Posted on December 11 2018
Both! I promise I am not just trying to make you buy more unnecessary gear here. Use the strengths of both gink and shake to keep your flies riding high all day. Gink (gel based floatant) is best applied when the fly is completely dry. Here we are trying to get the material of the fly to absorb the gink to help waterproof it. In my opinion, this is actually best done the night before fishing. If you have a general idea of a few dries you will be wanting to fish, the night before apply some gink to them so that the material has plenty of time to absorb it all and then re-dry out. I put the ginked up flies in a plastic hockey puck or fly box but make sure to leave it open. We want air flow to access the flies and help dry them out.
Then when I am on the water, I do NOT apply gink. I just use the shake here. Dry fly shake is a descant and is there to wick away water. Think of a rock climber using chalk to dry the sweat off his hands. Once the fly is wet, there is not point in using gink. Here we use the dry fly shake to help keep the water off the flies, thus keep them riding high! On a side note, once your dry fly starts sinking, add more shake! I know it is an extra step but a dry fly floating high results in a much better hook set. It can be easy to get lazy and try to quickly false cast to dry your fly out. This is a very temporary solution, let the shake, along with the gink, do their job!
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