My buddy Jeff Cottrell first told me about crane flies. I was headed to an out-of-state tailwater, a canyon creased by oversized pocket water churning between boulder-strewn banks and glaring granite walls — the kind of spot you used to hear rumors about, but it still took a decade of searching and offhand questions before somebody finally gave up the goods. Browns. Big ones. Jeff opened a fly box, an old Scientific Angler the color of a Stanley thermos, and plucked out a dozen flies, his hand hovering over each one with that brief despair we all suffer when our excitement to share comes up, momentarily, against a reluctance to let go.
“Fish these when the water comes up.” With what — a hand line? The flies were big — an inch, an inch and a half long, as chunky as a toddler’s fingers. And ugly. Today, when I recall those first crane fly larvae Jeff gave me, I keep picturing a pukey olive-green shag carpet that lined the inside of a van I once found myself in while headed to the coast, looking for surf. Speakers, discharging Led Zeppelin, were covered in the same. Jeff also shared some realistic segmented crane fly larvae — but it was those ugliest ones, fashioned from carpet rags, that he liked best.
“You’ll either get thundershowers, or they’ll let water out through the dam. Or both. Either way, the river rises, these guys get washed into the current.”
Which is pretty much what happened. Three afternoons in a row, thunderheads boiled above the rim of the canyon, eventually blotting out the impossibly blue skies. Hail the size of pea gravel rattled off the rocks; the surface of the river turned to froth. The water rose — and it kept rising, to the point that I would have begun to despair, had I not done as I was told and fished Jeff’s shaggiest crane fly larva.
The trout, as McGuane once wrote, “liked it real well.”
Most crane flies aren’t true aquatic insects. The grublike larvae live in damp soil, burrowing into silt or sand along the margins of rivers and streams, on some occasions into the actual streambed or riverbed itself. Increased flows strong enough to disturb the streambed, however, can dislodge the larvae and wash them downstream. Never available in the numbers of the trout angler’s trinity — mayflies, stoneflies, and caddisflies — the chunky crane fly larva still offers a generous wad of protein, a package that big trout rarely refuse.
Which is all well and good, a perfectly satisfying way to lift tight to a bunch of belligerent big-water browns, some of which, once stuck, glanced angrily about in the granite-lined shallows before plunging into heavy current, never to be seen again, despite my every effort to put the screws to them or skip like Bambi across the tops of the Volkswagen-sized boulders. Still, I don’t suspect I would have followed the crane fly thread any further had I not been reintroduced to them, transmogrified as adults, by another good friend on a river that I call the Wolf.
Bruce Milhiser and his wife, Linda, fish the Wolf more than anyone else I know. It’s a finicky tailwater, a low-gradient desert stream that meanders along the scree of rust-colored cliffs, its slow, wide pools laced with big brown trout educated by angling pressure. Besides the size of the fish, the best thing about the Wolf is that the trout seem always to be looking up. Even between hatches, the surface of the lazy current is rarely without spent bugs of some sort lying atop or trapped in the film. Still, you had better be ready to fish dainty flies on the Wolf — and not afraid to lengthen and reduce the size of your tippet. Yet given that, and the ability to stalk fish and cast with the accuracy of a military drone, there are few days you can’t get your share of trout, with every heart-stopping grab happening right before your eyes.
I’ve said this before, but nobody does this kind of fishing better than Bruce Milhiser. And nobody I know works harder to find it. Yet despite his talents, his cane rods, and his passion for fooling big trout on surface flies, there is nothing about Bruce that suggests he feels his style of fishing is better than someone else’s — or that he’s averse, on any grounds, to doing whatever it takes to catch fish.
Which is how he became such a fan of the adult cranefly. It didn’t happen overnight. The details, from the beginning, are now somewhat muddy. Can any of us really remember what it was like the first time? In fact, when I mentioned to Jeff Cottrell that I intended to write about Bruce’s adult crane fly, Jeff let on that he was the one who told Bruce about crane flies in the first place.
Maybe we’re all just getting old. Still, the way Bruce tells it, he was fussing with one of your typical Wolf River browns, a fish on a far bank, tight to windswept willows, that was feeding on what, he couldn’t figure out. He tried this, he tried that, each time casting to the fish until it disappeared, only to show itself later, right where Bruce had shown it his last cast. This went on awhile; Bruce is the kind of angler who doesn’t give up on a fish if it keeps coming back for more. He’s patient. If he gives a fish a good look at his fly, and the fish doesn’t eat, he picks up and tries something else, rather than flogging the water until the fish vanishes for good.
But we all have our limits, and rivers like the Wolf can push you to them as often as not. Bruce was about there, he says, the heat and swirling breeze conspiring against him, when he knotted on the adult crane fly pattern he got either from Jeff Cottrell or, more likely, from inspiration he took from a fly on the Hans Weilenmann Flytier’s Page, the Paraloop Daddy posted by Rune André Stokkebekk of Norway, although Bruce’s fly is conventionally hackled, not tied paraloop style.
