As we head into mid-February we have seen the midge be the most consistent bug for under the indicator, but we found a few on leeches as well, especially when the waves kicked up. We have been finding the best luck on the larger profiles for both the midges and leeches, fishing dark colored leeches around 2 inches or so. In this size, the Pyramid beach leech or Rowley’s balanced leeches will do you well. For midges we have been mostly fishing the larger size 10’s and you better believe that our two tone midge in all colors has been putting them in the net consistently! Other good midge patterns would be Cat’s burnt end or the new Wright’s BBL midge in black/red or burgundy/red.

 

As fish remain all over the water column, we recommend playing around with the depth of your flies. When fishing a beach around 15 feet or so, we ended up doing best suspending our midges at 8-10 feet. That’s not always the case, but it worked for us this week at this beach. With the overcast days, the bite window has been good all day, with slightly better fishing around 9:00am when the midges emerge. We have also seen the strip bite get really good this week too, with a lot of fish caught on beetles in the afternoon, around 3:30pm, until dark, so don’t be afraid to put in some time on the single hander this week, the tug really is the drug with this type of fishing… It’s addicting!

 

We have noticed a good number of fish begin to cruise into the shallows this week, and it appears they are beginning their yearly pre-spawn behavior a bit early due to the nice weather. We will see how this storm changes this, but this is probably one reason why the strip bite has gotten good.