Fly fishing in Iceland: A Frances or something else?
The Black Eyed Prawn variety of the Frances. Photo by Heimir Óskarsson.
Looking at the statistics you would without doubt come to the conclusion that the Frances is by far the best fly used on Icelandic rivers. It is logical as the Frances, most often the red one, and quite often the black one as well, take the top spots almost all the time. But is it the best fly or merely the most used fly?
It is obviously a very, very good fly, one that a huge number of anglers place most of their trust in. So trusted is it that it is the fly very many anglers try first. This is crucial as the first fly is often the fly taken by a volatile salmon. But looking at the statistics for Hitara for instance, the main beat had 737 salmon caught on fly. The top producer was the red Frances with 162 salmon and second came the black Frances with 116 to its name, 278 combined! Looking at the Andakilsa statistics out of 603 salmon caught on fly, the red Frances accounted for 86 while the black one weighed in with 82, a combined total of 168!
The red Frances.
Once, fishing the Midfjardara we had the chance to establish if we would have been doing better or worse using a different fly. We had two pools in our sights, a mere several paces apart, slow running cut bank pools and both of them full of fresh run grilse.
The Ally's Shrimp. Photo by Einar Falur.
We decided to try the red Frances on one of the pools and an Ally’;s Shrimp on the other. The red Frances was a silver treble size 12, the Ally’;s Shrimp a black treble number 10. We used a floating line and fished with a traditional dead drift.
The outcome: On each pool we fished for about two hours, hooked six and landed three. Totally identical statistics. Of course we will never know what would have happened had we used other flies or switched flies at some point. But at least we dispelled the theory that one must use a red Frances in order to catch fish.
