Mornings began with hot coffee and a hot breakfast, followed by a fair walk along lush, green trails. By the second morning, the walk was spent visualizing the pool ahead, wondering which fly might take the first silver of the day, and hoping that fly would be attached to my leader when it happened. One day the silvers showed a definite preference for a black-purple bunny strip with a brass cone for a head (or, more simply, the "purple conehead"). One day the most silvers were taken on a pink-white bunny, and most days a chartreuse-white bunny worked best. While I caught salmon on traditional streamers and flies tied with synthetic hair, the best fly to use always appeared to involve a 2- to 3-inch strip of bunny fur. An all-black bunny would out-produce a traditional chartreuse-white streamer 4 to 1, probably because a slightly-weighted bunny hovers in the "agitation zone" longer.
The "zone" is an area extending 2- to 3-feet forward of the face of a salmon. Silvers sometimes respond to flies 10 or even 20 feet away, but it's rare. The fly has to drift into fairly close proximity, and even then it will be ignored unless given a twitch or unless the perfect amount of line is stripped a perfect distance. That distance tended to be 6 inches or less. Making silvers ignore the fly was easy. Just let it dead drift past their face, or strip the fly more than a foot at any point.
The leader was a homemade concoction (butt: 18 inches of 30-pound mono followed by 3 feet of 20-pound mono, followed by 3 feet of 15-pound mono and terminating in a 5- to 6-foot leader of 12-pound Toray Hard Fluorocarbon, which, by the way, has to be one of the toughest fluorocarbons on earth, surviving many harrowing runs through log jams at more than 30 miles-per-hour). I was using an 8-weight rod and a floating Cortland 444 fly line. Bring a sink-tip along, but you won't need it on the Rocky very often if you can throw a weighted fly. Use premium hooks with some bite. My best flies were sporting size #1 to size #2/0 saltwater styles. (Or, for a world-class case of frustration, you could try to land Rocky River silvers on cheap hooks all day. Your call.) Though most fly anglers prefer a weight-forward or shooting taper with weighted flies, a double-tapered line is actually a plus for small-stream salmon, which so often take the line into places you don't want it to go. A lightning-quick run under a fallen tree can badly abraid a fly line, making it difficult to cast. Nice to be able to turn it around and use the other end.
