The mayflies are small and few. If you look closely, you see them spotting the water, one here, one over there — but not nearly as many as you would think by the number in the air, which suggests a hatch, but until you see some feeding fish, you’re reluctant to call it that. Still, they are mayflies, small and pale, not tiny like a Trico, but at least an 18, maybe a tad smaller. Probably a Blue-Winged Olive. Baetis. First fish shows itself, you’ve got just the thing.
Three things, actually, if it comes to that.
But nothing does show. Not a ring, not a dimple, not a rise. The river, you happen to know, is loaded with trout. And this particular run, a textbook bend of perfectly paced water below not one, but two riffles, each half as big as a football field, with structure and sunlight and gurgling oxygenated flows that pump out insects like the streamside cottonwoods and alders produce pollen and seeds — this particular run holds trout in numbers that, after two decades fishing it, still boggles your mind.
And trout do have to feed.
As is often the case, my buddy Peter Syka, fishing friend for forty-plus years now and counting, is the first to take a stab in the direction indicated by the evidence at hand. Where I’m one to flog the water with patterns and presentations that have worked in the past, Peter is much quicker to respond to what’s really going on, what’s different right now from the norm. Better casts! Better drifts! I tell myself, while Peter is one to take a look at things and follow a fresh idea.
He has an advantage, in this case, of also being a visitor; my two decades here may have left me a wee bit complacent. Along with his brother John, Peter has joined me so that as old friends, we can, as they say, catch up — and as some old friends are wont to do, catch some hot trout, besides. The previous evening, I waded into the whirl of mewling caddis and did what I know how to do best, whacking more than my share of these scalding trout. “Home field advantage!”
I exclaimed, not letting up for a moment, because, well, what are friends for?
But this morning, there don’t seem to be the usual number of spent and bedraggled caddis left behind by twilight emergence and the perilous egg laying extended into the night. These mayflies, meanwhile, are making me fidget, even if the trout seem slow to respond. Then Peter makes his decision to try something new, and sure enough, he’s soon tight to a fish, one that’s immediately stripping line from his reel — and as I reach for my camera, eager to capture an image of my old friend, I notice he’s taken hold of the cork with both hands as he starts across the slippery rocks, making for higher ground.
A Pheasant Tail Nymph when mayflies are around? That’s nothing new. The move is as routine as a sacrifice bunt to get a base runner into scoring position. Dave Hughes claims that stomach samples taken during a hatch of Baetis can show that “nymphs outnumber duns sometimes as much as ten to one.” A Pheasant Tail nearly always gets you into the mayfly game. Some anglers are such strong believers in the pattern that they even start with a Pheasant Tail Nymph before they have any idea what’s really shaping up, the same way many of us tie on an Adams or a Hare’s Ear — or both just so we have something on the line when we walk down to the water.
Yet many anglers, myself included, don’t put a lot of faith in a Pheasant Tail Nymph. We get it: we look at the fly and acknowledge its gracious design, simplicity, and overall charm. But we don’t immediately reach for our stash of Pheasant Tails, and when we do, usually when nothing else is working, they don’t work either, which leaves our doubts about them unchanged.
That’s another thing I love about fly fishing — these preferences and prejudices that develop during a career. There’s nearly always a story, if not many stories, behind our likes and dislikes, the flies we choose to tie and use and those we reject or refuse to give even a fair chance. Rarely are we offered such an opportunity to see, if we pay attention, how our beliefs can create the reality we experience. We catch fish on the flies we fish with. Beyond that, who’s to say where truth lies?
But there’s something else going on here: Peter tied on a Pheasant Tail — and I didn’t — because he had some with him that he liked. He had fussed with the pattern, turning it into something that looked, in his eyes, like a fly representing a mayfly nymph ought to look.
Or at least how it ought to look if you’re trying to fool a trout.
“I was never happy with the legs,” Peter explains as we cook, later in the day, a big meal before the evening session. Smoke from the skillet, overflowing with bratwurst and Brussels sprouts, onions and peppers and yams, billows through the junipers, rising toward the haze from distant fires. “No matter what you do, it’s hard to get those pheasant tail butts to lie like you want ’em.”
While he was at it, he made some other changes, too.
