Retrieve: To Strip or Not to Strip
Retrieve: to strip or not to strip
Assuming you’ve picked the correctly weighted fly, and you gave the fish proper lead, the fly gets to the bottom quickly, the fish closes in, what next?
Read the fish.
If the fish accelerates, turns toward your fly and stops, he’s about to eat your fly.
If he does any of the following, he’s eating your fly:
- Hovers near the fly for 3 seconds
- Lights up
- Hunches his shoulders
- Goes nose down
- Flares his gills
- Opens his mouth
Keep your rod tip low (in the water or close to it). Make a long slow strip to remove slack and hook the fish.
Voila! He saw the fly and came for it. No stripping required. It happens more than you think.
If the fish doesn’t accelerate, change direction, or stop, but continues coming at you at the same pace and over swims the fly, he never saw the fly. Maybe the fly didn’t get to bottom quickly or didn’t land in his field of vision. Often, you’ll hear a guide say, strip, strip, strip. Rarely is that a “retrieve” technique, rather a means of getting the fly quickly from outside to inside the fish’s field of vision.
Some anglers employ this strip, strip, strip as all the time, trying to feel the bite with every strip. Strip, strip, strip imitates fleeing baitfish. Shrimp, crabs and mollusks burrow, crawl or hide. A better scenario is to stop stripping, let the fly drop and watch the fish come pin it down. Pinning it down also gives you a better hooking angle.
Stripping too far, too fast can turn bonefish off…. especially a big one.
