Off on a weekend trout binge recently, I noticed something odd. Odd for me, at least. Despite a vest stuffed with no fewer than a half dozen different fly boxes, each box jammed with row after row after row of carefully constructed flies, many of the patterns tweaked just so for the nuanced demands of the heady trout in this very river — despite these boxes chock full of good flies, I was gazing into, and selecting from, only a single small box, one of those cheap little six-compartment jobs, maybe three dozen flies in all, not more.
The obvious question: What was I doing carrying those other hundred dozen flies? This is not the time nor the place to get into that, other than to remark that I’m not alone. Fly fishers of a certain bent, usually tyers, can be notorious hoarders, unwilling to step into the river without their box of twelve different types of caddis pupae, even though they’ve been fishing over emerging mayflies the past five days. Or is it really just me? On a positive note, fishing out of a single box, with just a short list of patterns, may suggest genuine progress, someone who has refined his or her game to a few bold strokes, with room left over for a stash of hunches, experiments, and windfalls kept close enough to favorites that they don’t disappear in the clutter of old or abandoned ideas.
I’m a long way from that. Yet now and then I do see evidence of change: I’ve learned something after all. What fly fishing shows us most often, of course, is how much we don’t know. There are mysteries unfolding that keep us guessing one moment to the next. Still, when you can step into the water, confident that one small box is all you really need, you might want to pause and reflect on and even celebrate that you’ve come a fair distance since you first started waving a rod through the morning air.
It’s hard to say, exactly, how a shortlist box of flies develops. Just as interesting to me is what I find there, what goes into this separate, immediately accessible stash. It usually begins, of course, with newly minted flies, ones fresh out of the vise. You know you’re going fishing; what flies do you know you need now?
Fly shops can also contribute to the special stash. That’s one of their roles: Here’s what’s working today. Sadly, most shops I visit these days buy from fly manufacturers, so you often don’t get those quirky regional patterns, some of them specific to single rivers or even hatches, that you used to find. Guides are a much better source, if you know some well enough that they’ll share their secrets.
On the stream is another good place to find new patterns to keep ready in the separate small box. All you have to do is ask, and most anglers will gladly tell you about one or two patterns they find indispensable on trout waters they visit. There’s a good chance they have one of these flies on the end of their line. You might even end up with an example handed over to you to while you chat.
What we aim for, after all, is confidence. And few things demonstrate confidence, I’ll argue, more than fishing out of a single small box, rather than the need to carry, because of lack of confidence, those hundred dozen flies in a half dozen different boxes.
Of course, there’s more to it than that. You step into a river with confidence when you know where the fish are, you know how to present the fly to them, and you fish with flies you know the fish will eat. It seems pretty simple — until you realize that most places in a river don’t hold fish; holding water is the exception, not the norm. And it’s not always particularly easy to deliver a fly to a trout, especially in such a way that the fly ends up behaving like things on which trout typically feed. Finally, the whole notion of a fishing a fly that trout will “eat” can be misleading.
My buddy Joe Kelly, the fish biologist, recalls watching a video of trout hanging in a current, each fish constantly taking bits and pieces of this and that into its mouth and then immediately rejecting those things that aren’t actually food. Trout don’t eat your fly so much as take it up in their mouths to investigate it as possible fare, just as they’ve learned to forage for food since they arrived in the river without fingers or hands. I know I’m oversimplifying all of this — or stating the obvious. But the point is, your fly goes into a trout’s mouth for but a moment, just long enough for the fish to check it out. Our job, at that moment, is to stick the fish, which is actually an important aspect of presentation, one that’s often overlooked.
Nothing reveals the competence of a skilled trout angler more quickly than his or her ability to stay in contact with the fly. Good presentation — on the surface, in the surface, below the surface — is always a delicate balancing act; you try to make the fly behave naturally, while at the same time you want to be able to nudge or turn or influence the fly with just the gentlest adjustment to the movement of the rod tip. Nothing comes out of the vise that remotely resembles the feel or, presumably, the taste of the live critters on which trout feed, especially when you consider the hook projecting so dramatically from one end of the offering. Reasonably, the most you should ever really expect from a trout is that it tries out your fly because it could be food. If I can just get the fish to pluck the fly, taking it up for consideration as food, by all counts I should be able to hook the fish, as long as I’ve remained in contact with the fly.
Now that I think of it, there really is a lot going on. On the other hand, what makes a good trout fly is not so much all that goes into it, but instead, what you leave out. It was Gary LaFontaine, I think, who introduced us to the notion that we don’t need flies that trout say yes to; what’s most important, goes the argument, is that there’s nothing about a fly the trout rejects. What you need from the fish is only a could be response — not necessarily an emphatic yes. The perfect match to a specific hatch — or the perfect moment in a hatch — is always satisfying; it’s also how you can end up carrying a hundred dozen flies each time you step into the river. A very different approach, and one that can prove equally satisfying, is relying on just a few patterns that, day in and day out, trout will examine with this could be grab. Patterns of this nature allow you to stop thinking or worrying so much about your fly and concentrate, instead, on your presentation and all that presenting the fly implies.
