Fires in my neck of the woods knocked out a little stream that has always been a good place to kick off the traditional trout season. In this day and age, of course, many of us fish for trout nearly year-round, either by travel to distant waters or, more likely, because of the profusion of blue-ribbon, catch-and-release waters throughout the West. For the genuine trout addict, there’s nearly always some way to find a fix, while those of us fortunate enough to enjoy a more balanced diet to satisfy our fly-fishing desires will often give trout — or at least our hunger for them — a rest during some portion of what was, in the past, closed season.
Most of us, anyway, carry with us, year to year, the notion that trout season begins sometime as winter loosens its grip on the world around us. And linked to that idea, for some, is a small stream like the one ravaged by fires not far from my home, a place to return to at the start of each season to see again, with our own eyes, that, yes, the trout are still here and, better yet, they’re here for no other reason than that this happens to be a trout stream where wild fish live and, on a human scale, have always lived, for no purpose or higher meaning that has anything to do with you or me or one generation or the next.
It’s a profound notion. Unlike so many other trout fisheries in the West, the trout in this nearby stream, pinched between sheer slopes now covered with deadfall and blackened trees, were never manipulated, never managed beyond the simple principle of leaving them alone, letting them be, and protecting them. No dams. No stocking programs. Nobody, apparently, paying attention to water quality, cfs flows, macroinvertebrate populations, the number of trout from one mile to the next. Once the season opened, anybody with a fishing license could hike up from the mouth of the stream and catch as many trout as he or she could possibly imagine.
And every time I did this, year after year, without ever seeing anyone else fishing but my own companions, I’d think, That’s cool.
Another reason I enjoyed fishing this stream at the start of each season, before the fires, was that you could go at it pretty light: spools of tippet and a handful of Humpys or whatnot was all you really needed. Not that it was easy fishing. I was often surprised, when I brought others to the stream, how much trouble they had wading the slippery rocks, keeping their flies out of the limbs of trees. Or they’d approach a perfect little pool and by the time they managed to get a fly floating merrily down the stream, it was apparent that every trout in the pool had been alerted to the presence of some terrible danger, and they were no more willing to rise to a fly than to stick their heads, if only figuratively, into a guillotine.
The stream was also a good place, before the fires, to fool around with new patterns, new flies. Or better yet, to see what I could learn about old flies — traditional patterns that, for whatever reason, have gone out of fashion. Of course, I was hedging my bets. Any experienced fly fisher could see that the name of the game here would be presentation, that how you went after these trout was a lot more important than what you tied to the end of your tippet.
Still, you learn a lot when you see fish eat the fly, just as you learn — or you should — how and why it is that a nymph is fished differently from, say, a soft-hackled wet fly. Soft hackles, of course, can be great good fun on a small trout stream, in part because rarely are you whacked so hard than when a fly swings downstream, swimming on a taut line riding through the current.
This year, though, I had planned on something different — tying and fishing a fresh assortment of traditional winged wet flies. In a rush to embrace the renewed interest in soft-hackled flies, many anglers, I’ve noticed, fail to acknowledge the historical significance of these old patterns. The upshot is the nearly complete absence of winged wet flies in the boxes of most modern fly fishers.
There’s the sense, of course, that patterns like these belong to a different era, an age of innocence, when trout were plentiful and dumb to a degree that practically any darn thing dangling from your line would inspire a strike. The earth was still flat, for god sakes. Why in blazes would anyone need to know more than the difference between a nymph and a ne’er-do-well?
Somebody somewhere concluded, however, that the flies we fish with are supposed to have wings. Even after the discovery that lots of what trout eat don’t have wings and that flies that swim can be just as effective as flies that imitate winged insects, the winged fly persisted into modern times, an irrational tradition seen commonly in decades of winged steelhead flies, innumerable patterns that nobody thinks have anything to do with insects, birds, pterodactyls, or any other creatures with wings.
Or is it a rational tradition? As I’ve mentioned in this column before, perhaps the wing on a traditional wet fly has little to do with imitating the appearance of wings or other aspects of a streamborn insect. Instead, the wing is a mechanical device, much like a sail, that guides the fly through the swing while at the same time producing subtle, lifelike movements that attract the attention of predator fish.
That’s a bold assertion. Nevertheless, I think we’d be foolish should we disregard, outright, any technique that proved successful for an earlier generation of fly fishers. I’ve said it too many times already, but I’ll say it again: the subtle efficacies of downstream presentations are lost to anglers who rely solely on the dead-drifted dry fly or a nymph or two, usually weighted, fished below an indicator. The reason, I contend, why we see so few traditional wet flies tied to tippets is that, lo and behold, they don’t work if you dangle them beneath a bobber. A winged wet fly is designed — by chance or the sublime, who’s to say — to be fished under tension, however slight, on a downstream presentation or swing.
In other words, the flies fail not because they’re inadequate, not because they’re from a less sophisticated or enlightened era of the sport, but they fail, instead, because many modern fly anglers don’t know how to fish the damn things.
Harrumph.
Or maybe they just forgot.
Dave Hughes, who makes a living looking at insects and the flies we tie to imitate them, has done as much as anybody to try to remind anglers not to forget or reject traditional wet flies — even the old winged wets. Our nymphs may do a better job of imitating the early stages of an aquatic insect’s life, claims Hughes in his classic work, Wet Flies. “But traditional winged wet flies,” he adds, “are more effective as imitations of certain emerging insects, and they still do the best at imitating drowned adult insects, aquatic and terrestrial (italics mine for emphasis).
