With trout season in full swing and many of us tempted again to reach for another iteration of the latest and greatest killer pattern that will solve, once and for all, any frustrations or angling woes, especially while trying to fool or outwit fussy or pressured trout, allow me to suggest you pause a moment and find yourself a copy of Bob Wyatt’s What Trout Want: The Educated Trout and Other Myths.
Wyatt, for those who haven’t read him, is an old-school modern-day minimalist who developed his ideas fishing for challenging trout in both New Zealand and Scotland, a far cry from the decidedly guileless freestone cutthroats he grew up with in Alberta. Decades of angling for big, snooty trout, the sort of fish we often refer to as “smart” or “educated,” have led Wyatt to believe that it’s our stalking and presentation skills, not our fly patterns, that make some of us successful and many of us still searching for that silver bullet that will finally carry the day.
Sound familiar? Yet my aim here is not to prove anybody right, only that I’m not alone in tending more and more toward the notion that a few good flies, tied in various shades and sizes, are all I really need to fool my fair share of trout. On a recent weekend on a favorite river, an old friend and I were joined by a relative newcomer to the sport, and I was startled, through the course of the day, to see how many different store-bought flies accumulated on the furry f ly patch attached to his vest. Conditions were lousy, fish very few and very far between, but the fellow kept trying this fly and that, when the obvious problem was that the river had climbed into the alders while continuing to deepen toward the color and opacity of dough for baking whole wheat bread.
Which proves nothing beyond the fact that tough fishing is tough fishing. Sometimes nothing we do makes a difference. That’s probably a worthwhile lesson, too. Wyatt’s reasoning behind fly selection begins with the notion that the trout is “an opportunistic generalized predator” and that the difficulties presented in fooling one are “primarily those created by our own presentation skills.” The flies he now uses, those he describes in What Trout Want, are, he says, “rough caricatures, impressionistic sketches of real insects.” Over the course of his long career, he writes, he hasn’t found that time-consuming, “close-copy” details are an important factor in fly design. In fact, Wyatt offers the first argument I’ve ever found, one based on something he read by Britain’s Oliver Kite, who died in 1968, against flies that are too realistic.
To call such notions radical would be an understatement. Isn’t the whole point to present a fly that looks as close as possible to what a trout eats?
Well, actually, no. The point, as I understand it, is to get the trout to eat your fly, whether it’s fooled by the fly’s similarity to other available prey, whether because a trout sees, like a dog smelling, in ways we can’t possibly comprehend, or whether your fly simply offers an immediate impression of something good enough to eat.
Who knows. And do I really need to care, as long as the fish I’m after ends up dancing on the end of my line?
Rather than claims of realistic imitation that accompany so many flies in the sport today, most of the handful of patterns Wyatt describes in WTW share an attitude — that is, their posture in the water. His Deer Hair Emerger, Dirty Duster, and Snowshoe Hare Emerger are all designed so that the abdomen, at least, sinks below the surface film, mimicking those vulnerable moments in an insect’s life as it struggles to transform itself to meet the needs of airborne rather than aquatic existence. Dry flies that float on top of the water, goes the argument, represent an insect that could escape from the water — and from a rising trout — at any moment, while a partially submerged fly, be it mayfly or caddisfly, offers easy pickings for any feeding trout, each one hardwired, we have to assume, to get as much nutrition as possible from the least amount of energy expended.
Judicious use of floatants, not anatomical precision, is often critical to the efficacy of Wyatt’s patterns. He generally suggests dressing only part of the fly, just the wing or the wing and the thorax, to aid in the suggestion of an emerging insect, one half submerged while still allowing the angler to see the fly, important for monitoring a drag-free drift. The “wing” on some of his patterns is as much a visual cue for the angler as it is an imitative feature the trout may or may not see. In their smaller sizes, in fact, Wyatt’s emerging flies demand the angler keep track of the cast by the subtlest of clues, a challenge most of us can still manage, even those of us with aging eyes, thanks to the obvious evidence left behind by a trout that rises and eats.
This is sly, yet rewarding sport. It has very little to do with patterns that attempt to mimic the precision of a 3-D multimaterial printer, even if you enhanced the process with genuine smartphone imagery and your photogrammetry software. I still recall with fondness those early years, now more than four decades ago, fishing primitive, sparsely dressed nymphs, small, dark emergers, really, on long, light leaders we dressed with Mucilin to within an inch or two of the fly, casting them across and down to big trout that would break your heart if you couldn’t get one. Later, with small, slender, nondescript soft hackles tied to imitate nothing at all but bugs coming to the surface and, eventually, if the trout didn’t eat them, lifting languidly into the air, I learned to present the bug upstream, just like a dry fly, even though it settled in the surface film, often escaping my view, only to reappear, much later, pinned to the lip of a fish.
This is Bob Wyatt’s game. You’ ll see it anywhere, in fact, that experienced anglers are challenged by difficult trout. Not exclusively, of course — no doubt there are a number of ways to skin a cat — yet the low-floating dry fly or floating emerger, suspended in the surface film, really should find a place in your lineup of tactics and flies, especially if you want to do more than drift nymphs, Euro style, underwater and stick fish without seeing the take or eat. If you still feel trout fishing is a numbers game, perhaps you see no reason to move beyond the tools and tactics of the popular nymphing trade. There are moments, however, I can assure you, when you’re called to do better than that.
Materials
Hook: Daiichi 1167 or other curved, emerger-style hook, size 12 to 20
Thread: Black 8/0 UNI-Thread
Wing: Snowshoe hare’s fur from the pad of the foot
Abdomen: Natural hare’s fur
Rib: Same as tying thread
Thorax: Natural spiky hare’s mask fur
Tying Instructions
Step 1: Secure the hook in the vise and start the thread behind the hook eye. Cover the hook shank with a layer of thread wraps. Wind forward to the tie-in point for the wing, about one-third of the way back from the eye.
Step 2: Clip a small tuft of fur from the pad or bottom of a snowshoe hare’s foot. This is the lighter, springy hair, not the fur from on top or the front of the foot. Don’t try to stack the hair, just pull or comb out any underfur and remove any hairs that seem a little too wild. Before you tie in any sort of hair, you should always wax your thread — a technique I failed to use for many, many years. The wax helps the thread grip the hair, snugging it into place without allowing it to rotate on the hook shank. Tie in the wing with the tips of the hair pointing just past the eye of the hook, the wing lying flat in line with the hook shank. Clip the butts of the wing hair aft of the tie-in point, leaving the butts proud so that they will help anchor the wing when covered by the abdomen dubbing.
Step 3: Wax your thread again and create a slender dubbing noodle for the abdomen. I always have two separate stashes of hare’s mask hair — the lighter-colored, furry material, which I use here for the abdomen, and the darker, spikier material loaded with guard hairs from the edges of the ears that I use for the thorax and an approximation of legs. Start the abdomen directly behind the wing, covering the clipped butts, and create a long, slender, tapered abdomen deep into the bend of the hook. Ideally, your dubbing noodle will end and leave you with bare thread at the aft end of the abdomen.
Step 4: Rib the abdomen with four or five evenly spaced wraps of thread.
Step 5: Pull the wing upright and advance the thread to just behind the hook eye. Allow the wing to fall forward again while you wax the thread and create a small dubbing noodle with dark spiky hair from a hare’s mask. Hold the wing material upright again and wind the dubbing back to the base of the wing, forcing the wing into what Wyatt calls “an upright attitude.” Remove any excess dubbing material from the thread and make two or three wraps through the thorax. Whip finish behind the hook eye. Saturate the thread wraps with lacquer or your favorite head cement.
