14. How to set up a dry dropper rig. (14 of 21)

So one of my favorite rigs for fishing a dry dropper is a fly called the Chubby Chernobyl. It's a foam body fly. It has highly visible wings, and I use that as my dry fly. And then I'll tie a bead head and a Chubby Chernobyl will float or will suspend even a smaller bead head fly.
So it's a great fly to use in this kind of rig. So I'm going to just grab one of my high floating Chubby Chernobyls out of my box and tie it onto my tippet just the normal way. And then, I'll put a piece of tippet on the bend of the hook with a clinch knot. And I usually use fluorocarbon because it sinks a little bit quicker than nylon, so it'll help that nymph sink a little bit better.
So you can use…typically people use 5X, you could use 4X, or even 3X in heavier water or when you're fishing a big fly, or you can go as light as 6X if you're fishing a little tiny nymph. But I'll put on 5X here. And usually, your dry dropper is going to be anywhere from six to 20 inches can be longer.
But I'm going to just take a piece of 5X fluorocarbon and I'm going to tie it around the bend of this dry fly. So this one happens to be about, I don't know, a foot long, maybe a little bit longer. And then I'll take a kind of a generic bead head. You're not trying to scratch bottom when you're fishing a dry dropper.
You want it to hang in mid-water somewhere you're looking for fish that are looking up. And then I'll just put on a little Copper John. Copper John is a very popular fly size, 16 Copper John on the end and then you're ready to go. And that's all there is to it. A dry dropper rig.
So you can also try to get deeper with a dry drop arrangement. And you can put on a long like a five-foot piece of tippet. It's not easy to cast, but it can sometimes be very effective particularly when the water's deeper. So again, normally dry dropper is fairly short dropper, but you can go with a big dropper, a big long dropper and it can be effective.
So I'm going to try that. So now we got a fish on the nymph with the dry dropper. On the long dropper, went to the longer dropper and that seemed to do the trick. Probably just needed to get that nymph a little bit deeper.
♪ [music] ♪ And one for the Copper John. ♪ [music] ♪ Although you need a high floating, visible dry, try to make it one that's appealing to the trout for the season or for that particular river.
In June or July try a Stonefly imitation. In late summer, try a Grasshopper Fly. The reason for this is that, not only may you catch fish on the dry, sometimes if the dry is interesting enough, fish will rise up, take a look at the dry, decided not to take it but they might see the more subtle nymph and decide to eat it instead.
Oh, yeah, there we go [Inaudible]. So your dry fly is a lure, a strike indicator, and an attractor all in one. Well we're been fishing a dry dropper for about two hours, a hopper and a nymph and we got one fish on the nymph. And we finally got a fish to eat the hopper. So we've been waiting for the surface eat and ice rainbow ate the hopper.
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