Bucktail fishing on Okanagan Lake

What a bucktail actually is

A bucktail is a streamer fly tied from the hair of a deer's tail. The hair is hollow, slightly translucent and does not absorb water, so when you pull it through a lake it breathes and flickers in a way that solid plastic and metal lures simply cannot copy. Tied long and slim, it reads as a young fish.

That matters on Okanagan Lake specifically, because the large rainbow trout here are not eating insects. They are eating kokanee and rainbow fry. A four-inch bucktail in the right colours is a very convincing young kokanee.

Why it is trolled, not cast

Almost every fly you have seen is cast. A bucktail on this lake is trolled, and the distance behind the boat is not a detail, it is the whole technique.

Big Okanagan rainbows near the surface are extremely wary of a hull passing overhead. Run a fly thirty feet back and you will not touch a fish all day. Run it two hundred feet back on a flat line, well outside the disturbance, and the same water produces. We commonly fish 150 to 250 feet of line, sometimes on planer boards to push the fly sideways out of the boat's path entirely.

Speed matters too. Around 2.5 to 3 miles an hour is the working range. Too slow and the hair collapses and stops moving. Too fast and the fly skips.

The season

From roughly October through April, the big rainbows come up out of deep water to feed near the surface. That is bucktail season, and it is the single best window of the year to catch a genuinely large fish on this lake. It is also, not coincidentally, the time of year when almost every other boat has been pulled out for the winter.

This is why our boat is heated and covered. The best fishing here happens when it is cold.

Rotating patterns

There is no one fly that works all winter. Light changes, water clarity changes, and what the fish are keyed on changes with it. On a charter we will run several patterns at once and rotate through them until something gets hit, then put more of that colour in the water.

Dark, high-contrast patterns like the Cop Car and the Dark Knight earn their keep in low light and coloured water. Pale, translucent ones like the Ghost come into their own on bright flat days. The Grey Ghost is the old reliable that has probably accounted for more big Okanagan rainbows than any other fly ever tied.

See all our patterns Trophy rainbow fishing

You do not need to know any of this to come fishing

Every guest we take out gets the flies, the rods, the line-counter reels and the boat, and Geoff sets the whole spread. Plenty of people who book have never trolled anything in their lives. The technique above is what is happening behind the boat while you are drinking coffee, and if you want to learn it properly, ask, because he genuinely enjoys teaching it.