I recently spent a couple of days fishing the Upper Rogue river in Oregon for late summer run steelheads.
This fishery is not your traditional skating dry fly or swinging wet fly steelhead fishery, but must -for best results- be fished with dead drift nymphing techniques. If you are not bouncing along the bottom, you have no chance, and the slots some of these fish hold in are deep runs.
These techniques were developed on the Rogue and Umpqua rivers and consist of a heavy duty strike indicator suspending at least six feet down a heavily weighted fly (often a stonefly nymph) with a trailing weighted or unweighted fly hanging on 18" of additional tippet off the bend of the first hook. The trailing fly is often an egg pattern, or an Eggo (weighted egg pattern), or a big beadhead nymph such as a Copper John or big flashback Pheasant Tail. All of this weight requires a big, buoyant strike indicator, and the combination is pure crap to cast. Classic Chuck and Duck.
You can see a collection of favorite Rogue River bugs at: http://www.rogueflyfishers.org/GoodFlies.htm
Which brings us back to the life preserver, uh strike indicator. Big corkies and yarn indicators stay on top about three seconds in this system...not the answer.
Scott Richmond recommends fluffing out 1-1/2 to 2 inches of poly macrame yarn and anchoring that to a small dropper on your leader. That stays afloat...maybe six seconds. *sigh*
Met a skilled Rogue angler, and he was using one of the 5/8" diameter foam strike indicators, fluorescent orange, shaped like an upside down ocean buoy. That seemed to work, but my attempts to locate some at the local fly fishing supply spots in Medford were zilch...they were all sold out, which should tell you something.
After returning to Bend, I went to the local sporting goods outlet. They weren't stocking ocean buoys, so I discovered that someone was marketing what I think is an innovative indicator design that would work well in this situation.
A little hard to describe, maybe a photo later. The thing consists of about a 3/4" x 1" cylinder of the kind of superfloating foam that is solid but has visible bubbles. Down the axis of the cylinder they use a drill or awl to form a space to insert something like a hollow plastic coffee stirrer. You should cement this in with Zap a Gap or Krazy Glue or Flexament, then after the glue sets, trim off any projecting ends of the coffee stirrer cleanly flush with the top and bottom of the indicator.
Then you find yourself some day-glo poly cord or at worst some egg yarn treated with Watershed or a spray waterproofer. Also find a needle or threading awl that has a needle eye large enough to thread the cord through with a piece of wire bent like a bobbin threader.
Thread on some cord, poke it through the middle of the side of the foam and push it through, making sure to clear the coffee stirrer in the center of the cylinder. You do this threading operation three times with three separate cords so that the cords being pushed through form a triangle around the center axis coffee stirrer.
Trim the cording or egg yarn to desired length, fluff it out, apply more waterproofing if desired.
To use, thread your leader through the hollow coffee stirrer, then plug the opening with a section of toothpick.
Try it, if you think it might work for your fishing.
Wes Wada Bend, Oregon
