The Best Flies for Rainbow Trout

The best flies for rainbow trout are bead-head nymphs, and the 54-piece assortment with San Juan worms and egg patterns is the kit to buy — because it is the only one here that includes the two patterns stocked rainbows eat most readily. If you want to go all-in on the highest-percentage approach, buy the nymph-only box and accept that you will be fishing below the surface.

Rainbow trout are the most widely stocked trout in the United States and the fish most anglers learn on. They are also the species where received fly-fishing wisdom — match the hatch, fish the dry — is furthest from what actually catches them.

How rainbows actually feed

Below the surface, most of the time. Trout take the overwhelming majority of their food subsurface, because that is where the overwhelming majority of it is — nymphs drifting in the current, not adults on the film. A nymph fished at the right depth is simply a higher-percentage fly than a dry, on most days, on most water.

Rainbows hold in faster water than brook or brown trout. They will sit in the seam of a riffle where food is delivered fastest, which means your fly has to get down quickly in a short window. That is why bead heads matter: weight at the front of the fly is what gets it to depth in a four-foot drift.

And they are aggressive, which is useful. A rainbow will chase a stripped streamer in a way a brown trout often will not, so when you cannot find fish, covering water with a Woolly Bugger is a genuinely productive search method rather than a desperate one.

The five flies that matter

Two of each in two sizes is twenty flies and a complete box. The storage options are in the fly box roundup; the honest cost tiers across assortment and hand-tied flies are in the cheap flies guide.

Stocked rainbows are a different fish

Recently stocked rainbows eat shape and color, not species. They were raised on extruded pellets, so they key on roughly pellet-sized, pellet-colored items drifting past. That is the real reason egg patterns and bright attractors work on freshly stocked water and feel like cheating.

After a few months in a river they wise up considerably. Fish that have survived a season start behaving like wild trout: holding in better water, refusing sloppy drifts, and responding to actual insect patterns. The same stream can need two different boxes depending on when the truck came.

Wild rainbows are the selective ones. In clear water, a wild rainbow gets a long look at your fly and the drift has to be right. This is the one situation on this page where hand-tied quality and exact size are worth the money rather than a nicety.

Eggs and worms, and why they work

A San Juan worm is a piece of red chenille on a hook, and it is deadly. Aquatic worms genuinely live in river silt and genuinely wash free when water rises, so after rain it is an honest imitation of a large easy meal. Fish it deep and dead-drifted, not swung.

An egg pattern is a bead of yarn, and it works for two reasons. On rivers with spawning fish it imitates a real loose egg drifting downstream. On stocked water it looks like a feed pellet. Either way it is a fly that requires no entomology and catches rainbows consistently.

Both are the patterns purists leave out of their boxes. They are also the patterns that will save a day in high water in March, which is when rainbow fishing most needs saving. If you prefer imitating insects, the general trout selection is in the best flies for trout.

Through the season

Early spring: worms and eggs, deep. High cold water, fish on the bottom in the slowest seams. This is San Juan worm season and the time of year a dry fly is a waste of a drift.

Late spring to summer: nymphs all day, dries in the evening. The mayfly and caddis hatches arrive, fish move into faster water, and the indicator nymph is the method. Evening rises are when the dry box earns its place.

Fall: streamers, and eggs again. Rainbows get aggressive as water cools, which makes a stripped Woolly Bugger the fly of the season, and wherever other species are spawning the egg pattern comes back. Seasons and tackle rules vary by state and change — check your state wildlife agency. For brook trout, which feed differently, see the best flies for brook trout, and for the spinning alternative on the same water, the best trout lures.

If you fish spinning gear for the same fish. The best lures for rainbow trout covers the spinners, spoons and soft plastics that take rainbows in the same creeks.