later in the day simon took out his two-handed fly rod and started swinging soft hackle flies
from the bank this is a deadly technique for catching trout and it's also a lot of fun
when you're looking at a river one of the ideal locations you can see above me here and kind of
below me here you're looking for water like this this is a really good typical soft tackle water
and you're looking for water that's moving because you want the current to swing the fly you don't
want dead slow water you don't want white water that's tearing down i'm just going to start with
a short line in here just get the line and the tip out and all i'm trying to do is cast my end fly
i've got two flies the second one tied off a tip it ring my point fly the furthest fly i want to
cast it just into the quicker water and then both fly swing out of that quicker water into the soft
water and that's why i like fishing two flies is you're covering a lot of water swinging with two
flies especially when you tie them off something like a tippet ring which makes it really easy
to do so now that's swung around i'm gonna go down a couple of steps and pop my fly back out and just
work my way down this inside seam to the bottom and that is swinging soft tackles on a spey rod
let's have a look at what soft tackles are so i've got a little box here of my kind of go-to soft
tackles for most river fishing i've got dozens of these boxes so i'm such a big fan and this
kind of gives you an idea of the array of flies there's some large ones and there's medium there's
average and there's micros and there's tinies but they all follow a theme and that theme is
they have a hackle at the front of the head that slopes back made of a soft hen type feather and
the idea hence the name soft tackle is that when you increase and decrease tension your hackles
pulse and give this lifelike movement and so this is a selection of type of soft hackles i have
these big ones i like to use as point flies when i'm searching now these ones are october caddis
type carlos so if the fish are feeding october caddis or feeding on the pupa and the lavas
in the water then i might put on one of these and then generally speaking you want to mix up
and always have a smaller fly my smaller flies might be something down here i've got some gray
ones i've got some ones with greenish body and grey hackles i've got some yellow ones here like
pmd patterns so you can simulate the hatches with the soft hackles you get the same kind of color
variations and that's a good thing to know because when you're fishing to rising fish with soft
tackles if they're rising on pmds well fish are yellow body one if they're rising on blue olives
fish one with an olive body you're gonna get a lot more success by observing that color scheme
if you like and if you don't know what those flies are just go by the color look at what the color
of the natural flies are flying around or lying on the water and pick something similar to that
all right that's perfect in exactly the type of audio fishing soft tackle
i think he's taking the larger fly on the point
decent fish
just one of the joys of fishing soft tackles is the grab the tightening of the line the
take oh he's a nice rainbow let's just get me to the slow water so we get him in
oh no he's on the small dropper a small blue winged olive soft tackle
see if we can get them in here
nicely done i'm cracking a little rainbow off the boat
look at that for a beautiful trout
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