Strikes on a nymph fished in this manner can occur anytime since nymph is floating drag free. Always follow strike indicator using this method, setting hook immediately whenever you see strike indicator stop momentarily in water or suddenly change direction. With practice, you’ll get a feel for what differentiates a “rock strike” from a “trout strike”.

Also, don’t be in to big a hurry to pick up nymph. You can let it float right down almost to your feet (within 5-10 feet), assuming you didn’t make too much of a commotion during your wading (thus scaring away all fish near you). Remember, trout will be facing against current waiting for their food to arrive – and you’ll be downstream from them. Thus, they won’t see you unless you make lots of noise to let them know that you are there.

The other reason you want nymph to continue floating towards you is because you want to nymph to come up from bottom of river a bit – which simulates an emerging insect. As nymph gets closer to you, simply raise rod tip a bit. This will bring nymph off bottom of river and put it in a gradual, but still downstream, incline towards surface.

Once you pick up fly, you will then want to wade just a bit to your right or left, then make another cast, allowing nymph to dead drift through another spot in river that is just a bit away from where your nymph previously floated through. By doing things this way, you can cover a lot of water in a hurry – in a very effective manner.

So, what’s wrong with this beginner method? A number of things, actually. First, only point this method is likely to draw any strikes is right at point where your nymph begins to lift off from depths of river. This greatly narrows scope of effectiveness of this fly fishing method; since vast majority of float of nymph is “wasted” (trout are unlikely to take a nymph that is careening at weird angles across a river).

Secondly, since point of strike will occur directly below you, you need to make sure that you are able to be directly upstream of this point. If, for some reason (and there are lots of potential reasons) you can’t get directly upstream of this point, you’re unlikely to get your fly there.

And, lastly, this method won’t work from a boat very well. This beginner method is mainly designed for angler who is fly fishing with nymphs from shore.

This page covered "beginners nymphing method", for lack of better terminology. While this method is an excellent way for beginner to get started in nymph fly fishing, there are better methods available.

So, let's look more closely at advanced nymphing techniques, particularly Dead Drift Method for Nymph Fishing.

The method listed above is an excellent method for beginner anglers to use when fly fishing with wet flies. However, there are a modifications of this basic method that will improve your fly fishing productivity and are not much more difficult to learn how to do. This page discusses several of these methods.