I remember the humiliation as sharply as yesterday. The river was becoming my favorite. I fished it often enough that I had managed to build a game that included the repertoire of flies and presentation techniques you need to catch trout every month of the year. It didn’t hurt that success meant contact with the hottest of rainbows, fish possessed of some added dash of horsepower that made 5X tippet a fool’s play. There were weekends when I saw more backing on 16-inch fish than I’d see in a month of successful steelheading.
At the moment in question, I had every reason to picture more of the same. It was early June, right after the Salmonflies fizzled, and the trout seemed heavier, more spirited than at any other time of the year. Beginning the long summer caddis season, I carried a wealth of patterns I had tweaked and kneaded into flies that I fished confidently before, during, and, the following mornings, after the evening caddis hatch. It was never a sure thing. Is it ever? But I got my share.
Sometimes even more.
So I was shocked that evening, the one in question, when the fish began rising, right below me, in a shallow riffle behind an island where I was used to whacking trout that made my heart soar — and for the next hour, maybe two, I failed to touch a single fish.
It’s such an old story, perhaps the oldest in the literature. And every experienced trout angler knows it can happen again, even the very next time on the water. Probably not, though — we do learn a few things, after all. But one of the grand aspects of fly fishing, perhaps the one that keeps bringing us back for more, is the things we still don’t know — especially those we may never learn.
Still, nothing leaves quite the same impression as a run full of feeding trout we fail to move to the fly. Let’s be frank about it. It can drive you nuts.
Or how about this: failing to fool feeding fish doesn’t so much drive me batty as it does reveal what’s already unsound in my mental game.
The one genuinely great trout angler I’ve fished with in my career does all those things you know you’re supposed to do, but few of us rarely practice, even less so in the heat of the moment. I’m not talking about application of a quiet casting stroke or subtle, sparsely dressed flies. Instead, recollections of my own failure remind me how Bruce Milhiser is able to stop fishing, with feeding trout right in
front of him, and take the time to consider what is actually going on.
Patience and observation. Here at my writing desk, I’m able to see myself stepping back from those feeding fish during that humiliating scene, studying the rise forms, reaching down in the water and turning over a few rocks, checking my boots and waders to see what may be clinging to them. But I know what really happens: I just keep hacking away.
Sad. I might as well be a dog with someone holding a bone just out of reach: complete focus — and the inability to pause and observe and reflect on any other evidence at hand.
And here’s the irony of it all: even if you can’t figure out what’s going on, even if you don’t know a caddisfly from a mayfly, a pupa from a nymph, a cripple from an emerger from a spinner from a terrestrial, if you simply stop for a moment, quit waving your rod in the air, quit laying your line on the water, rising fish will soon forget all about you and return to the kind of one-dimensional focused feeding that makes them so vulnerable to our crude casts and clumsy flies in the first place.
Eventually, almost every savvy trout angler learns this secret: when nothing else you try seems to work, back off and rest the water awhile.
Be smarter than the trout, I try to tell myself.
Stop, for godssake.
Had I actually been able to practice this level of self-discipline, of course, I probably wouldn’t have suffered the kind of humiliating shutout I’m describing now. At least not that evening. Because as soon as it was over, as soon as I strapped on my headlamp so I could see my way through the shallow riffle and minefield of greasy rocks, I noticed on the legs of my waders the little green caddis pupae that had to have been what was making all of those trout porpoise and boil just beyond the end of my rod tip.
I know, I know: I’ve claimed for years in this column that your fly doesn’t matter, which I still contend, in the grand scheme of things, holds true.
But in trout fishing, I concede, there are times when you need something close.
Still, all I would have had to do, sometime before darkness fell, was stop long enough to notice the little green caddis pupae, rather than continue to flail away. Instead, I went home, tail between my legs, and did my research. I had guessed it was some kind of case-making Brachycentrus, but the local iteration turned out to be what’s called the Little Western Weedy-Water Sedge, Amiocentrus aspilus. If I had confused it for a Green Rock Worm, the free-living caddis larva of the Green Sedge (Rhyacophila), I still should have been able to swing something sparse and green and probably would have had action of some sort to keep from feeling I’d learned nothing in decades of trout fishing.
What bothered me most was that had I stopped for a moment and checked out those pupae gathered on the legs of my waders, I would have taken the time to dig through my caddis box and found something that looked right.
Instead, I sat down at home at the vise and cranked out a bunch of green-bodied, soft-hackled little guys, size 16 through 20 — the Starling and Green, if you need a name for the pattern A few evenings later, I found the trout more than willing to agree with my rough impersonation of this small green sedge.
I’m still using the last of that batch of flies. As I’ve argued before, the beauty of returning home from a trip and immediately tying up two or three dozen flies is that you know just what you want, and now you’ve got that hatch covered when you run into it the next time — five days or five years later.
