Fly selection for the Little and Great Miami Rivers

Well it's that time of year. Time to venture out once in a while after saugers but mostly just wish for spring. And tie flies. I tell you what I do. I hit the Orvis store at the Dayton Mall and try to reverse engineer some of their flies. To me they have the best smallie fly selection around and some weirdly cool flies you just can't find anywhere else. Like for example my favorite crayfish fly, May's Clearwater Crayfish.





I love this fly. It has everything I'm looking for in a crayfish fly. Good color. It sinks like a rock. Rubber legs for movement. And only the suggestion of claws. Study after study shows smallmouth prefer crayfish with little claws, or no claws for that matter. This guy is pretty close to the perfect crayfish fly in my book. I fish it on a short line, usually across and down in riffles and runs.

Other flies I fish in this manner are weighted stonefly nymphs and two other weirdly wonderful flies, the Conehead Rubber Bugger and Shultzy's Red Eyed Leech. I think both the rubber bugger and the Shultzy look a little bit like a whole slew of stuff smallmouth are looking to eat in runs and riffles. They slightly resemble everything from a darter to some kind of big nymph to even a little crayfish. At any riffle on the Little Miami there's going to be a dozen kinds of little dark and rusty colored little fish in and among the rocks as well as a list of invertebrates as long as your arm. I think a smallmouth up on a riffle sees a lot of different stuff and isn't about to be as selective as a fish in slower water. That's why I really go for these generalized creepy crawly flies.



When fishing pools for smallmouth I try to imitate shiners more than anything else. Both the LMR and GMR have about a dozen shiner species and in most stretches of calmer water they are far and away more common than anything else. I like unweighted shiner flies because shiners are usually more active high in the water column and don't hug the bottom like riffle minnows and darters.



As a general rule I try to fish heavier weighted flies and darker flies the closer I get to the riffle and lighter colored flies the farther I am into the pool. This is in a broad general way following the pattern of the dozens of little baitfish in the river. But there are exceptions to the rule. There are so many variables that this only gives you a place a place to start. If the fish aren't biting don't be afraid to experiment. The food chain in smallmouth streams is more complicated than that of just about any other kind of water. If someone tells you they know exactly what's going on down there at any one time, you know just how little they do know. Sometimes we catch fish in spite of our best theories. We think we are catching smallmouth feeding on crayfish and they are actually feeding on rainbow darters flushed out of the rocks by crawfish too big for smallmouth to eat. Or any of a hundred other scenarios that might be going on at any given time.

And of course you have to have some topwater flies. This is stream fishing at it's very finest. I throw deer hair bugs a lot just because I have a huge supply of deer hair but a sneaky pete might be a better choice if your only going to buy or tie one. A sneaky pete lets you you fish the slicks in the tail of pools without getting waterlogged like a deer hair bug but is just as effective as the deer hair in quiet water. Some days a deer hair bug or sneaky pete can simply be deadly. Another fly I fish on the surface is a marabou muddler. I know its a streamer but dressed with just a bit of floatant it fishes in the film. I call it fishing it soggy, not wet or dry. Its exciting just like topwater fishing and just as visual.