In case anybody’s still uncertain, let me restate two themes that show up, to some degree, in most everything I write about flies, fly tying, and fly fishing. First, good fly tyers — and by that, I mean fly fishers who tie flies that work — are inveterate tinkerers; they fuss and fiddle with patterns, making them eventually their own. These private or personal designs, those that eventually win spots in our go-to lineup, evolve out of the challenges we face in the fish we fish for and the places where we fish. Yet they also reflect an individual style or temperament we bring to the water — how we like to fish and the kind of water in which we feel we have the most success. Our flies, like our fishing, should say a lot about who we are — and the best fly fishers I know are those who enjoy a sound, yet ever-evolving marriage between the flies they tie and how they fish them. They believe in their flies, they have faith in them, in large part because they’ve made them their own.
The second thing I’m trying to get at here may in fact just be an ancillary point how important I feel it is to look at and appreciate flies from the past to develop an understanding of materials and design elements to inform the choices we make with our own flies. A fly is “beautiful” not when judged against some sort of abstract aesthetic, but when viewed as a working tool that will get the job done in a specific fishing situation. Peter’s Pheasant Tail is a fly that you can tie to your tippet with confidence when mayflies begin to stir — and probably whenever you’re trying to present something trout are likely to eat. That evening, after the midday meal, Peter is still using his Pheasant Tail to good effect. As I said, I don’t particularly like my version of the traditional Sawyer pattern, so I’ve already switched to a size 18 Wild Hare, an old favorite, which proves a fair representation of the little mayfly nymphs or whatever else the trout are feeding on, as well. After the sun drops behind the lip of the river canyon, we see a rise or two, nothing to get excited about, but fish nosing up to the surface, just the same. A few little mayflies flutter past, riding the downstream breeze. The trout are definitely not eating the duns, but something new is going on. I look through several boxes and find what I’m looking for — a size 20 Green and Something: floss body, itty bitty hare’s mask thorax, a couple of turns of undersized medium dun hen hackle. I lengthen my tippet, get rid of the small pinch of lead I was using with the nymph. I fish the new fly sort of like a dry, sort of like a soft hackle, sometimes dead-drifting it, sometimes tightening up and allowing it to swing.
The trout, anyway, like this one real well, too.
Materials
Hook: TMC 3761, size 14 to 18
Thread: Black
Tail: Moose mane fibers
Abdomen: Pheasant tail
Rib: Black copper wire
Shellback/wing pad: Pheasant Tail
Thorax: Peacock herl
Hackle/legs: Starling
Tying Instructions
Step 1: Secure the hook in the vise and start the thread. Rather than carry a bunch of different mayfly nymphs, the savvy angler, with experience, will settle on a pattern he or she has confidence in and then be more apt to fuss with hook sizes and types of hooks than with pattern changes to cover various moments in a hatch, different water profiles, and the variety of presentations one often needs to employ. Tied on at least three different hook types and in three different sizes, Peter’s Pheasant Tail could cover nearly all of your mayfly nymph needs.
Step 2: For the tail, line up the tips of four or five fibers or hairs from a patch of moose mane. Secure the tail just forward the bend of the hook shank, directly above the point of the hook. The tail should be about two-thirds the length of the hook shank.
Step 3: At the root of the tail, tie in a length of black copper wire. At the same spot, secure the tips of three or four pheasant tail fibers. Advance the thread to the midpoint of the hook shank. With a pair of hackle pliers, grab hold of the butts of the pheasant tail fibers and then gently twist them into something resembling a dubbing noodle. Wind the pheasant tail fibers forward, aiming for a tapered abdomen. Secure the fibers and cut off the excess. Then wind forward the black wire, segmenting the abdomen with four to six turns of wire. Secure the wire and clip the excess.
Step 4: For the shellback or wing pad, tie in four or five more pheasant tail fibers directly ahead of the abdomen. Tie them in by the tips, but far enough from the tips of the fibers that they don’t break off when you eventually pull them forward over the thorax. Now tie in one or two lengths of peacock herl. Advance the thread, leaving yourself plenty of room behind the hook eye. Wind the peacock herl forward, tie off, and clip the excess.
Step 5: Ahead of the herl thorax, secure by its tip a small starling hackle feather. If you don’t have a starling skin, invest five bucks and get one. It’s hard to find smaller, softer feathers for nymph legs or traditional soft hackles. Here you need only one or two turns. Tie off and clip the excess.
Step 6: To finish the fly, pull forward the pheasant tail fibers to form the shellback or wing pad. As the fibers lie down over the thorax, they should splay the starling hackle, creating the appearance of legs. Secure the pheasant tail fibers directly behind the eye of the hook and clip the excess. Fashion a tidy head with wraps of thread, whip finish, and saturate the head with lacquer or your favorite head cement.
