Fly Fishing with Streamers: BIG vs SMALL - Which works best? (brown trout)

Which works best when streamer fishing for brown trout - big or small streamers? That's a question that I often ask myself as I go on my fishing adventures. So I finally decided to actually dedicate a day of fishing to answering this question.

WHAT I LEARNED: Small streamers give you a much higher catch rate but move much smaller fish on average. In some rivers or creeks where the average fish size is 12-14 inches that can be a good thing. You may not want to throw a big streamer just because the hook up ratio will be low and the odds of a very large trout are minimal. HOWEVER if you want the odds of catching a big fish to increase you most certainly want to throw a larger streamer. The bigger streamers tend to move less fish, and even the fish you do move may not get hooked. This is mostly because smaller fish struggle to eat the larger flies, and a lot of times trout will try to stun their prey before eating it. But if you're looking for a truly special fish then you're going to want to throw big streamers and sacrifice numbers.

The other takeaway that I learned (if you made it to the end of the video) is that streamer color is a huge factor when streamer fishing. In this case, I learned later in the day that throwing a lighter colored streamer was the ticket. Which in retrospect should have been obvious considering it was a sunny day. But after struggling to catch fish on the large streamer I finally threw a light tan colored circus peanut and caught the biggest brown trout of the day and by far the coolest fish I had caught. So you have to pay attention to all of the factors when fly fishing, and there are so many variables that can prevent your success.

I hope you guys enjoyed this video! I know I had fun making it.

#fishing #flyfishing #outdoors #nature #troutfishing