I don't fly fish for salmon much. I've been skunked often enough steelhead fishing to know better than to fly fish for salmon on purpose. With the aforementioned qualifier, I have caught salmon of every species (even masu) on flies. Other than pinks and chums, which of course don't count, I think the best way of targeting salmon with flies (in freshwater) is to do it in Alaska where the damn things strike, as opposed to WA, where they normally don't.

What I think I've learned about coho fishing is that for every day the fish is removed from saltwater, they are exponentially far less willing to strike. So fishing for fresh fish is most productive. And in AK they will hit wogs almost as willingly as they will hit a stripped streamer. I intend to experiment more with wogs in WA, but haven't gotten around to it yet.

I don't know if fly pattern matters much, as I've caught most of my fly caught salmon on steelhead flies while I was steelhead fishing. If I'm targeting coho, I use a marabou streamer. If there's a better pattern or style, I don't know what it is. Most of my coho success has been random, and I attribute that to fishing too far upstream of tidewater for fish that were several or more days from the salt. When I fish for coho now, I look for fish that I think are no more than 24 hours from saltwater, and hookups seem to be more regular than random. I'm thinking that is the key factor.

Sg