“The indications which tell your dry-fly angler when to strike are clear and unmistakable, but those which bid a wet-fly man raise his rod-point and draw in the steel are frequently so subtle, so evanescent and impalpable to the senses, that, when the bending rod assures him he has divined aright, he feels an ecstasy as though he had performed a miracle each time.”

G E M Skues, Nymph Fishing for Chalk Stream Trout

I remember the first trout I caught on a nymph as though it was yesterday.

It was probably around 1980. I had caught some trout on a dry fly, usually # 10 Caribou Spiders which I purchased from Lemkus Sport in Cape Town.

There were days, however, when no rises were to be seen and certainly no rises to my dry fly.

The answer, I was told, was to fish a nymph and I was regaled with stories of how a change to a nymph after several hours of fishing a dry fly without success had led to a significant change in fortune.

I visited a member of the Cape Piscatorial Society who was known to be an expert in this mysterious discipline and he explained how I had to watch the line tip and when it hesitated I was to strike.

The problem was that I never saw it hesitate.

Then Dave Whitlock came into my life. In the early eighties he was one of several authors who made the arrival of each issue of the American magazine Fly Fisherman such an eagerly awaited occasion.

At the time, Whitlock was using a piece of red fly line threaded onto the leader about two metres from the fly as a strike indicator. I calculated that as I was fishing small, shallow streams I could move it even closer. For good measure I threaded the fly line onto some yellow Stren mono to make it even more visible.

I first tried this rig on a famous pool, Donkergat (Dark Hole), on the Smalblaar stream near Worcester in the Western Cape. When the strike indicator slowed down and it dawned on me that perhaps a trout had taken my unseen nymph, everything seemed to go into slow motion. Then, when I felt the resistance of the hooked fish I experienced a moment of elation.

I later developed a rig of my own which I am sure was not original but it worked for me. I would finish my leader with a piece of 4x Stren and tie a Perfection Loop Knot at the end of this section. I would then construct the tippet section of the leader, also with a Perfection Loop knot. I would link the two loops, put a small piece of egg yarn which I had pre-treated with floatant in the gap between the loops and trap it by pulling the two loops together. I used Mucilin to grease the leader from the fly line down to a few centimetres from the nymph.

Initially I used a Sawyer PT Nymph but, after reading Eric Horsfall-Turner’s account of how deadly a small beetle fished like a nymph was, I started working on sunken beetle patterns – and was very happy with the success they brought me. I described the most recent version of this “fly” on this website.

http://www.tomsutcliffe.co.za/fly-fishing/fly-tying/item/244-ed-herbsts-six-pack-of-flies.html

Click in Images to enlarge them

My Sunken Beetle

The beauty of this set up was that when I wanted to switch back to the dry fly I just slid the loops apart and removed the strike indicator. If I was fishing a small, low-floating dry fly which was difficult to follow, I retained the small piece of egg yarn which I usually clipped to about the size of a match head.

Competition fly fishing radically changed our tactics as the finest anglers on the planet constantly refined tackle and tactics and exchanged ideas.

I was reminded of this when I attended talk recently at the Cape Piscatorial Society in Cape Town.  The speaker was Korrie Broos who, in the past decade, has befriended some of the most famous fly fishers representing their countries in the annual FIPS-Mouche World Fly Fishing Championship and fished with them on their home water.

He first attended the championships as Manager of the South African team in France in 2002 where he made friends with a member of the Italian team, Edoardo Ferrero. In 2003 he brought Edoardo to South Africa. He fished with Edoardo in and around Barkly East and Maclear. It was an immensely beneficial trip for us. Edoardo brought home to us how important soft hackles were on our small, shallow streams and he introduced us the magical CDC fly, the quick-to-tie Arpo which he dried with tissues. Edoardo loved South Africa so much that later that same year, he brought a fellow member of the Italian team Pier-Luigi Cocito, (a double individual gold medallist in the World Championship who also garnered a bronze) to South Africa.

The Arpo

In 2006 Korrie brought out the Czech wizard, Jiri Klima (the most successful captain and coach in the history of the World Fly Fishing championship) who Charles Jardine dubbed the ‘River God’ and Karel Krivanec. Karel was manager of the Czech team for many years and also wrote a book on Czech nymphing.

Jiri Klima on the Smalblaar River with Korrie Broos

I spent a day with Jiri on the Holsloot and it was a fascinating experience. He used an 8 foot, two weight rod custom built to his specifications on a blank made by Harvest Tackle in Taiwan. Jiri constructed a leader with a dropper in about two minutes flat, using his outstretched arms to measure the sections and biting them off to save time.

The stream was low and clear but he used two micro-nymphs where I would have used a small dry fly. He used false casts to measure the distance to the target and dropped his nymphs with unerring precision. In the evening when trout were dimpling the surface taking midges he continued to use the nymph and when I asked him why, he just shrugged and said that was his preferred way of fishing.

