Bernd Ziesche | Wednesday, 15 July 2020
When fly fishing for asp I quite often see the asp hammering right into small or medium sized schools of baitfish. Pretty clear, imitating such schools of baitfish is THE key to success!
But how do you imitate a school of baitfish? I have tried several different strategies. Since I often want to make a quick presentation when seeing the asp moving near the surface, proper castabilty of my flies always is quite important.
Yet my best strategy is to put 5 or 6 flies in a row. I use the surgeon's not here. Very important is to add a proper shock absorber, since many knots in the leader lower the breaking strength of course. It's smart to have the heaviest fly to the end of the leader. This helps to avoid the leader to crash casting wise. The other flies should vary in weight, because this keeps them from moving exactly in a row, but starting to sink different on every strip stop. Such a setup was key to success in a fair number of situations! Last week I caught quite an excellent asp on it. Another even bigger one I landed on my multi action fly.
Yes, fly fishing for asp is all about presenting your fly in highest possible action or imitating a school of baitfish. Without these strategies in your tool box very often you are out of the game even though the asp may hunt baitfish like crazy just in front of you. I have been there often within my first years of fly fishing for asp.
Besides chasing asp all week long I was teaching fly casting. Also I was guiding for an hour and my client managed to catch his first asp on fly right after the casting lesson.
All in all I didn't do anything else but fly fishing. Brilliant week! ;)
Great fly fishing week to all of you!
All my best
P.s.: When fishing several flies in a row, it's smart to remove the fish carefully. If he starts shaking you easily may end up hooked in one of the other flies as it happened to me these days. Oh, and you may want to remove all barbs in advance! ;)
Some pictures of the last days...
