I went on a camping and fishing trip with my girlfriend this weekend. on saturday i was using an olive wooley bugger and did pretty well catching about 20 fish in about 4 hrs of fishing this fly has worked well all year so far on this lake. on sunday i fished again and in about 2hrs i caught only 1. i tried several different buggers, black, brown,olive with no luck. i tied on a brown wooley worm and all of a sudden every cast i either had a bite or caught a fish, on some casts i had several bites. i continued to fish for another hour until my feet got to cold to stay in the water any longer. what would the woolley worm imitate that the wooley bugger wouldn't?
i fished another lake that is close to this one last year, and a little this year, and i haven't ever caught a fish off of a bugger, but iv'e had great sucess with a wooley worm at this lake.
the wolley worm maybe just enough different to make the trout think they havent seen it a thousand times before.
i thought about that to , but this lake doesn't get alot of fly fisherman. there is a healthly population of bull trout, maybe the wooley worm looks more like a tiny bull trout than a bugger does.
Caterpillars? Ain't heard of a Woolie Worm in many years. May have been taking it for a dragonfly nymph . . . appears the longer tail of the 'Bugger was turning them away.
Chris were you fishing it like the bugger? I used a small yellow wooly worm with a black strip up the topside called a crackleback. It looks alot like the local caterpillars here. Super slow retrieve, fished on the bottom. Worked a few times, but then they got sick of it, or my poor ability.
I fished it with an intermidiate sinking line , but didn't fish it very deep i was in probably in 8-10' most of the fish seemed to be close to the surface. i used about two 2-4" strips followed by a short pause , but im not sure if it would have mattered what kind of retrieve i used.
