The list of flies to tie is long. And frankly, a little daunting. Who knows, in the middle of winter, if he or she will even make it to another trout season? Who knows, given the times in which we live, if the trout will still be there?
In winter, we tie on faith. Some years are harder than others. We want to believe. But for many of us, until we can see it right in front of us, until a trip’s been scheduled and we know something about the fish and the fishing, the water and the season and the bugs, it all remains an abstraction, an idea we hold in our minds without the urgency and dare I say lust we feel on a visceral level when the time draws near and we head to the vise with purpose.
Tying while we’re keen, when emotions are up and the senses sharp, when we can recall immediately the pleasure of hooking a fish and the disappointment of failing to fool others, inspires us to pour into fly tying the same energy and intensity and hopeful creativity we bring to the water. At such times, we generally sit down with strong notions about what we want our flies to look like, how we want them to behave. This is one of the reasons I advocate tying flies immediately after a trip or any visit to the water. Do it while the memories are fresh, when you know exactly what you wanted to find when you opened your box. Put a dozen of those dogs in there right now, and the next time you encounter the same situation — or something quite like it — you’ll open that box again and think, Dude, you got ’em. But it’s a lot harder in winter. You know what your life looks like better than I do. Given the demands, the obligations, the quotidian weight, who’s got a chance to take a deep breath, much less stop, sit still, and tie? The flies can wait.
Can’t they?
I recommend they don’t.
For most of us who are amateur tyers, the single biggest obstacle to sitting down and busting out a dozen or two flies is the effort it takes to set up and start. I’ve written often of the sad angler who hasn’t yet claimed the appropriate space in his or her life to create a tying station, however minimal, however small, and leave it there ready for whenever the spirit moves. Let’s be frank about it: that spirit, in whatever guise, will appear more frequently if you can drop into a seat and immediately start tying.
The second biggest obstacle, for many of us, is simply clutter. It’s hard to get started if the first step you have to take is to clear a spot amidst a tangle of hooks and spools and materials that have collected like old food in a refrigerator. I’m so bad about tidying up after finishing one pattern and before starting another that I sometimes just move my vise and tools to a new location — an abdication of efficiency for which there’s really no excuse, other than that I live alone and I can get away with it. For a while. Of course, the other kind of clutter that many tyers also have to contend with is stuff that somehow magically appears on any horizontal surface left unattended for any length of time. Since I do live alone, you can imagine my consternation in dealing with this problem. Who the hell put that there? For those of you who have chosen a more sociable living arrangement, I suggest either caution tape or a miniature electric fence, if someone in your life doesn’t respect the boundaries of your tying space.
A final problem, for many winter or out-of-season trout tyers, is the question of where to begin.
Funny you should ask.
Given a commitment to an established tying station, as well as to maintaining a semblance of order around your vise, let me also propose an organizational strategy for your winter trout tying. Hence the title of this column. The E refers to Ephemeroptera, the order of insects we know as mayflies, favorite fare of our beloved trout. The three phases, however, are not the well-known stages nymph, dun, spinner — of a mayfly’s life, all of which the fly fisher will find important, to varying degrees, depending on the type of mayfly and where and when it’s found. Instead of these stages, my three phases refer to three types of flies I tie for any mayfly hatch I hope to encounter during a season. These three types don’t cover the entire scope of a mayfly hatch; nymphs, you’ll notice, are not included. But these are the mayfly patterns I reach for most often as soon as I see signs of a hatch, either because I know how to fish these patterns or because I like they way they fool fish.
Which may well be the same thing.
