A Beginner's Fly Box for the Eastern Sierra

Walk into most fly shops and ask what you need for the Eastern Sierra, and you will walk out having spent a hundred dollars on forty patterns, most of which you will never tie on. This is the opposite of that. Twelve flies, chosen because between them they cover every water along Highway 395 in most conditions you will meet. It is what we would hand a friend making the drive up for the first time.

The four that do most of the work

If you only bought four flies, buy these. A BH Pheasant Tail Angel Hair is the most useful nymph in the Sierra and will catch fish in every river here. A Black Buzzer is the fly for Crowley Lake, where midges are the main food source all season. An Elk Hair Caddis in brown covers the most dependable hatch on the rivers and is easy to see. And an Adams Parachute is the dry fly that imitates nothing exactly and everything approximately.

Four more for depth and difficulty

A TG BH Zebra Midge in black is your dropper for everything and gets down fast. A BH Olive Hares Ear is the buggy generalist for when you have no idea what they are eating. A Czech Nymph in natural is the heavy one that reaches the bottom of the fast runs on the East Walker and the Owens. And The Green Damsel Nymph is the one that turns a slow Crowley morning into a good one when the damsels come off around midday.

Four to finish the box

A Wooly Bugger in brown is your streamer, and the fly to reach for when you want a bigger fish or the water has colour in it. A BL Bright Red Weighted Squirmy Wormy is not pretty and it works, particularly on the Upper Owens in autumn. A CDC Ant covers the terrestrial fishing that gets overlooked all summer. And a Sparkle Dun Male Trico is the small fly you will need on Hot Creek in late summer, where nothing bigger will do.

What this costs, and a note on sizes

Twelve flies at three dollars each is thirty six dollars, and because we run a buy eleven get one free offer, a dozen actually comes to thirty three. That is a complete Eastern Sierra kit for less than the price of two beers and a sandwich in Mammoth.

On sizes, the honest answer is that it depends where you are going. As a rough guide, nymphs in 16 to 18 will cover most situations, dries in 16 to 18 for the rivers, buzzers in 14 to 18 for Crowley, and tricos in 20 to 22 because there is no alternative. If you tell us which waters you are fishing and roughly when, we will pick the sizes for you.

Buy fewer flies, fish them better

The single most common mistake we see in new stillwater anglers is changing flies when they should be changing depth, and in new river anglers it is casting to the middle when the fish are along the edges. Neither is solved by owning more patterns. Twelve flies you understand will out fish a hundred you do not.

Every fly above is one we tie ourselves, and each ships with a tutorial for the water it is made for, so you will know how to fish it before you are standing in the river. You can browse the full range here, or email 395flyco@gmail.com with your dates and we will build the list for you. We would rather talk you into the right twelve than sell you forty.