Jiri later held clinics in Kwa-Zulu Natal and in Gauteng where his ability to take yellowfish in the turbid water of the Vaal River was a revelation.

Last year Korrie brought Pascal Cognard to this country, the only man to win three individual gold medals in the World Championship.

 Korrie and Pascal Cognard (Tom Sutcliffe photo)

Pascal Cognard delivering his lecture

I was unable to attend his clinics but everyone who did was amazed at his extraordinary skill and the thought that had gone into refining his tackle and techniques. On the Smalblaar, for example, he hooked a trout which, when he released it, took up station beneath a rock a few metres away.

Pascal casting on the Smalblaar (Tom Sutcliffe photo)

 Within a minute, Pascal presented the nymph again with a delicate curve cast that placed the fly a few centimetres upstream of the fish but without the leader floating over it. As the nymph drifted within millimetres of the trout’s mouth a delicate twitch invoked an instinctive take, leaving his audience awed.

Pascal with his  twice caught Smalblaar rainbow! (Tom Sutcliffe photo)

In early 2010 I asked Korrie to spend a day with me on the lower Molenaars stream so that he could demonstrate the use the use of the corkscrew mono  strike indicator which is also known as the Curly Q or the Slinky. It is usually made of red or neon yellow mono and it looks like a spring.

The Curly Q or the Slinky (Photo Korrie Broos)

At the time I was experiencing balance problems which I would later discover was caused by a plasmacytoma (cancer growth) in my pelvic bone, but Korrie was immensely kind and solicitous and he helped me to wade and move on uneven ground. The day was an eye-opener for me as he demonstrated techniques that I had never seen before, heard of, read about or could have imagined. He used a 10 foot, 3-weight rod and the Curly Q did not drift flat on the water as I imagined but was held diagonal to vertically with the bottom of the “spring” just touching the water.

At other times, depending on the conditions, he used the Curly-Q, dressed with floatant, like a conventional strike indicator. He fished each section of stream in a grid pattern guiding his nymph around both sides of virtually every rock and underneath the bigger boulders. It required more skill, dexterity and strength than I possessed but it was very effective.

I prefer to fish up the bubble line with short casts but I could see why such techniques proved vital in the closely-contested competitions at international level.

Korrie based his talk at the Society on a Jiri Klima mantra – “You must practise” and, to show what he does almost daily, he stood on one side of a table and on the other side he set up a simulation of in-stream rocks using a variety of objects, vases, books, rod tubes etc. He then practised guiding his nymph around each of these objects. This manmade stream bed helps you to understand and read what your indicator is telling you about the stream bed, river flow and the take of a fish.

He pointed out that any form of strike indicator caused drag because the strike indicator was drifting at a faster speed than the nymph, but said that drag, the right drag, could often assist in catching fish. For this reason a brightly coloured length of mono or the corkscrew/curly Q, incorporated in the leader is the preferred option today.

It was a fascinating evening and his reputation preceded him because almost three dozen people attended, an exceptionally high figure for such talks. The congratulatory emails he received later attested to the value of the information he conveyed.

Korrie guides visiting anglers and recently helped an American client to catch, on successive days, a yellowfin tunny off Cape Point and a 5 kg Clanwilliam yellowfish in the Cederberg mountain range a few hours from Cape Town.

When I started fly fishing forty years ago the best books available on nymphing were those by Frank Sawyer and Oliver Kite.  This changed from the mid-seventies when two books by Charles Brooks, The Trout and the Stream and Nymph Fishing for Larger Trout were published in quick succession. Then, in 1979 came Masters on the Nymph which was hugely helpful because it had chapters by experts from Sawyer to Schweibert and Nymphing, A Basic Book by Gary Borger which I still read with enjoyment today.

If you are building a nymphing library then a must-read in my opinion is an outstanding, pioneering book which never achieved remotely the recognition it deserved. Swimming Flies, a Revolutionary Approach to Successful Fly Fishing by George Odier introduced the concept of “high-sticking” which, in a slightly different form, is used in Czech nymphing today

Today we have outstanding and very technical books which draw heavily on competition experience such as Dynamic Nymphing by a member of the American national team, George Daniel. (You can order most of these books through Craig Thom at Netbooks/Stream X)

Korrie Broos on the Molenaars River Western Cape Province

Korrie, I am pleased to say is going to add to this lexicon with a book which will take a different approach. Its title is Nymphing: Secret Tricks and Techniques of the World’s Master Nymphers and it will have a chapter on each of the international anglers that he has fished with and what he has learned from them. They include -in addition to Ferrero, Cocito, Klima and Cognard - Carlos Baldesini, Stefano Cotugno and Vladi Trzebunia,who might not be familiar to you but are legends in the competition fly fishing world.

If you would like Korrie to hold a nymphing clinic in your area you can contact him on 021 5103756 or email him at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..">This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..