When fishing streamers, most anglers want to go big. Big flies, big casts, big strips. This alone can often be a recipe for success but, as noted in an earlier piece titled 5 Tips for Better Streamer Fishing, the key to improvement when streamer fishing is finding new ways of eliciting a predatory response from the fish you're chasing. To do so, it is useful to think of all of the varying behaviors -- not just some of them -- that fish might see from the prey they're seeking and how to best imitate all of them -- not just some of them.
Swimming prey, which our streamers are designed to imitate, do all manners of things in the water. Some of these things are big, but many are small. And so we must go small sometimes, too. Baitfish, crayfish, leeches and so on aren't constantly racing across the stream in mad, feverish dashes that long strips and quick retrieves most accurately imitate. Sure, they are sometimes, but they're also seen quickly moving relatively short distances in small bursts, slowly plying the currents for prey of their own, or moving erratically (often when wounded).
