Salmon chasing rainbows in Iceland
So salmon chase rainbows? Photo by Heimir Óskarsson.
In a small feature earlier we were speaking to Halli Stefánsson former fishing colleague of Joe Hubert about the real origin of the famous Black Sheep. Halli had some facinating news on the riffles hitch as well. Let‘s have a look.
Halli said to us: „I have always dearly loved fishing with the hitch. This is a tactic that I have studied along with Joe Hubert for long periods and we caught an awful lot of salmon while hitching the fly. You often hear anglers say that a salmon chased their hitched fly but then missed it. They are actually saying that the salmon has missed the hitch but the salmon in fact are not chasing the hitch itself at all. The reason that the salmon does not miss the hitched fly is because it is never after the fly itself!
When the salmon are in their juvenile stages they adapt to their surroundings f.eks by learning to monitor the aquatic life around them. Natural flies that sit on the surface are a part of that. When they move their wings, to fly away or change postitons, they send up a fine spray of water that the light pierces and produces a miniature rainbow. It is the rainbow that the salmon are chasing and attempting to grab. You could say that they are chasing rainbows!
Me and Joe often found ourselves a good vantage point from were we could observe how the fly, the hitch and the sprey worked together. We even attached matches to the leader instead of real flies so the salmon would not interrupt the research by hooking themselves! By doing this we found the salmon out and caught far more fish as a result. In fact we rarely lost a hitched salmon afterwards.