Hare’s Ear Soft Hackle
Hook: Mustad 9671 or similar, size 10 to 18
Thread: Camel 8/0 Uni-Thread
Tail: Light-tipped deer hair, stacked, tied short
Rib: Small flat gold tinsel
Abdomen: Softer, paler hair from the face of a hare’s mask, spun in a dubbing loop
Thorax/wing pad: Dark, spiky material from around the ears of a hare’s mask,
spun into a dubbing loop
Hackle: Hungarian partridge for larger flies, hen hackle for smaller
Notes: This is my all-purpose mayfly emerger pattern, fished either low in the water column, sometimes with the help of lead on the tippet, or, with floatant dabbed to the hackle or thorax, fished all the way at the surface. Or anywhere in between. There’s nothing better, of course, than swinging this fly to trout set up in current downstream that are picking off nymphs headed toward the surface. Judicious mending is the best way to slow down a swinging fly, perhaps the most important aspect of presentation. Also, many wet-fly neophytes or simply impatient anglers pick up and recast their soft hackles too soon. If the trout are there and feeding, they’re looking for easy marks. It’s a long time after your line appears to stop swinging before the fly actually stops, especially if you’ve removed the lead from your leader and chosen a fly tied without weight on a medium or light-wire hook. Trout move effortlessly in soft currents. Give them a chance. If they’re fooled, they’ll cock their pectorals and rise.
There’s nothing new about tying this pattern. Obviously, you can tweak it to cover the mayflies you find on your water. Size is the most important variable, color a distant second. I do like hare’s masks that are dyed different colors, but I’m not convinced I ever do better than with patterns tied from the light and dark parts of the natural. Although professionals I know hate using dubbing tools, I find mine indispensable for creating the look I want for both the abdomen and thorax, with its bold impression of wings about to unfold. Whatever type of hackle material you choose, first tie in the feather by the stem before you tie the rest of the fly.
Then, after you’ve finished the thorax, leaving yourself plenty of room behind the eye of the hook, wind the hackle back toward the thread. Finally, wind the thread forward to the eye, locking the hackle in place.
Hairwing Dun
Hook: TMC 5212 or similar 2X-long dry fly hook, size 8 to 16, TMC 100 for smaller sizes
Thread: Camel 8/0 Uni-Thread
Wing: Natural elk hair or coastal deer hair, upright and divided
Tail: Moose body hair
Rib: Pearsall’s Gossamer Silk, doubled, shades lighter and contrasting with dubbing
Body: Dark tan Super Fine Dubbing, or color to match naturals
Hackle: Dun and brown, mixed
Notes: The Hairwing Dun is an obvious choice once you see mayflies on the water and you’re sure that’s what the trout are feeding on. This is a generic, impressionistic dun; it’s rarely the only one I’ll have in my box for a hatch I’ve encountered in the past, but I know it will get me in the game, and it may be the exact fly I need if the water has much pace or texture to it. I wish I got to cast in these situations more often than I do. In fact, this is the phase of E I find myself using least, probably because I don’t find myself fishing the sort of classic hatch rivers described so often in the literature. If the trout are really up and feeding on duns, this is probably the easiest kind of trout fishing there is. I know dry-fly aficionados who will treat that opinion with scorn. Let’s just say if you know how to cast, a fish rushing to duns is a pretty straightforward proposition: hit it on the nose, and chances are it will eat.
Everybody probably already ties a generic mayfly dun that works. The Adams is the archetype. The Hairwing Dun follows more along the lines of the classic Wulff patterns, which float almost as well as a Humpy, but offer a more slender, more mayflylike profile.
Is there anything you haven’t seen here? Moose hair makes for a long, stout tail, essential for balancing the fly so that it floats in the correct position or attitude, especially important with larger imitations that can end up on their noses because of their oversized wings.
Hairwing flies are never an easy tie. Tie in a tuft of stacked hair with the tips pointed forward, then prop up the hair with a dam of thread wraps, divide the wing, and use figure-eight wraps to hold the separated halves in place. But nothing beats a hairwing fly for holding its shape and coming back from a serious dunking. And did I mention that these things float? Commercially tied patterns using the latest synthetic materials will always grace the lead-off spots in a so-called cutting-edge lineup. But if you just sit down and get to work on a few dozen Hairwing Duns in about three different sizes, I bet you’ll do just fine during the mayfly hatches you encounter during the upcoming trout season.