That’s another bold assertion, and not one you heard, I suspect, the last time you suited up for a day with a guide or one of your expert trout-fishing friends. Of course, a glance at any of Dave Hughes’s books shows him to be something of a generalist. That is, he aims to carry an assortment of fly types that can be used on trout waters anywhere in the world. He favors patterns that rely on broad, clear strokes, rather than ones that descend into the minutiae deemed critical by so many of us who fish, year after year, over trout keyed into the same regional hatches. Hughes, anyway, still ties and carries traditional winged wet flies. He recommends we all do. Moreover, he says, traditional winged wet flies allow us to catch trout in circumstances in which we would fail without them.
Yet Hughes holds no stock in the idea that the sail or keel-like properties of the traditional winged wet fly are anything but a liability. He contends that the traditional wing, usually tied from the stiff quills of mallard primary feathers, is pretty to look at, but contributes nothing to a fly’s capacity to fool trout. The flies never “look alive,” he says. Worse, he argues, the stiff quill wing usually twists in one way or another, so that its rudder effect causes the fly to swim like nothing a trout has ever seen before, “half the reason,” Hughes suspects, that “traditional wet flies fail.”
Perhaps. No doubt the hen or other soft-hackle wings that Hughes now employs on his winged wet flies, like the wing used here for the Hen and Harelug, create a fly that looks more like the insects we’re trying to imitate, whether in an emerging stage or as adults awash in the water. Hen hackle wings, like soft-hackle fibers, states Hughes, “quiver and kick . . . with every ripple of current.” Yet I still contend that the winged wet fly, fished on the swing, shares with certain swimming insects both an attitude and action that goes beyond the wiggly movements produced by soft fibers bending and flexing in the current. Watch any tiny aquatic animal that feels threatened, be it a caddis pupa or emerging mayfly or even an itty-bitty fry or baitfish, and tell me those little guys don’t tense up and know how to dart and dive. And in my experience, nothing sparks a strike from predatory fish quite like a lure or fly, or even bait, that acts like it’s in danger of being devoured by a monster ten or a hundred or a thousand times its size.
It’s a theory, at least, worth further study. Fires nearby have made a mess of things, but I have a hunch this spring I’ll be able to get back to that hard-hit stream to continue my research. That’s assuming, of course, the trout are still there.
I’m willing to bet they are.
Materials
Hook: Mustad 3906 or similar, size 12 to 16
Thread: Primrose Pearsall’s Gossamer Silk*
Tag: Two or three turns of flat gold tinsel
Body: Hare’s ear, lightly dubbed, allowing the tying silk to show through
Wing: Partridge tail fibers
Hackle: Medium dun hen
Tying Instructions
Step 1: Secure the hook in the vise and start the thread directly behind the hook eye. Wind an even layer of thread back to the start of the bend of the hook. Modern hooks notwithstanding, the 3906 or Mustad’s newer S80NP remain the quintessential wet-fly hook, offering plenty of weight on a relatively short hook. Flies tied on the old 3906 immediately penetrate the surface film and stay down on the swing.
Step 2: Tie in a short length of narrow flat tinsel. Leave the waste end long enough that it lies forward along the length of the thread underbody. Advance the thread in an even layer back to a point just shy of the hook eye.
Step 3: Select a hen neck feather with fibers slightly longer than the hook gap. Strip the fluff and webby fibers from the lower portion of the stem. With the underside or concave side of the feather away from you, secure the stem directly behind the eye of the hook. Wind the thread in an even layer to the aft end of the fly, just short of where you tied in the tinsel. Don’t clip the excess stem until you’ve almost reached the tinsel; in that way, you have a better chance of maintaining a lump-free body.
Step 4: Create the tag of the fly with two or three turns of tinsel. Tie it off and clip the excess. If I’m being finicky, I might run another two layers of thread, forward to the eye and back, to keep the body as even as possible. This is important when tying with silk thread, which is much bulkier than modern threads.
Step 5: A defining aspect of most “harelug” flies is a touch-dubbed body that allows the color of the thread or tying silk to show through the dubbing material. Apply wax liberally to the top two or three inches of the tying silk. Use a small amount of dubbing hair, free of any clumps, and simply touch it to the thread. Whatever sticks is enough. Don’t try to twist the thread or create a typical dubbing noodle. Wind the fuzzy thread forward in loosely spaced wraps, stopping several wraps short of where you tied in the stem of the hackle feather.
Step 6: For the wing, select a tail feather from a partridge skin. Remove the fluff and webby fibers. Stroke the fibers along one side of the feather so that the fiber tips are aligned, perpendicular to the stem. Strip or cut the fibers, keeping the tips aligned. Then gently roll the fibers between your thumb and forefinger, again doing your best to keep tips aligned. Measure the wing so that it ends up about the length of the hook shank. Secure the wing, leaving enough space between the root of the wing and the hook eye for the hackle. Clip the butts of the wing fibers, being careful not to cut or damage the hackle stem.
Step 7: Attach hackle pliers to the tip of the hackle feather. Wind the hackle back toward the root of the tail, making two to four turns, depending on the size of the fly. Now wind the thread forward, making three or four turns through the hackle wraps, locking the stem in place. In front of the hackle, create a tidy head of thread wraps. If I’m tying with silk, I always wax my thread before I whip finish, which helps the thread slide through the finish wraps without grabbing. Saturate the final thread wraps with lacquer or head cement.
* Pearsall’s no longer produces Gossamer Silk and Marabou Silk, the threads long associated with classic wet flies, and existing fly-shop stocks are depleted. YLI, Clover, and Guttermann all produce possible substitutes. YLI 261 is close to Pearsall’s primrose.
