at other times, I can’t go past a more imitative Fulling Mill CDC Ant.  The CDC Ant has extra value through being remarkably visible: with ants and termites, you just have to know which fly is yours in the sea of naturals.

Generalist dry

Aside from when trout are being attracted to the surface by the presence of a particular insect or insects, they’ve evolved to look up for food – at least a lot of the time. Even in the depths of winter, you can often observe trout in lakes respond to the ‘plop’ of a wet fly landing, despite the fact that in the real world, few winter food options falling from the sky are large enough or heavy enough to do that. Unless there’s a really decent subsurface option which the trout can afford to devote all their attention to, chances are they’ll have one eye, so to speak, on what’s happening above.

This ‘surface alertness’ can be used nearly all year on lakes, by fishing generalist dry flies which disturb the top. The best options are flies which are sufficiently buoyant to be drawn across the water without sinking – or if they do sink, they bob straight back up again. My favourite is Mark’s beloved Claret Carrot, but many other flies can be employed to perform the same function, such as Sedgehogs, Bibio Hoppers; even a well-oiled Possum Emerger. Besides a willingness to float (or almost), the only other requirement for these flies is they look buggy – whatever that means! Fishing a team of these dries is another option, or perhaps adding a barely-buoyant emerger-style fly off the back.

Switch on

As with any form of flyfishing which relies upon your eyes and ears, rather than feel, you must stay switched on to fish terrestrial dries on lakes. When you’re targeting a particular trout, your casts must be accurate and perfectly timed. And when fishing your dry ‘blind’, you’ve got to be ready for a take from nowhere, and then build in an appropriate pause and lift, rather than a panicked rip. (Readers may be relieved to know that I am hopeless at this – at least for the first or second ‘blind’ rise. It’s certainly a case of do as I say, not as I do!)

Regardless, it’s all great fun, and given the right conditions, fishing terrestrial dries works all the way from sea level to the highest alpine lakes – and more often than you might think.