The Fall River is one of my favorite places to go this time of year. I always joked they don’t call it the Fall River for nothing (in October and November….get it?). There are beautiful afternoons of dry fly fishing with BWO hatches, and Amber Caddis and Midges. Bring your light tippet for the best results. 7x will fool more fish than 6x. If you don’t feel confident with 7x pick up a spool of the Trout Hunter 6.5x and ease your way to learning to handle the lightest tippets. It makes a difference, and it takes practice to feel it, to tie a knot with it, and to land a fish with it. The 3rd part is the easiest, although I think a lot of people think that is the hardest.
That light tippet also plays well with the nymphs in sink rate, less drag, less visible to the fish and more fish to the net. Just don’t set like you’re in a bass tournament.
Nymphing is always a good bet on the Fall River, and no the fish do not always feed or bite well but can be enticed by a well drifted nymph or jig streamer. A couple of things to add to your FR box are Tungsten Eggs in Brown (yep) and MOP Flies. I was fishing a run between the Tubes and the Falls with a myriad of flies and there were 3 fish sitting mid river that were in a spot due to trees and deep water to get a dead drift over. I went upstream and swung a MOP in front of them and immediately hooked up. What was really cool was the hooked fish not only stirred up the other 2 that were laying mid-river, but swam quickly to the undercut bank below me and spooked well over a dozen trout out of the hidden undercut and the entire pool was chaotic for a moment. It goes to show you that those undercuts are important places for the fish too. An old friend of mine Tom Brasier used to quietly walk those cut banks with a Lead Eye Wooly Bugger and hit along the cuts with good success. That was in the 80’s and 90’s and he was tightline fishing long before all the modern techniques took hold. Pretty cool! These days we would probably use a Slum Lord or Sir Mix a Lot to do the same thing. If you tie flies, tie up some black lead eye buggers with a small or medium eye. Tom usually tied his with the natural *dull* eyes, although sometimes I saw him use silver ones.
I have a special place in my heart for this river as it is where I truly learned to fly fish. Not my 1st place to go fly fishing, but where I kept going back to week after week, sometimes day after day to practice skills I learned from the Doug Swisher Scientific Anglers videos called Strategies for Selective Trout and Advanced Strategies for Selective Trout. Find them on You Tube or Vimeo and watch them this winter. The more you know….