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3. Esopus River Nymphing

Hey, so I went to the Big E. last saturday, fished for about an hour and a half, caught 2, a small rainbow and a nice brown, probably around 11 inches. Used a 3 fly nymph rig w the coil, worked ok but im thinking that in some of the deeper runs, my flies were not getting down deep enough,negating the efficacy of the sighter. Of course, I could have readjusted by cutting and retying but My feeling is that a thinga ma bobber indy or maybe yarn that is more readily adjustable might be a better option for certain stretches of the E. where profound changes in depth can occur. Some of the holes were like 6ft or more in depth and when it gets the deep, I think a floating surface sighter wouldbe a better choice, what do you think?

I've heard about something called "strike putty(?)" that you basically glob onto your leader. It's supposedly easy to put on and off, but after a while it slides up and down on the line. Those foam sticky indicators are easy to take on and off too, but have the same problem as the putty after the adhesive gets wet after a while. I have been nymphing without a bobber this year. I know I'm missing a lot of strikes but I don't really nymph much anyway. I usually end up fishing emergers/soft hackles when not much is going on on the surface. I need to step my nymphing game up. Ha

Yeah, Ive talked to a few guys who do it entirely by feel, i.e., no indy, not quite there yet myself lol. My feeling is that even if you can have success nymphing entirely by feel, your still gonna miss some strikes, so, say you had a 7-8 fish day w/o and indy, with one on top perhaps you would have caught 11-12.

Definitely. I've seen underwater videos of trout spitting flies out so fast, there's no way a person could detect it.... Maybe even with an indicator

Yeah, I can confirm from my work with video that this happens all the time with real debris. Fish sample lots of things that aren't really food and very often spit them out within a tiny fraction of a second.

There is NO WAY youre ever gonna get them all lol!