If you sling flies on a salt water beach in the state of Washington; you'd be remiss not to have the State of Washington Department of Ecology Aerial Photos website in your back pocket.

Browsing through the photos via their interactive shoreline representation will give you a bird's eye view of what the beach you're about to hit up looks like. Seeing the beach from above helps you understand the structure and layout of the land. When you can understand this; you understand where the fish are going to hold.

Keep in mind, while checking this site out, you'll want to orient yourself to which way the tide will flow at the time you'll be fishing the beach. This is important because some beaches will have great structure on an flood tide and nothing on an ebb - or vice versa.

Check it out here.

The retinal physiology of fish eyes allows for some degree of color discrimination but not nearly as much as the human eye.  Like humans, salmonids have rod and cone cells in their retinas, the light perception membranes in the rear of eyes.  Rod cells discern low light black, white, and gray contrasts.  Con es are color receptors.  Studies on Oncorhynchus mykiss (Steelhead) and other salmonids have determined there are far more rods than cones.  It appears that salmon do have a range of color vision that may be somewhat wider than humans in terms of wavelengths in the blue to ultraviolet range, but not in terms of acute color perception for most of the visible color range.  However, studies have also shown salmonids appear to have specific peaks in color perception for several specific color hues.  These peak perception wavelengths appear to be at 455 nanometers (blue), 530 nanometers (greens), and 625 nanometers (orange).The following table demonstrates this.

Table 1.1: Color Perception in Salmonids; Very Shallow in Clear Water

Color Wavelength (nm) Frequency (THz) Color Perception Range

From the above there is a striking difference between human and salmon color perception

Studies have also demonstrated that salmonids show a preference for blue under most background and light intensity conditions.They also show salmon are able to differentiate between subtle differences of shades of blue.  Conversely, salmon sensitivity to red is about 10 times lower than blue, then orange, brown, yellow and green in that order.   But what they actually see depends on a number of factors including the frequency and wavelengths of the available light, and turbidity (Cloudiness) of the water.

In any case, a full range of color vision is not possible below approximately 10 feet in depth in gin clear water, much shallower in turbid or cloudy water.  The red-orange-yellow side of the color spectrum filters out very quickly with depth, with the red side of the spectrum virtually disappearing at 10-12 feet in gin clear water and as little as one to two feet in turbid water where incident light penetration is greatly diminished.  Greens and then blues saturate deeper water landscapes with depth to about 60 feet in clear water.

Below 60 at best and possibly far shallower depending on water conditions, the blue side of the spectrum dominates.  If color is important in deeper water, then flies should be in those lower wavelength hues that given enough light penetration to be visible at depth. These colors are in the blue to ultraviolet range.   It makes ecological sense that salmon see best in the blue to ultraviolet color ranges as deeper water landscapes are saturated with these colors.

Studies also show that juvenile salmon and salmon approaching sexual maturity have a higher sensitivity to ultraviolet, below the lowest range of human vision, than mid-life salmon.  Further, salmon that specialize in feeding on plankton such as sockeye and pinks also have a higher sensitivity to ultraviolet ranges throughout their adult lives.  It has been postulated that this is because many crustaceans and other plankton species these fish feed on emit ultraviolet hues as a component of their coloration.

The significance of this for fly anglers is salmonids see best in the blue to indigo range, deep water colors.  Greens and oranges may take on some greater importance in shallow waters with green hues dominant over orange.  Florescence also makes these colors stand out where there is adequate light to make a substance to fluoresce.  This is possibly the reason that colors like fluorescent chartreuse are so effective in shallow water, as salmon anglers have long known.

In some cases, color may not be an issue at all.  Salmon most easily observe the fly from below.  This is especially the case when flies are fished shallow or on the surface (e.g. Miyawaki Popper).  Conversely, Salmonids cannot look directly down.  The position of their eyes, the shape of their head and mouth parts, and the ovular shape of the eye creates a large down looking blind spot.  They look out to the sides and up.  Where the fly is between the fish and the surface it is most often silhouetted against the sky.  In these cases the fish would most often perceive shaded to gray and black rather than color.

The bottom line is that because of they structure of their eyes salmonids see very little red, if they see red at all.  This is even in the clearest of water.  And, even if some salmonids do see some red, as a matter of physics red fast diminishes with water depth.  The same is true to some greater degree with high spectrum colors such as yellow, pink, orange and the like.  Try tying San Juan Worms in gray and black.  They may work even better.  Nevertheless, we fly anglers love our beautiful and sometimes colorful flies.  We should continue to tie and fish them if just for the aesthetics but also to peak our imaginations.

Richard Stoll is a biologist and environmental scientist. He can be found chasing chum, among other species,  all over the Pacific Northwest. Contact Richard here: rkstoll (at) yahoo (dot) com

"Many men fish to get away from women, but now they have to accept the galling reality that they can't escape."  -The New York Times, Aug 8, 1994.

Some call local chum fishing “picket fencing”, others call it “combat fishing”, but most call it fun fishing.

My wife, Ana, loves to fly fish.  She is most certainly not a Joan Wulff, the current Deaconess of the fly casting world.  But Ana holds her own.  Her graceful thirty to forty foot casts put many machoistic slap-it-on-the-water male fly anglers to shame.  When salmon are on our beaches Ana is often more hot to trot than me.  If she can convince me or a fly fishing girlfriend up she’ll be off to locations like Point no Point in a flash.

“It’s up to you if you what to come along.” She’ll inform me.  “But I am not waiting.  The tide is low and I have a good feeling.”

One November Saturday afternoon not too long ago Ana was after me to go picket fencing for chum salmon at Chico Creek.  Her justification was that the tides were right.  Well, maybe she was not so much after me as after a passel of new chum flies.  She does not tie flies too often, I do.  The point is she was ready to go and I had better get hot at the fly tying bench.

Fly fishing is considered the quiet sport for many reasons. There is no crowd cheering. There is no team mate to rely on or to disappoi nt. There are no rule book or playbook, only unspoken rules that most abide by simply out of the goodness of their heart. There are no television cameras and no score. It is only the fisherman, the water and the pursuit of the prize. Fly fishing is hard work, mentally and physically. There is much wading and casting to be done. As well, the fisherman is constantly strategizing on the next move up or down the river, the best place to place the most natural-looking fly with the most deadly cast. Fly fishing will challenge a fisherman in a multitude of ways; he must be a decent fly-caster, he must have knowledge on how to read the water to know where the fish will be holding and he must know what the fish will be eating at that time of the day. These reasons are the driving factors most fly fisherman practice this art. Fly fishing is more art than sport and requires much skill and patience.

According to William Radcliffe the Macedonians were the first to invent fly fishing around 200 A.D. They noticed trout from the rivers would hunt after a specific type of fly that is “not like the flies found elsewhere, nor does it resemble a wasp in appearance, nor in shape would one justly describe it as a midge or a bee, yet it has something of each of these. In boldness it is like a fly, in size you might call it a midge, it imitates the colour of a wasp, and it hums like a bee. The natives generally call it the Hippouros”. From this passage we...