What happens underwater when you are nymphing?

Hello everyone,

Have you ever wondered what your fly and tippet are doing underwater while you are nymphing? Furthermore, have you wondered what happens to your drift below the water when you change the angle of your leader and sighter above the water? I've been studying these questions for a long time, but the most direct way to study what happens to your rig underwater is to see it with your own eyes, or at least through the lens of a camera.

In our latest YouTube video, our warehouse manager Justin Hart and I went to a very clear river to capture some underwater footage. I made repeated drifts with various angles in my sighter and Justin directed a GoPro to capture what happened to my drift underwater. Thankfully, what happened was exactly what I was expecting, though the footage was a lot more difficult to capture than I expected. Hopefully the findings provide some food for thought the next time you are on the river. You can watch the video by clicking this link or the image below. 

On another topic, for those of you who live in brown trout country, it's that time of year again when the brown trout are turning to amorous activities and trying to create their next generation. To help ensure we don't negate their efforts, it is our job to learn how to recognize their spawning beds (redds) so we can avoid stepping on them while we are out fishing. It's also important to realize that their eggs are in the gravel all the way until February or March in most places, so you need to learn how to avoid redds through the winter as well. To help everyone learn to identify and avoid redds better, I produced a video a few years back. You can watch it at this link or by clicking the image below. Hopefully it will help so we can all contribute to being good stewards of our fisheries.