Tag Archives: salmon fly

Blackwater salmon

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Recent guided sessions produced some nice spring salmon from the Munster Blackwater river. This season the water levels have been quite high on our local rivers and fly fishing opportunities have been fairly limited. Luckily the weather has been improving and the rivers reached a better if not ideal fly fishing height, particularly in the upper stretches. As a consequence we managed a few very nice salmon.

My guests were using two outfits, one was a 13’7 Mackenzie Atlas rod matched with a Mackenzie Phased Density Shooting Head in Float/Sink 2 and a short leader to a White Francis fly.

The other client used a 15ft Mackenzie FX1 GRAPHENE Rod matched with a Mackenzie Float/S1 shooting head and attached to the business end was a local shrimp fly pattern called Hick’s Bug. The guys were blown away by this kit and when good fish came the were even more impressed.

So some very happy anglers and a nice tackle test was a great result. The river is coming into good order again after the latest flood so fingers crossed for some more action. Tight lines!

The Yeti Cascade

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All our Irish salmon rivers are bank high at the moment.  Of course eventually they will drop to a fly fishing level.  However, those fishing with spinning outfits are likely to have the first of the sport.  They can get their lures down really deep and they have the bling of those flashy blades to attract fish.  A client asked me to tie “something” for him that might also work, but he wants to fish with his fly rod.  So here is the Yeti Cascade!

Yeti Cascade

Yeti Cascade

The Yeti Cascade is a variation on the standard green butt cascade. The wing is black fox with Yeti Hair over.  I kid you not, the package said Yeti’s Moms Hair!!   I added a propeller blade to the front of the tube fly.  This thing really spins around in the water.  They are banned on a lot of small water stocked fisheries so they must be pretty effective.

Propeller blade at front!

Propeller blade at front!

I tied another version with some extra fox in the wing. Maybe the extra profile of this one will be better, it is difficult to say.

IMG_3747

IMG_3748

This client really likes purple flies so I also tied up a purple version for him.

Purple Yeti

Purple Yeti

Purple is very popular in other countries but you do not see it so much on Irish salmon flies.  Nevertheless it can be a very productive colour and I really like Irish shrimp flies with dark purple tails.