But don’t get me wrong: It’s not just old favorites that go into the single box. There are also experiments, something you got from somewhere or somebody else, something that initiated your own could be response. Or that you created yourself. Good fly anglers are rarely complacent; few of us are ever completely satisfied with the lineup at hand. While restocking our supply of old favorites, we inevitably try our hand at something new. Or at least different. For years now, my Wild Hare has often been one of two flies I tie either to the end of my tippet or to a tag end left long from my tippet Blood Knot, whenever I’m unsure if the trout are actively feeding on any specific insect or stage of an insect’s life. A Wild Hare is simply a Gold-Ribbed Hare’s Ear that’s been tweaked to my tastes, modified and reduced to the components that I feel are essential for the fly to pass as either a preemergent caddis or mayfly or, my favorite criterion, something else appealing to trout. In other words, a classic could be fly, as generic as an Adams and, in my game, just as effective.
If not more so. Still, you wonder. So lately, I’ve been tying a dark version of the fly, the Dark Hare. The idea is that this dark version is a closer approximation of typical mayfly nymphs and emergers, often a much darker shade than typical caddis larvae or pupae. Or that’s the rationale. This is a pattern I actually now use interchangeably with the Wild Hare and Peter Syka’s version of a Pheasant Tail, and, lo and behold, the one that spends the most time in the water catches the most fish.
Oh, and one more thing: I just went to my vest and pulled out the single box that I was fishing from during my recent spell on the river. The box actually contains 47 flies — not exactly a bare-bones arsenal. Wild Hares, Dark Hares, Flymphs, Pheasant Tails, soft-hackle patterns, plus, an elegant caddis pattern I watched a guy at a shop in British Columbia tie, just for me, when I asked about what he used when bazillions of bugs clouded the horizon each evening above giant macking rainbows.
Could be. . . .
Materials
Hook: TMC 3671 or similar, size 12 to
Thread: Black 8/0 Uni-Thread, UTC 70
Tail: Dark brown elk mane
Rib: Narrow gold tinsel
Abdomen: Soft fur from hare’s mask, dyed dun
Thorax/Head/Etc.: Dun hare’s mask guard hairs spun into dubbing loop
Tying Instructions
Step 1: Secure the hook in the vise and start the thread. Yesterday, when I tied some Dark Hares with Joe Kelly, I pulled out a half dozen different nymph and wet-fly hooks, an assortment that reflects both my indecisive nature and the wealth of subtle variations available to tyers who like to explore different presentations made possible simply by changing the style of hook you marry to a pattern. If your fly is designed so that it swims at an effective attitude in the water, attention paid to the hook on which the fly is tied will prove more effective than just fiddling, say, with split shot on your leader.
Step 2: For the tail of the fly, clip a small tuft of dark elk mane from the skin. Clean the underfur from the base of the hair. Align the tips with a hair stacker. At the start of the hook bend, tie in a short, stubby tail. The idea for this type of tail (rather than one made from a few longer feather fibers or the like) is that it suggests a tail while also extending the tapered abdomen of the fly — plus, it serves as a substantial rudder so that, again, the fly swims with the proper attitude in the water. Clip the butts of the tail hair and cover them with thread wraps, beginning to create shape for the body or abdomen.
Step 3: After covering the tail butts, secure a length of small flat gold tinsel and wind the thread back to the root of the tail. To create the abdomen of the fly, use the soft fur found near the temples, cheeks, and forehead of a hare’s mask. I use a mask dyed dun for this pattern. Wax the tying thread and form a dubbing noodle by twisting the soft fur onto the thread. Since you’ve already built up the abdomen with thread wraps over the butts of the tail material, make the noodle so that it starts out as sparse as possible, tapering to a slightly thicker diameter as you continue down the thread. Most flies of this style are tied with too much bulk; insects have slender, delicate bodies. Wind the noodle forward, tapering the abdomen as you advance the wraps. Stop the abdomen with at least one-third of the hook shank still showing; even half the hook shank is rarely too much. Crowding the forward portion of this type of fly is another common error. Once the abdomen is formed, rib the fly with three or four evenly spaced turns of tinsel.
Step 4: Now we are at what I consider the crux of the fly: you create the thorax, legs, and head all in one step. The two crucial components in this step are the material you use and a “hair hackle” created with a dubbing loop and dubbing tool. The material used is the stiff, dark, spiky hair from up and down the edges of the hare’s mask. I cut a bunch of this hair from a mask and keep it in a separate container. Form a dubbing loop with the thread. Your dubbing-loop tool — even just a pair of hackle pliers — hangs from the bottom of the loop. Wax the loop thread liberally — you’re trying to make the legs of the loop sticky. Then take up a pinch of the spiky ear hair and dab it onto the waxed side (facing you) of the loop legs. You’re trying to get the hairs to stick perpendicularly to the legs, but don’t fuss with it too much, or you’ll just end up bumping the thread and knocking loose a bunch of hair. After the hair is stuck to the loop legs, spin the dubbing tool. The thread not only catches the hairs, but as you continue to twist the tool, the turns of thread double up on themselves and the loop grows shorter, the hackle more compressed. You don’t need to end up with much, unless you’re tying a big fly.
Step 5: Now that you’ve got your hair hackle formed, simply wind it forward. As you do, brush back the tips of the hackle with your fingers and keep one wrap ahead of the other. Wind right up to the eye of the hook, leaving just enough room to tie off the hair hackle loop with the working thread, clip the excess hackle, and then whip finish. Saturate the final thread wraps with lacquer or your favorite head cement, trying not to soil any of the hair hackle. (For a picture of the Dark Hare after completion of step 5, see the image that’s shown on the first page of this column.)
