I know you will all think I am crazy but I want to hook a chum on my 5 wt. fly rod. I am an extreme novice at fly fishing but someone gave me a WW Grigg 5 wt with an okuma reel. I have landed rainbows to 5 pounds on it but I have the desire to get my ass kicked. Just wondering what flies to use? Thanks.

Most anything big and pink, pink/white, cerise/purple, cerise/blue...and you'll have no problem hooking them.

Bring a lot of flies.

Fish on...

Todd

Chum candy works great but I always seem to cath more fish with variations of a Teeny Nymph; dark green, lime, purple, cerise... they usually aren't as picky about color.

In saltwater a medium speed one foot strip works for me and in a river I get them on the swing.

There is a reasonably good chance your five weight may end up a four piece.

Thats ok if it breaks. It was a freebie. Thanks

To the dismay of the purists here... you COULD also add a smear of shrimp Smelly Jelly to your fly as well.


Not that I would know...

What Todd said.

Chartreuse egg sucking leech's and pink/white marablobs are good for chumlies.

Silvers and chums overlap on my home rivers pretty closely. As a result, I wind up fishing over chums and weeding through them to find silvers quite a bit. Chums aren't usually bait (cured eggs) eaters, but when the bait starts getting washed out and looks more like skeiny flesh than eggs, you can't keep chums off the hook. Kinda interesting.

If you find them in the right mood, just about anything will work, but the aforementioned colors seem to be the best producers. I recall one time when I lost all the flies I had tied for chums (like Todd said, bring bunch, and then bring more) and all I had left was trout flies. Turns out a black woolly bugger looks just as good to bitey chums as anything else (or at least it did on that day).

Have fun!

Friends don't let friends fly fish for chums. But when they do, a piece of chartruese yarn on a hook works as well as anything.

I believe cerise will out fish chartreuse ten to one - usually. I have done several very nonscientific tests that have shown that to be true. Add a piece of prawn and both colors wok well. Chums are lazy. A dead drift will out fish stripping- usually

I like a small sparse fly. Size 4-8
Chartreuse, Cerise, Purple and Black all work well.

Crikey.

Looks more like a bonefish meal than a chumly lure.

Bonus points for...creativity?

You beat me to it. I was scanning to see if anyone else was going to say it.

Yes, you could. But why bother? In my experience of mainly trying to avoid hooking chums, I have never found them difficult to catch. Mostly they tend to get in the way while I'm targeting another species.

To the original poster: take Vedder's advice. My one small hardly scientific experiment occurred when I ran into a co-worker on the Satsop one day many years ago. He wanted to catch a chum salmon, I said I didn't but agreed to show him what I thought would work. As we walked along the trail to the river I spotted a piece of chartruese yarn on the ground. I leaned over, picked it up and tied it on a hook when we arrived at the river bank. I told him that chum like to hold in water, "like that over there." I cast and immediately hooked a chum, then another, then another until I was confident that my co-worker understood what to do. I left him happily hooking chums as I went in search of silver.

Sg

TBJ,

Please leave the 5wt at home and show these fishes some respect. 7 wt at least keeps them swimming away.

pink bead swung or dead drifted in the frog water on floating line gets them when the aforementioned fails.

Tom,

Let me know when and I'll go with you so you can borrow my back-up 8 wt. You'll bust the 6 or spend 30 minutes fighting them.

Bill

A little surprised by your "chums are lazy" coment. They seem anything but... considering they strike just about anything that comes their way, jump often when hooked and pretty much fight each other to the death over spawning grounds. I think "chum fisherman are lazy" maybe more accurate. Just sayin.

I have only used a 5wt on chum. At least partly because that is what I had. Worked fine on fish up to 10-15 # (scale weight) but the bigger ones didn't seem to know they were hooked.

This was fishing in smaller water like Kennedy Creek. In big water, like the Nisqually, Skagit, etc. the added streamflow and the ability of the fish to use it might overwhelm the rod.

As to flies, my best luck had been with green bodies with some mallard flank wings.

Really?

I don't know about all of this "chum are the best fighting salmon pound for pound" business. Between work and play, I net and release a metric shizzle ton of chum every year. Hundreds probably wouldn't be an exaggeration. I can't remember ever having seen one jump. I am sure it has happened, but chum aren't jumpers, they aren't runners, they don't generally go out of their way to put up an entertaining struggle. They sit in the current, shake their toothy gaping mouth, and they have decent endurance while doing so. I won't blame the annual chumathon completely on others. I accidentally hook a few while silver fishing as well. Outside of an ability to sit there for a while, I would say the struggle is marginal at best.

In terms of the quality of the fight, give me a silver or chinook any day of the week. If I wanted to play stationary tug of war, I would find a dog. Dog salmon. That is kind of ironic isn't it?

I, too, don't equate "takes a while to land" with "fights well"...as a matter of fact, some of the best fighting fish to be had around these parts take about 45 seconds to land, and those are native summer runs in Western Washington...cool part is how they spend 30 of those 45 seconds in the air.

Not badmouthing chums, as they are great for taking beginners out to catch since there are a lot and they are pretty easy to catch, but to call them good fighters would be a ginormous stretch.

Fish on...

Todd

Now a tuna is a fighting fish, right Todd? Impossible to land in less than 5 minutes.