Originally Posted by
Bill Hedden
Bruce,
I have fished flies for muskies and spent quite a bit of time fishing with a partner who was flyfishing exclusively, and I have a few thoughts. First, and if you are the only fisherman in the boat this is irrelevant, but if you are fishing with a partner then both of you should fish flies together. Otherwise, the difference in casting length makes it very hard to put the boat in the right place relative to the structure. My fishing buddy was casting a spey rod 100' but if I put him in the right place I felt like I was crammed on top of the fish and making pooch casts all day. If I set up the boat for my casts, he couldn't reach the sweet spots. Second, though you are casting big, wind resistant flies in a place that is often windy, you probably want a relatively short rod (8'6" or so), because you need to do boatside maneuvers with flies just like with baits. That gives you your best chance to actually have a successful hook set since the fish takes at the boat and turns off so the hook can hit them in the corner of the mouth and get stuck. If a fish takes from behind as you are stripping in a fly, it is terribly difficult to to make a successful hook up. I vividly recall being on Snowshoe Point with Cal and a nice fish took my friend's fly about 35 feet from the boat. He hit it so hard that I thought his rod would break and, indeed, the fish struggled on the line for a few seconds while Cal and I cheered, and then the fish simply looked at us and opened its mouth and let the fly go. It wasn't hooked at all. In sum, flies are a lot of fun and you should surely catch some big pike if you work at it, and they might provoke a muskie when nothing else is working, but everybody in the boat is fully involved in flyfishing and needs to be bought in to the process; and you often hook them at boatside, just like baitcasting. One thing for sure: you can be very proud of any big muskie you catch on a fly.
Bill
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