Not a Klinkhåmer Cripple
Hook: Daiichi 1167 or similar, size 10 to 18
Thread: Camel 8/0 Uni-Thread
Wing: Dark elk hair, divided and in line with the forward curve of hook
Thorax: Butts of wing material
Tail: Tips marabou barbels used for body
Body: Marabou, tan or color to match naturals
Rib: Pearsall’s Gossamer Silk, doubled, color to contrast with body
Hackle: Brown or color to match naturals, a size smaller than for typical dry fly
Notes: Almost everybody knows that a crippled mayfly pattern can be just what you need if you find yourself fishing over snooty trout that don’t seem willing to break through the surface to grab your floating dun. The beauty of the best cripple patterns is the attitude of the fly — the way the body or abdomen hangs beneath the surface, as if the rising nymph is trapped in the film. The curved Klinkhåmer hook (or even the old TMC 200, if used correctly) made it easy to create a fly that rides with the bend of the hook curving beneath the surface of the water. The Not a Klinkhåmer takes it one step further, giving you a fly with a body that’s perpendicular to the surface if not even a little past vertical.
But it has wings! you might argue. How can it be a cripple? Well, I have a lot of answers to this and to most every question about why flies I use work. But the only answers that really matter are the ones you get directly from the fish you’re after. I suspect there’s a real name for the Not a Klinkhåmer, and probably a story about who invented it and how it came to exist. I just ran into an old guy (older than I am) on a river with big, challenging trout feeding each evening on a smattering of big mayflies. The guy was catching fish on this pattern. I tied some up, and the trout I showed ’em to all seemed to say yes.
Step 1: Secure the hook in the vise. If you’re using Uni-Thread, run the first bit of it across your tying or dubbing wax. That gives you a better chance of keeping the wing hair, in the next step, from escaping your control. Start your thread and lay down a base of wraps over the forward third of the hook.
Step 2: Any kind of hair you feel comfortable working with is appropriate for the wing of this pattern. (In smaller sizes, you might consider kip tail or calf body hair, for example.) Clean and stack a tuft of hair — a little is better than too much. Lay the tuft of stacked hair along the top of the hook shank — the tips of the hair should extend forward, past the eye of the hook, about the length of the body of the fly, which is a bit hard to judge because of the shape of the hook. Starting at about the one-third point back from the hook eye, begin securing the hair with light turns of thread, trying to keep the hair above the hook shank as you wind forward. Eventually, your tie-in point should turn into a wide base of thread wraps, over which you’ll later wind your hackle. At this point, you can also clip the butts of the wing hair, leaving about an eighth of an inch, which, on this cross-phase fly, represents the overdeveloped wing pad. Now, I wish I had some brilliant advice that could make it easy to create the divided wings, lying in line with the hook, that you’re after. Sorry. I know the waxed thread helps, and I go back and forth between figure-eight wraps and a series of wraps around the base of each wing. But mostly I’m just trying to get it right, happy that I’m not also attempting to make money by how many of these things I can tie an hour.
Step 3: Adjust the hook in the vise so you can work deep into the bend. Wind the thread back to where it hangs at an angle at least 45 degrees from the eye of the hook. Cut a short length of silk thread, double it up, and run it over your tying wax. Secure it to the hook, then make several more turns of thread farther back along the hook. From a single marabou feather, clip six to eight barbs; with the tips aligned, and twist the feather barbs into a loose rope. Secure the marabou rope, leaving the tips of the barbs extended past the bend of the hook for the tail.
Step 4: Advance the thread to the clipped butts of the wing. Create the body of the fly by winding your rope of twisted marabou to the wing butts. You may find it easier to hold the butt end of the marabou barbs in a pair of hackle pliers, keeping a light twist in the barbs as you wind forward. Secure the marabou aft of the wing butts and clip the excess. Now rib the body or abdomen of the fly with the waxed silk thread. It will sort of just disappear in the marabou — but the fish can see the segmented effect, which is where the gills of a mayfly nymph lie, and the thread protects the marabou from unraveling after the touch of a trout’s teeth.
Step 5: Strip the base of the stem of your hackle feather. Secure the stem at the aft end of the thread wraps that hold the wing hairs in place. Advance the thread to the forward end of these same thread wraps. Make five or six turns of hackle, one in front of the other. Secure the hackle with the thread and clip the excess. I whip finish this fly behind the base of the wings; I suspect you could do the same between the base of the wings and just aft of the hook eye. Wherever you finish, saturate the thread wraps with lacquer or head cement.
