Salmon flies

Salmon Flies - Hook Based Flies

Salmon flies come in all shapes and sizes and vary accoring to hooks, salmon single hook flies, salmon flies and salmon treble hook flies. Depending where you are fishing and the club or water rules you may be allowed to use salmon doubles or trebles or may not. More waters are restricting the types of hooks for the benefit of the salmon. 

Salmon Flies - Tube Flies

One of the most successful and flexible salmon fly fishing method is undoubtedly using tube flies. Salmon tube flies can comprise aluminium salmon tube flies, copper salmon tube flies (which have more weight to go deeper faster) or nylon salmon tube flies which stay closer to the surface. There are then modern tube fly systems like Tubeology which are even more flexible allowing you to take a aluminium salmon tube fly to the water and interchange heads for hot spot colour and size / weight allowing the same salmon tube fishing fly to vary the depth and spped at which it descends in different parts of the salmon pools. Salmon tube fly patterns vary from traditional flies like green highlander through modern flies like pot bellied pig tube flies and the ultra mobile sunray shadow tube flies and monkey tube flies using materials like cashmere goat for maximum movement.

Salmon Flies - Size & Use

Salmon Flies - General

Remember the salmon stops eating when it moves into fresh water from the sea to breed, it is literally dying to reproduce until it is able to return to the sea and vast quantities of salmon die in the act of reproduction.  Because of this we are not catching salmon because it wants a fly as food like the Rainbow Trout but because we are stimulating its predatory nature. We can trigger the salmons predatory nature using imitative flies like Ally's shrimps designed byAlistair Gowans known as Ally Gowanswhich unsurprisingly resemble shrimp based patterns or the red francis which using boar hair again looks like a shrimp through to modern flies like sunray shadow tube flies and monkey tube flies using materials like cashmere goat for maximum movement producing ultra-mobile flies which may look like a small fish to the predatory salmon.