Now, where the crane fly larva is an ugly, even repulsive grub, a plump package of squishy flesh, the adult crane fly offers up a thin, delicate, ephemeral outline, as light of limb as seeding grass. This difference between larvae and adults holds true for most insects, although I have to say, I think mayfly nymphs, regardless of the species, are about the cutest little critters you’ll find anywhere outdoors. What gives adult crane flies their character, however, is that despite their fine lines and lacy texture, they flutter about with little suggestion of grace, like gradeschool girls learning to play lacrosse.
The artificial is a crude cast, too. Yet with his cane rods and gentle, left-handed stroke, Bruce delivers flies with the accuracy of a dart thrower. So when he says he didn’t make a very good cast with his awkward adult cranefly, I sort of wonder if he’s embellishing his story for dramatic effect. His point, of course, is that he had already landed flies exactly where they needed to land, gotten casts to drift perfectly over the feeding trout’s snout — but this time, when his cast “wasn’t very good,” the trout swam right over to his big crane fly and ate it.
Really?
“Just like that,” Bruce says.
There’s a certain chutzpah or braggadocio that comes with tying on a dry fly the size of the Adult Crane. Your fly announces, “I am here. Come eat me.” Finally we can stop thinking about all of this as a game of subtle finesse. Throw ’em the chalupa and watch a big dog boil.
Last summer, while I was fishing with Steven Bird, we matched a mayfly hatch with hair wing dries that were two and a quarter inches long and an inch an a quarter tall. I measured. These are opportunities in a fly-fishing career that should not be ignored. Flies this size, and trout big enough and willing to eat them, remind us that the sport is never just about catching fish. What it is about, and whether any of it matters, remains anybody’s guess. But when a big dry fly such as the Adult Crane goes on the end of your leader, and your cast delivers it to the mark, all of the questions, for a moment, can wait.
Bruce Milhiser lists half a dozen different rivers, and even some lakes, where he’s had success with his adult crane fly pattern. He fishes it in frog water and eddies and on deep, heavy currents. He uses it as a searching pattern when nothing is happening and for sighted fish, whether they are rising or not. Upstream, downstream, still water— he’ll give the crane fly a try whatever the situation dictates, whatever “bad position” he claims he’s gotten himself into.
I haven’t seen many of those. Whenever I fish with Bruce on the Wolf, he seems either to be stalking fish, sending tight, crisp loops their way, or, as often as not, leaning into the thrill of a deep bend into the cork of a cane rod.
Unlike some of us, Bruce also goes quietly about the business of landing a big fish. But there’s something else I’ve noticed, too: when he gets one on the crane fly, he always lets you know.
Materials
Hook: Standard dry-fly hook, size 12 to 14
Thread: Camel 8/0 Uni-Thread
Abdomen: 1/16-inch or 3/32-inch foam cylinder, tan or darkened to brown with a permanent marker
Legs: Moose body hair, knotted
Wings: Natural badger hackle tips
Hackle: Natural badger
Tying Instructions
Step 1: Secure the hook and start your thread. Cover the hook shank with thread wraps.
Step 2: At the middle of the hook shank, tie in a piece of foam cylinder about one and a half to two times the length of the hook. Use loose wraps toward the back of the hook; these wraps hold the foam in line with the hook shank, rather than cocked skyward. With a match or lighter, carefully heat the butt of the abdomen to give it a slight taper. If you want to darken the abdomen (I’m not sure it matters), use a brown Sharpie or similar permanent marker.
Step 3: Prepare all of the legs. Clip a tuft of hair from a patch of moose body hair. Separate the individual hairs. In each one, tie an overhand knot about three-quarters of an inch from the tip. Tie in the first pair of legs, one on each side, just in front of the abdomen.
Step 4: For the wings, clip tips from longer badger saddle hackles so that the wings end up slightly longer than the abdomen. Tie in the wings just ahead of the first pair of legs. Position the wings so that they lie flat at roughly a 20-to-30-degree angle from the midline of the fly.
Step 5: Tie in a badger hackle feather with the base of its stripped stem just ahead of the root of the wings. With the feather held out of the way, tie in two more pairs of legs, leaving space between each pair. Position the legs so that they extend at a sharp angle away from the midline of the fly.
Step 6: Now wind the hackle feather forward. Use your bodkin needle to slip the hackle wraps between the separate pairs of legs. The hackle wraps can also help you reposition any leg that, despite all your efforts, looks like what McGuane once described as the hind leg of a dog next to a fire hydrant.
Step 7: Secure the hackle feather with wraps of thread just aft of the hook eye. Whip finish and saturate the thread with lacquer or head cement.
Bruce suggests clipping the bottom hackles so that the fly rests lower in the water. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t.
