The Best Nymphs for Trout

The best nymphs for trout are a bead head Pheasant Tail, a Hare’s Ear, a Prince Nymph, a Zebra Midge and a Perdigon — and the 54-piece bead head box is the cheapest way to own all five. If you would rather buy one pattern properly than fifty-four roughly, buy Pheasant Tails in four sizes. And if your creek is a staircase of short, deep pockets, add tungsten Perdigons — they are the only flies here that reach the bottom in time.

A nymph is the immature, underwater stage of an aquatic insect, and an artificial nymph is a fly tied to imitate it. That single definition explains why this page matters more than the dry fly page: trout take the overwhelming majority of their food below the surface, and a dry fly only works during the fraction of the year when insects are hatching. A nymph works the rest of the time.

Why nymphs out-fish dry flies

Because the food is down there. Mayflies, caddisflies, stoneflies and midges spend almost their entire lives underwater as nymphs or larvae and only days as adults. A trout holding in a creek is watching a conveyor belt of drifting nymphs go past at eye level all day, every day. The hatch it rises to is the exception, not the rule.

Because a nymph works on a dead day. The honest reason to carry nymphs is that most trips do not coincide with a hatch. You arrive at eleven in the morning in July, nothing is rising, and the choice is to fish a dry fly on faith or put something under the surface where the fish are already feeding. On small water this is the difference between a blank afternoon and a decent one.

Because small streams hide their fish deep. Creek trout sit in the few places with depth and cover: a plunge pool below a drop, the slot under an undercut bank, the pocket behind a boulder. All three are subsurface lies. A dry fly skates over the top of them; a weighted nymph goes into them. The general trout fly selection covers the full box across dries, nymphs and streamers — this page is the subsurface half of it in detail.

The five patterns that matter

That is the entire list. Two sizes each of the first three, plus a few midges and a few Perdigons, is about thirty flies — one shirt-pocket box, and more subsurface coverage than you will ever need on small water. The box options are compared in the fly box roundup.

What is deliberately missing is more patterns. Stonefly nymphs in size 6, scuds, sow bugs, caddis larvae in four colors, and the hundred other things a fly shop wall offers are all real flies that catch real fish somewhere. On a brushy creek holding 7-inch to 12-inch trout, none of them beats a correctly sized Pheasant Tail drifted properly, and buying them is the most common way beginners spend money without catching more fish.

Size and weight beat pattern

Size is the first thing to change when you are being refused. Trout feeding on drifting nymphs are size-sensitive long before they are pattern-sensitive. If a 14 is ignored in clear water, the fix is a 16 or an 18 of the same fly, not a different pattern. In high or colored water the fix runs the other way: go up to a 12. The whole size system, and which sizes to buy for each kind of fly, is set out in what size flies to use for trout.

Weight decides whether the fly is fishing at all. A nymph drifting a foot under the surface over a four-foot pool is not being fished — the trout is on the bottom and has not seen it. The bead is what fixes this, and the material matters: tungsten is roughly twice as dense as brass, so a tungsten-beaded fly sinks in about half the water. That is why the Perdigon set earns a place in a creek box even though it is the most expensive fly here per unit.

Bead color is a real variable, and a small one. Gold and copper beads add flash that helps in stained water; black and matte tungsten draw fewer refusals from pressured fish in gin-clear water. If you are choosing between two otherwise identical packs, this is a reasonable tiebreaker. It is not worth buying both.

Barbless is worth choosing when it is offered. Creek trout are often small and often wild, nymphing hooks them deep more often than a dry fly does, and a barbless hook comes out in seconds with forceps. Several states and many special-regulation stretches also require it. Check your state wildlife agency for the water you plan to fish — tackle rules vary by state and by stretch, and they change.

How many nymphs you actually need

Thirty, and you will lose eight of them. That is the honest arithmetic of nymph fishing: the fly is designed to tick along the bottom, and the bottom is where rocks, sticks and roots live. A nymph box is a consumable in a way a dry fly box is not, and your buying should reflect it.

Which is the argument for assortments over hand-tied flies. There is a real quality gap — hand-tied flies hold their hackle and keep a sharper hook — but it is the wrong gap to pay for on the fly you are most likely to leave in a log. Buy the assortment box for your nymphs and spend the saved money on better dries, which live in the air and last for years. The full argument on fly quality tiers and cost per fish is in the cheap flies guide.

Fishing a nymph on a creek

Short line, upstream, no slack. On a creek you are rarely more than twenty feet from the fly, which removes most of the difficulty that makes nymphing sound technical on big rivers. Flick the nymph to the head of the pocket, lift the rod tip to follow it down, and keep just enough tension to feel the take without dragging the fly.

Dead drift is the whole technique. A real nymph has no engine; it tumbles at the speed of the current. A fly being pulled across the current at a different speed looks wrong to a trout and gets refused. Everything about nymphing — the mending, the rod lift, the leader length — exists to let the fly drift as if nothing were attached to it.

You will not feel most takes. A trout inhales a nymph and spits it in under a second, and on a dead drift there is nothing pulling. Watch where the leader enters the water: a pause, a twitch, a drift that stops a fraction early. Set on anything odd. The single most common mistake is waiting to feel something.

Add an indicator if you cannot read the leader. A small yarn indicator or a buoyant dry fly fished eighteen inches above the nymph solves the detection problem outright and costs you very little on small water. Setting the leader up is covered in how to tie tippet to leader, and a short rod helps more than any of it — the small-stream rod guide makes that case.

Through the season

Winter: midges, small, slow. Water in the thirties and low forties means fish on the bottom of the deepest pool, barely moving, eating almost nothing. A size 18 Zebra Midge drifted slowly through that pool is the only thing that reliably works, and you need to put it right on their nose.

Spring: everything, heavy. High cold water from snowmelt and rain, fish pushed to the edges, visibility down. This is Prince Nymph and Squirmy Worm weather — bigger, heavier, more visible flies, fished in close to the bank where the current slackens.

Summer: small and subtle, early and late. Low clear water makes trout cautious and makes 16s and 18s the working sizes. Mornings and evenings are the productive hours; in the middle of the day the dry fly often takes over, which is the one season nymphs are not automatically the better choice. Terrestrials dominate the surface in those months - see the best summer trout flies.

Fall: back to the Pheasant Tail, and watch where you walk. Cooling water brings fish back on the feed and the standard nymph box comes into its own again. Brook and brown trout spawn in autumn; gravel beds in shallow water should be walked around, not cast to. Species-specific selections are in flies for brook trout and flies for rainbow trout. The surface half of the same box is in the dry fly roundup, and if you would rather fish nymphs on a long rod with no indicator at all, that is euro nymphing.