Fly Fishing for Trout by Tom Rosenbauer

Author:Tom Rosenbauer [Rosenbauer, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stackpole Books
Published: 2016-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

Sometimes mayfly spinners fall to the water with their wings upright, but most of them soon lay spent on the water and are hard to see without looking carefully at the surface.

After the hatch one night I followed them back to their car, and with the innocence of a curious teenager, I asked them what they were using. “Look at your waders,” one of them told me. I looked down, and at the wet spot where the high-water line of my wading remained were scores of small, very dark gray caddisflies, about a size 18 or maybe even 20. I looked up and the second guy said, “Now it might make sense what we’re using.” He showed me a size 18 hare’s ear wet fly, the old traditional style with wings made of duck quills. “We fish ’em just under the surface because we think the trout are eating those little ones, not the bigger tan ones, and that kind of caddisfly seems to crawl under the water to lay its eggs.”

So I had been blinded by the easier-to-see, bigger caddisflies in the air and had never even noticed the smaller dark bugs on my waders, which would have been impossible to see in the fading light. To this day, when trout get snotty in the evening, the first thing I do is to look down at my waders.

Mayfly spinners have also fooled me in similar ways more times than I can recount. Sometimes spinners fall with upright wings, which can tip you off, but most times spinners fall to the water with their wings pinioned in the surface film. They are then almost invisible, either with a wing spread out to each side in the classic spinner pose or with both wings tipped over to one side. After the rigors of mating and egg-laying, and because mayflies don’t take any nutrition once they’ve hatched from a larva, they don’t even have enough energy left to hold their wings upright.

I’ve found that trout prefer mayfly spinners over any other insect on the water, possibly because the females can be laden with eggs, but for sure because spinners are helpless prey. In fact, if I even suspect mayfly spinners are falling above me, I’ll put on a spinner pattern before any other dry fly because I have more confidence in a trout taking a spinner than any other pattern.

Just because trout may be feeding on a different stage of a hatch does not mean you need a special fly for each stage. For instance, a good emerger pattern can be fished with no fly dressing at all when trout are bulging or feeding on insects just below the surface. The same fly can be dabbed with a touch of white desiccant powder if you suspect trout may prefer a fly just in the process of emerging, half in and half out of the water. If you want to get fancy, you can just dress the front part of an emerger and let the back hang in the water.

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