Greetings and welcome to another video here on Fly Fishing With Jeff. In today’s video, I travel down 4-5 miles of the St Croix river in search of big bronzebacks …. smallies! While I catch a few on a popper, the real magic comes when I tie on one of my own reversed tied bucktail flies in a natural grey color.
As you will see and possibly even hear … I land three big smallmouth bass in succession just below an old retired dam that holds back tannic water. The water was 2-4 feet in depth and with the fresh entry of water and oxygen provided by the dam … the bronzebacks were up and active and willing to attack one of my streamers.
I am using a 7 weight rod with a sink tip one line; this line has a clear 10 foot section that sinks at a rate of a bit over 1 inch per second. This is and has been my go to line for many many years now. In this application it was the perfect line to help the bucktail fly submerge enough to get those big fish chasing.
I have discussed this before but I like to call this technique my over/under method whereby I have a popper and a streamer that resemble each other. With floating line, I use the popper in shady areas with not as much depth or movement of the water. With the sink tip line, I like to use this line along with the bucktail fly to ‘float’ the fly over the rocks just under the surface of the water. Often, if I get a hit with the popper and miss the take, I will quickly go to the streamer and often this results in a successful take.
Below is a photo of my fly fishing buddy, Duane, who accompanies me on many of these fly fishing adventures.
I hope you like the video and if there are any questions or comments please leave those below or you can reach me via email at flyfishingwithjeff@gmail.com.
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