Kelly Galloup talks streamer size and snake eating trout
Not that long ago fishing big, articulated streamers was either innovative or blasphemous (depending on your perspective). Either way, stripping big flies was a novel approach in the trout world. Now, it’s pedestrian.
Streamer fishing went from oddity to arms race seemingly overnight. One day (circa 2007 or so), woolly buggers and mickey finns were considered “big.” The next, trout anglers started buying eight weights so they could cast quadruple-articulated, gerbil-esque concoctions, cooked up through a performance enhancing stew of PBR and Copenhagen. Bigger streamers meant bigger fish—at least, that was the theory.
Turns out, the formula isn’t that simple. Shocker.
Kelly Galloup embodies and serves as the de facto figurehead for the streamer insurgency. He wrote the book on modern streamer tactics and has spent decades testing, refining, and occasionally abandoning theories around what moves big fish. We recently sat down with him to discuss the history and trajectory of streamer fishing and get his thinking on what works, what doesn’t, and how to consider size when selecting a fly.
Spoiler: smaller than you might think.
The arms race that didn’t work
It started with a few internet-famous fish on the White River. “About 10 years ago, everything had to be huge,” Galloup says. “A few fish were taken on these massive musky-sized flies, and everybody kind of followed the wave just went big, big, big, big. Somehow they equated big fish with stupid fish—that if you put a giant ham hock out there, they’re going to eat it.”
Even though Galloup is often credited (or blamed) for assembling the flock of streamer faithful, he was never an apostle of the bigger is better dogma. Not out of any sense of purity, but because he had already tested those limits.
“Before the book (Modern Streamers for Trophy Trout), we were trying flies that were 11, 12, even 13 inches, and we saw diminishing returns. I wanted the big flies to actually do what they should do. When I did the triple articulated dungeon, that one had a super day its first day—multiple giant fish. And then I went a week without another eat. It was just that day. I put on a five-inch dungeon and boom, I’m all over them. The bigger you got, you'd see swirls, but it takes a very rare fish to eat a 13-inch fly and possibly a really stupid one too, and those aren't synonymous terms.”
One significant hurdle with giant flies: fishing them effectively. “You couldn’t animate [a 13-inch fly],” Galloup explains. “You just couldn't keep up and make it swim. That fly’s got to move the second it hits the water. If it just sits there and floats down the river, they’ve made you. If you two-hand burn an eight-inch deceiver you might have a shot, but what an awful way to fish.”
That raises a question: if giant streamers aren’t fun to fish, wear out your shoulder, and don’t help you catch huge trout, why bother?
“In reality, I fish a lot of small flies,” Galloup confesses. “I'm there for the vision.”
In his opinion, seven inches is as big as you ever need to go. “I never saw a fish come on a 13-inch fly that wouldn’t have eaten a seven-inch fly.”
A good size, aka the “sweet spot”
Eighty percent of the time, he fishes three-to five-inch streamers. For trout, Galloup considers the optimal range to be three to seven inches, with anything over eight entering genuinely big territory. “Five, five and a half inches is kind of standard nowadays,” he says. “Seven’s pushing the limit, depending on the style of fly.”
Weight matters as much as, or more than, length. Galloup prefers lighter flies, be they thin profiled (like a peanut envy or flatliner) or broader profiled (like a zoo cougar or dungeon). Lighter flies allow you a range of retrieve options. You can burn them, jig them, stall them, jerk strip them—experiment to figure out what’s triggering the bite on that particular day. A heavy fly (like a dolly llama or a sculpzilla) becomes harder to animate and easier for a fish to inspect and refuse. “I like light flies that flutter,” Galloup says. “I don’t particularly like heavy flies.”
Work through variables
Galloup advocates changing flies early and often. “Never hold a fly for three minutes,” he says. “If you’ve passed fish, you should have seen fish. It’s nothing for me to make 20 casts and change the fly.”
He usually starts with a streamer around five inches and experiments with color, speed, and profile first. “I go white, black, olive, tan, and then yellow or chartreuse. It’s usually color that’s the most important thing to get [fish] to show,” he says, “but it’s your speed that’s going to trigger a [strike].” He uses three different retrieves—burning, jigging, and stalling—to gauge the fish’s mood. After that, he’ll experiment with thin and broad profiles in different sizes. He frequently runs tandem rigs with different patterns to gather information quickly. A five-inch dungeon paired with a slim three-inch baitfish pattern covers more variables at once.
When in doubt, go smaller, not bigger. “I never go big on the exploratory,” he says. “Every time I’m getting my ass kicked, I put out a number four zoo cougar and win. And it’s like, why didn’t I do that four hours ago?”
The snake eater…
Galloup tells an instructional, or maybe cautionary, story about one particular brown trout that lived behind his shop. “I kept seeing the same fish, a big brown, probably 26 [inches], maybe a little more.”
One day he was watching the fish, which looked like it was feeding on nymphs. “And all of a sudden he just goes crazy,” Galloup says. “Spinning in circles, rolling, like gator rolling.”
Galloup initially thought the fish was hooked on a stray leader. “He's right on shore flopping around, like six inches deep, and a three foot water snake comes running up the bank. And he had that son of a bitch.”
Two weeks later, Galloup saw the same fish again. “This thing just starts smashing his head into the rocks. He looks like he's trying to kill himself. A water snake comes out of the rock he's smashing, and that fish chased it out of the water. He dry docked himself. You know how you see killer whales do that? This brown trout did that with a snake.”
Of course, he had to try. “We did an articulated hair fly. I think it was 17 inches long, and we swam that snake forever. We fished it at night. We fished it during the day. We tried it on the surface. We tried it with a 300-grain sinking line. We never got a single fish to eat, but we had fun.”
The takeaway
For anglers who don’t live on the Madison River and spend every available day fishing, Galloup’s practical advice is straightforward. Learn to control smaller, simpler streamers before reaching for bigger, more complicated patterns. “Start with a fly you can see moving—a white fly, whatever—and learn that you’re moving the fly, not the current.”
Once you have the basics down, start with a medium streamer, have two profiles ready—one broader, one thinner—and scale down before you scale up. The instinct to go bigger when nothing’s happening is usually wrong.
“Don’t think you always have to have a big fly,” Galloup says. “Quite the contrary.”
“One of my best days on this river ever, we took four flies: a mickey finn, a royal coachman, a black-nosed dace, and a muddler, all size six. We wiped that river out.”
Coming from a man who’s made his career designing and selling modern streamer patterns, that’s significant. “One of the greatest flies in the history of the world is a woolly bugger.”
Kelly Galloup and the team at the Slide Inn have taken size in the fly fishing industry to new heights with the recent opening of the world's largest fly shop in Ennis, Montana. For all things Slide Inn, see them on Instagram or visit them online.