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Loch style fly fishing is fly fishing over the lee side of a boat with the wind at your back with the boat side onto the wind, using a system incorporating one or a number of flies. It is a technique that is well suited to individual or teams of flies and has applications for both surface presentation of one or more flies right down to dredging the depths with fast sink lines and shooting heads.

Related articles:
Loch style fly fishing – the basics
Loch style fly fishing – fishing static wets on floating lines
Loch style fly fishing – fishing blobs and squirmy worms on floating sink tip lines
Loch style fly fishing – booby pumping
Loch style fly fishing - fishing the bung

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On almost every still water you will experience at some time that the fish have retreated to the deeper water and are just sitting there or mooching around there sulking or feeding.

Trout do this for various reasons including:

1) To get away from fishing pressures. In competitions this typically happens in the later sessions. If you are employing this system in the later part of a competition I also suggest that you use smaller and/or less flashy flies than the flies that worked in earlier sessions in the competition.
2) Fish have moved deep to feed. Typically this can happen when trout are feeding on blood worms and several other food sources or when they are feeding on daphnia. On sunny days clouds/colonies of daphnia typically move up in the water columns but as it clouds over they quickly move deeper.
3) Changes in barometric pressure.
4) Changes in wind direction.
5) To avoid cormorants and other predatory birds of prey.
6) If spooked by surface activity.
7) Sudden changes other weather conditions.

In any case when fish are deep and sulking or even feeding they can be hard to catch.

The system set out below has worked for me in competitions in various parts of the world and at home in the Snowy Mountains of Australia as well as in competitions in other parts of Australia.

The gear

This is just one of the styles of loch style fly fishing that I use. The rod selection and leader set up is the same as set out in my article ‘Loch style fly fishing – the basics’.

The best lines for this system are full sink lines from say type 5 to 8 that are density compensated and therefore sink at a relatively uniform rate along the full length of the line whereas sweep lines are not density compensated and consequently sink fastest in the middle which make them unusable for this system of fly fishing.

I generally start with a Type 5 or Type 7 fly line with the final selection being determined by the expected speed the boat drifts, the depth you expect the fish to be holding at as well as your count down and retrieve.

The Technique

For maximum success you have to make long casts for this system to have enough time for your flies to reach the desired depth and then allow enough time for you to make a relatively horizontal retrieve of you line through the holding water. If you’re not casting far enough then what happens is that, because your boat is drifting roughly in the direction of where you cast your flies, your flies may not sink deep enough to get to where the fish are holding or that whilst you reach the desired depths because you boat has caught up with your flies what your doing is retrieving your flies at an angle or even vertically taking them out of the holding water.

My recommendation is to recognise the limits of the depth that your casting ability will allow you to fish and not to fish beyond those limits. It is much better to fish water 20 plus feet deep well using other loch style techniques that don’t require long casts than to spend all of your time snagged or tangled.

So, make a long cast, for count downs above say 10, wiggle extra line out the tip so that the cast line can pull that out that extra line as the cast line sinks rather than the flies being pulled toward the boat as the cast line sinks. Plunge the tip of the fly rod deep down deep into the water so that the tip is facing the bottom of the lake. This will help your line sink. I generally fish three flies of similar weights (for example three 2.0 to 2.5mm tungsten bead head damsels) with this system. Count the line and flies down to the desired depth which ideally is just above the bottom structure, in the thermocline where fish may be holding or where fish may be feeding.

Keeping you line and flies close to the desired depth actively working for as long as possible is the key to this system The quicker you can get your line and flies down to the desired depth the better chance you have of achieving that.

At the end of the count down, when the line reaches the desired depth, start your retrieve. I generally start with a medium pace short strip that picks up around only 30cm of line for each strip. If that is not working vary your retrieves including faster or slower strips, slow or fast rollie polly and even long draws or hand retrieves.

If as your retrieving you do sense that your line of flies are touching bottom progressively lift you rod tip up toward the surface. This will bring you line and team up at the same time.

Know the sink rate of your fly lines. One line will not fit all situations. For me a good rule of thumb is to choose a sink rate that will get your flies into the zone in say 10 to 20 seconds. So for Type 5 with its intrinsic sink rate of 5 inches per second a countdown of 20 seconds should put the fly line, with no other influences, to around 100 inches below the surface. Plunging you rod tip and fishing three evenly weights flies will give you a little extra so that is a combination I would use for water of around 4 meters deep. If the water is 5 meters deep a Type 6 would be a better option and for water 7 meters or deeper I generally go for a Type 7. The maximum count down you can achieve will always be a function of your sink rate and the drift speed of the boat.

If you do start hitting bottom structure with your combination of fly line and count down, minus a couple of seconds of seconds off your countdown to ensure that the flies are working without risking getting snagged up along the desired depth within vision of the sulking or feeding fish. If you know there are fish there and you’re not getting bumps then it’s worth varying your countdown to ensure that the bottom has not dropped away or the fish have not moved up or down for example following a daphnia cloud/colony, leaving you flies above or below the fish holding zone.

If you have an accidental shorter cast, which we all do from time to time, fish that out at higher levels just as a tester to ascertain if the fish have moved off the bottom or up in the water column.

As the water depth gets deeper you will need to increase your countdown and of course as you drift over shallower water you will need to decrease your count down. You may also have change fly lines to different sink rate to accommodate deeper or shallower depths.

Hooking the fish

When I get a bump, unlike other fishing systems, I find it best to either strip strike or continue the retrieve and allow the fish to basically hook itself rather than striking with the rod which takes the fly or flies out of the zone.

Summary

As long as it’s not too windy the ‘fast sink lines for deep sulking or feeding trout’ system described above provides a way that you can present moving flies that may induce a strike to fish that may or may not be actively feeding but are holding in deeper water.

An alternative system you can consider for deeper water is fishing static wets on a floating line or a floating line with a sink tip. These floating line options are more reliant on fish basically find your fly and works very well when fish are deeper but still actively feeding.

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