Nat Greene Flyfishers    April 2009

Nat Greene Flyfishers would like to thank everyone who contributed items and time to help make our banquet a success. A special thanks goes out to Bob Clouser who presented an excellent seminar and provided us with an entertaining evening presentation.

Laura Kennerly, Dick Feulner, and the Banquet Committee

It’s banquet time again and I’ve spent a few hours in the fly tying room putting together my annual set of trout flies for the bucket raffle. There are a number of parachute dries and some nymphs to hug the bottom. What happens in between is less clear. Should I tie some true wet flies, emergers or even soft hackles? Something that would bridge the gap between weighted flies designed to be fished deep and light-as-a-feather patterns to drift enticingly along the surface. These “in-between” flies are important because many of us hang a dropper fly off a dry to offer the fish a choice. When the fish rises to the silhouette of the surface fly, it runs smack into a second choice in its own element. Because the fish often encounters the deeper fly first, the dropper fly may be more important than the surface pattern.

My standard mountain trout fishing tandem rig is an elk hair caddis trailing a wet black ant. Ants fall into the water from the time the ground thaws in the spring until the hard frosts of autumn. Fish see a lot of them and recognize their unique body form of two opaque lumps separated by a narrow thorax. Edward Ringwood Hewitt actually ate some ants to try to understand why trout liked them so much. He concluded it was the formic acid, sort of like sprinkling vinegar on everything. I just accept the fish will readily eat ants, thank you. I prefer a number sixteen ant but have used up to a twelve and as small as a twenty. Shady areas along stream edges are good places to cast because fish are on the lookout for freebies dropping out of the trees.

Sometimes a small nymph imitates a broad spectrum of life forms. Despite being designed as mayfly nymphs, I believe a small pheasant tail or hare’s ear nymph also serves as a midge pupa. Years ago I fished the streams between the reservoirs that fed New York City its drinking water. These streams flowed out of the bottom of each reservoir and were often so cold midges dominated the insect populations. A favorite stream was the East Branch of the Croton River; it contained thousands of muddy brown midge larvae. The most effective pattern was a #18 hare’s ear nymph. The similarity of body shapes (small abdomen, thicker thorax) between a small hare’s ear nymph and a midge pupa didn’t occur to me at the time. Over the years I’ve concluded fish suck in anything that looks vaguely like a familiar food.

Another fly utilizing pheasant tail fibers is the “Shop Vac.” This is a very simple, generalized emerger pattern from Blue Ribbon Flies in West Yellowstone, MT. Pheasant tail fibers are wrapped on a #16 scud hook for the body. At the thorax position a small piece of white synthetic yarn sticks out as a stubby wing. The fly is topped off with a gold bead. I sometimes overwrap the wing base with peacock herl to complete the color scheme of the regular pheasant tail nymph.

When I look at the Shop Vac, I note little more than a rusty brown body with a short wing. A skinnier version of this is the indispensable “Serendipity,” also from Blue Ribbon Flies. This fly originated on the Madison River in Montana as a midge imitation and has worked every where I’ve used it. There are several versions of it (dependent on body color) but the one I use the most is the “Crystal Serendipidity.” The crystal part comes from a body of pearl flashabou counterwound with gold wire. The wing consists of a few strands of deer hair, flared with thread pressure and clipped short. This simple fly (also on a #16 scud hook) looks like nothing would eat it but trout everywhere I’ve used it uniformly disagree. Try it for yourself.

Two other patterns imitate insects swimming up in the water column. The first is a hare’s ear soft hackle. It is tied with a hare’s ear body counter wound with gold wire or tinsel. The fly is completed with two turns of a brown partridge hackle. The hackle has great movement in the water and makes the fly look alive. I stumbled over this pattern by chance in the 1970’s and years later found it was probably taken for an emerging caddis.

The other emerger pattern is a derivative of the above fly. It’s called the “Holy Grail,” because it contains just about everything and micmics nearly every emerging insect as well. The body is hare’s ear ribbed with gold, pearl or peacock crystal flash. A piece of dark turkey tail serves as a wingcase spanning a green or pearl plastic bead. The fly is topped off with two turns of partridge hackle. The Orvis website calls this a “level four” pattern, meaning there is a lot going on in a small space. I second that opinion, especially when tied on a #16 scud hook. This is a terrific “all everything” emerger pattern. You can vary the body color to suit conditions and substitute a metal bead for the plastic “thorax” if you want to fish the fly deeper. Check the Orvis website for a picture and more information.

The old double play combination of Tinker-Evers-Chance was famously transformed by Abbott and Costello into the comedy routine of “Whose on First?” The routine went hilariously from base to base confusing Costello at each turn. By the time second base came around, he asked “What’s on second?” This is precisely the point of the above discussion. We often select our surface flies first and pick out the dropper as an after thought. To the contrary, the fish have taught me on several occasions that the dropper may be the more important pattern. So I recommend giving equal weight to deciding on the tail fly because it will be the first fraud the fish encounters. In other words, a fishing point of view giving priority to the dropper fly might exchange “What’s on second” for “Whose on first.”

Finally, two suggestions for rigging a dropper fly. First, tie the dropper strand to the eye of the surface fly, not the hook bend. Squeak Smith, who is a premier small stream fisherman, once told our group that he observed fish coming open-mouthed to the surface fly only to turn away at the last instant. He believed the fish were bumping into the unseen dropper strand. He did not observe this behavior when the strand was tied to the hook eye. Second, restrict the length of the strand to about eighteen inches. Any longer than that and enough slack is introduced to allow a fish to inhale and eject the subsurface fly without giving itself away. I like to use about a fourteen inch strand.

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