CRITICAL FLY

UMPQUA SWIMMING BAITFISH - SHAD

Original Designer: Umpqua Feather Merchants

We brought a half-dozen of these streamers with us on one of the first float trips on the Zhupanova in 2003 and its been total mayhem ever since. Up until then the critical fly in that fishery was a simple black or purple egg sucking leach tied extra long with a stinger hook. The monster trout of the Zhupanova loved them, but they actually loved them too much and would instantly inhale the leach often to the point where the stinger hook was impaled deep in their gills. The result was completely unacceptable fish mortality and the purple leach was no longer welcome in the fishery. Walking the river one day we swung an Umpqua swimming baitfish shad across the fractured limestone bottom in the same manner we had fished the leach and KAPOW!; it was greeted with the same enthusiasm. And the fact that you can fish this pattern both subsurface and as a floating popper depending on the rate and style of retrieve opened up a whole new aspect of fishing for big 'bows in Kamchatka.