Last year I spent a lot of time fly fishing and I bought many hundreds of dollars worth of fly tying materials of all sorts. I got pretty good at it, not to brag overly. But lately I’ve been doing more fishing with spinning reels. My favorite lures to use are crankbaits and bucktail spinners.
Are there fly patterns that can be tied (maybe slightly modified) so that they can be cast on a conventional rod? Is it possible to make a spinner (using maybe a piece of metal cut out for the spinning part) and tie it with colors and feathers in the fly vise? Are there any other patterns that can be used this way?
I see no reason why my fly-tying tools can only be used to make fly-fishing lures, when there’s a whole other side of fishing that uses artificial lures just as much. Any ideas?
Any fly pattern can be fished with a spin rod. Place a bubble float on your line followed by a swivel and about 4 feet of a light leader material and tie your fly on the end of this. Half fill your bubble with water and cast it out. Use a very slow but varying retrieval speed. This works best by far with dry flies, but can also be used with nymphs and streamer flies like wooly buggers in shallow water.
I use flies on my spin rod all the time. You can’t cast them nearly as far, but sometime it’s a nice option when I haven’t got a fly rod with me. Even the weight provided by a little swivel snap will give you the ability to cast at least fifteen feet, and sometimes this is enough.
The key for optimizing for a spin rod is probably weight; you don’t have heavy fly line to cast with; rather, you’re relying on the weight of the fly to cast. Heavier is probably better for this reason. Relatively large flies may be perfectly fine if you’re trying for bass, so don’t worry about keeping them small. Flies can work well if you’re trying for perch, bluegill, crappie, or sunfish.
This exactly, especially if you’ve somewhere you can fish that has smallmouth bass, because this can absolutely kill them in the early spring when there’s insect hatches but not a great deal of young of the year baitfish. Google **Jorge’s ** appropriately named “float and fly” technique for more information that you really wanted in the first place.