And in addition, you might learn some new tricks along the way.
The Amiocentrus, my latest iteration for fishing during this common early-season hatch, has a few different things going on. Clearly it’s old school, a designation that seems to land on most flies that rely mainly on natural feathers and hair, rather than newer synthetic materials. It’s much like a Gary LaFontaine Diving Caddis, as well, a fly I use persistently during the caddis season, whether swinging on the surface or anywhere down through the water column when fished in tandem with a heavier fly or with lead pinched on my leader. The thread body is a classic soft-hackle trait. The touch-dubbed ribbing comes from the Scottish harelug flies. There’s also something about this pattern that points back to the old Clyde style wet flies, tied originally in Scotland for the famous River Clyde, a style of sparse soft-hackled dressing that, if you haven’t been aware of it, might do more to stimulate your creativity at the vise than the tungsten-and-epoxy fare being served up of late by Czech and Euro-style nymphers.
Then again, the more I look at it, the more the Amiocentrus reminds me of the very first caddis I tied in preparation for a trip, forty-some years ago, to Yellowstone, when I thought a caddis was a type of pattern, not an actual insect, because I’d never noticed caddisflies in real life or read about them before.
Materials
Hook: TMC 3761 or 900BL, size 14 to 18
Thread: Highland Green Pearsall’s Gossamer Silk
Hackle: Furnace hen
Tag: Small flat gold tinsel
Body: Tying silk
Rib: Tying silk waxed and touch dubbed with dark hairs from a natural hare’s mask
Underwing: Dark brown partridge
Overwing: Clear Antron yarn
Tying Instructions
Step 1: Secure the hook in the vise and start the thread. I tie most of my wet caddis patterns on the TMC 3761 or similar wet-fly hook, but I also tie a few on light-wire dry-fly hooks, which can help keep the fly directly in the surface film, whether dead-drifted or fished on the swing. For size 18 caddis patterns, I usually switch to 8/0 or similar thread, which reduces the bulk created by the thicker Pearsall’s silk.
Step 2: Select a hackle feather with fibers slightly longer than the hook gap. Strip the webby fibers from the base of the stem right up to the first fibers that begin to show the distinctive two-tone colors of furnace hackle. With the convex (shiny) outside of the feather toward you, secure the feather with the start of the fibers just behind the eye of the hook, with the tip of the feather pointing forward.
Step 3: Secure a short length of flat tinsel as you wind the thread back toward the bend of the hook. Just forward of the bend, create the tag with two turns of tinsel. Before cutting off the excess, lay the tinsel along the hook shank and cut it just short of the lump created by the end of the hackle stem. Cover the remaining tinsel excess and the body with an even layer of thread wraps.
Step 4: I talked about touch dubbing and harelug flies in the March/April 2019 “At the Vise” column. I can’t say enough about this body style. It can’t be tied unless you first thoroughly wax your thread, right up to the fly. If you don’t yet employ wax as you tie, watch a Davie McPhail video, and maybe he’ll set you straight. One trick for touch dubbing is remembering to touch the wax and thread with the fingers and thumb of one hand only, so that when you handle the dubbing in your other hand, you don’t end up with hairs stuck to your fingers instead of your thread. Once you have a dusting of hairs stuck to the top inch or so of thread, wind the dubbed thread forward as if palmering the body, four or five evenly spaced wraps that end well back from the hackle feather.
Step 5: For the underwing, use a well-marked feather from the middle of the upper back of a partridge skin. English grouse might work, as well. Remove the webby fibers from the base of the feather; then align the tips on one side and snip them free of the stem. Measure the fibers against the hook shank — you want the fibers to extend about even with the gold tag. Tie in the fibers, making sure you’ve again left plenty of room behind the base of the hackle feather.
Step 6: For the overwing, use a fairly sparse dressing of fibers separated from a short length of Antron yarn. Gary LaFontaine introduced many of us to Antron (he called it Sparkle Yarn) back in 1981 in his book Caddisflies, and I still believe in the material, if only because it’s been an ingredient in so many flies of mine that have hooked sizeable fish, and Gary believed that Antron is indispensible for imitating wet caddisfly patterns. Make the overwing about the same length as the underwing. Clip the excess in front of the tie-in point, making sure you don’t also cut the hackle stem.
Step 7: Hold the tip of the hackle feather in your hackle pliers and make two or three turns back toward the root of the wing. Then wind the thread forward, locking down the stem of the hackle feather. Make a couple of turns in front of the hackle, forcing back any untidy fibers. If you are using Pearsall’s silk, make sure you wax the thread before whip finishing. Saturate the finished head with lacquer or your favorite head cement.
