On this episode of the Fly Fishing Insider Podcast, my guest was Antoine Bissieux, a French-born guide who's spent 36 years fishing the American East Coast, from a stint teaching at the Orvis school in Manchester to guiding Connecticut's Farmington River today. What makes Antoine's approach different is how he learns: he set out to track down and fish with the ten most productive anglers he could find, and turned what he picked up from them into a research project he's still running. Two things from that research stood out enough to build a whole episode around: a curve-cast technique that lets a dry fly skitter upstream in front of a trout instead of away from it, and a leader formula built entirely around stretch.
Why Antoine Started Chasing the Best Anglers on the Planet
After years of teaching at Orvis, Antoine decided to stop teaching and just guide, which forced a hard question: what actually separates an angler who lands 26 fish an hour from one who lands 33? He started calling competition anglers in France, got turned down repeatedly, and eventually found one who'd fish with him. That connection snowballed into a decade-plus of trading knowledge with the best competitive anglers in Europe, brought back and applied to trout water in Utah, Vermont, and Connecticut. His takeaway on why elite anglers share so freely: in competition fishing everyone uses the same gear and technique, so there's no competitive edge lost by sharing, only bragging rights on execution.
The Five-Things Rule
The single biggest lesson Antoine pulled from that research: stop trying to catch a fish, and instead focus on doing five small things right. Water temperature, clarity, current speed, and a dozen other variables can spiral you into overthinking a drift before you've even made a cast. Simplify to a handful of fundamentals — for a nymph rig, that might be: drop the fly downstream, let it drag, flip the rod tip so the fly drifts upstream, lift the rod to lead the fly, then release and let it come up — execute those five steps cleanly, and the takes follow. Trout, as Antoine puts it, run on a brain the size of a rice grain, using six percent of it for feeding, escaping predators, and spawning. Complicating your approach fights the fish's own simplicity.
How to Skitter a Dry Fly Upstream
Most anglers know how to skitter a fly downstream on a swing. Antoine's trick flips that: he keeps his fly moving upstream, toward a fish that hasn't seen him, by throwing a curve cast that lands above the fish and curls the leader so the fly travels toward the far bank while still drifting up-current. To curve the cast to his right, he underpowers the stroke and drops the rod tip before the loop fully unfolds, letting the leader collapse into the curve. To curve it the other direction, he rotates the rod blank at the end of the stroke so the tip bends sideways, sending the leader — and the fly — around the inside. The fish only ever sees food moving upstream toward it, never the leader, and never the angler. It's a harder cast to place with pinpoint accuracy than a standard overpowered curve, but it gives you far more control over exactly how the fly behaves once it lands.
A Leader Built Entirely Around Stretch
Antoine's leader formula starts with five feet of 25-pound material at the butt, then halves the length every step down in diameter until he reaches a 6X tippet, tied off with a micro perfection loop. The material he prefers has almost no memory and stretches roughly 26 percent, which he compares to fishing with a rod that bends versus a broomstick: shock absorption, not stiffness, is what protects thin tippet from a hard-fighting fish. The full leader runs 14 to 18 feet, tapered down through 3X at the point where he attaches a strike indicator or dry fly. He grease-floats the whole leader with any floatant on hand to keep the stretchy material from waterlogging over a few hours of fishing.
Gear
If you'd rather skip hand-tying tapered sections and start fishing a leader built on the same principle — soft, stretchy, low-memory material — the Platinum Featherweight Furled Leader from Moonlit Fly Fishing is a strong, ready-made starting point for dry fly work. And for more presentation-first techniques like this one, our Tips and Tricks for Fly Fishing eBook is worth adding to your library.
