I’m overseas, fishing a famous river for sea-run fish, when a scatter of resident trout begin sticking up their noses, feeding on one or the other of a handful of different mayflies we’ve seen f littering about now and then throughout an otherwise quiet day. My guide, the writer Finlay Wilson, who’s not really guiding today because I can’t afford to hire him, much less the cost of a day on the Duke of Northumberland’s private beat, puts up a 4-weight and suggests I give the trout a go.
“I’ll get another rod and see what I can do, too.”
I can see right off it’s going to be about as tough as it gets — low, slow tailout, the trout obviously sipping on something emerging, although now and then there’s a loud, hungry slurp that tells you they are willing to play that game, too, should we feel so inclined.
But Fin has already tied a rough deer hair emerger, something he called his Deer Hair Shuckster, to my leader. I get down in a crouch and work my way out across rocks the size of melons, exposed by the low flows. As close as I dare, I pick out a larger fish rising above a little dark spot surrounded by shallows and eager dinks. I can blow a cast like this with the best of them, but one thing I’ve learned, this far into the game, is think what I might, I’ve got nothing to lose.
This one lands just about where I aimed. The fly drifts. The trout pounces. I raise the tip of the rod.
Nothing.
“You moved him,” says Fin. Fin slides down lower in the tailout, and while I try the same fish and then a half-dozen others, I watch Fin out of the corner of my eye as he creeps out onto a spine of shallow rocks, settles onto his haunches, and proceeds to watch and wait. About the time I’ve put down every trout I can reach, Fin finally casts.
I see the swirl, the flinch of Fin’s rod tip — and then the sudden slump of his shoulders.
“ Wha’d’you move it with? I ask, headed Fin’s way.
“Jingler,” he says, holding up a scruffy, oversized dry.
“What’s that?”
“About the only mayfly pattern I use.”
I’ve written before that one of the pleasures I get out of traveling to look for fish is stumbling upon fly patterns that seem far removed from anything we might use back home. Despite the internet and the increased homogeneity of our world today, there are in fact flies and whole schools of thought that your local fly shop, favorite blogger, video maestro, or circle of friends isn’t selling or perhaps even aware of.
The next evening, after we have managed to find one of the famous river’s illustrious Atlantic salmon, Fin and I celebrate with a wee dram each of a Speyside single malt that goes down as smoothly as one of those trout, the day before, sipping a mayfly or mayfly emerger from the surface of the greasy slick tailout. Fin’s as happy as I am that we landed the fish, but he’s still troubled a bit that we didn’t stick one of those resident brown trout the day before.
“I never did see what they were feeding on,” I offer.
“Doesn’t matter,” says Fin. “The Jingler always works when mayflies are around. It’s not a Bob Wyatt pattern, but it’s the same idea.” “Bob Wyatt?”
Sometimes I feel like such a rube. I get home and track down Wyatt’s What Trout Want (subtitle: The Educated Trout and Other Myths), nearly a decade old now, but still rich with the freshest of ideas and insights, especially in this era of microniche approaches to trout fishing, where we’re told, over and over again, that the single most important aspect of success is the perfect hatch matching fly. Either that or striking them on the nose with a tiny, hard-bodied fluorescent jig, fished on a leader that would not turn over an Adams.
Wyatt’s thesis, by way of contrast, begins with what he calls the myth of selective or educated trout. Half a century of fishing for difficult trout in difficult waters has convinced Wyatt that trout aren’t smart, just spooky, and the way you fool them is with better casts and better presentations, not new or improved or even revolutionary flies. Wyatt relies on about a half-dozen generic patterns, tied in different sizes, it’s true, but almost never targeted to match one particular mayfly or caddisfly or another.
Sound familiar? Yet even for someone who believes in common or traditional impressionistic patterns as much as I do, who argues the way to catch more fish, especially trout, is to improve one’s fishing skills, not by searching out the latest and greatest new patterns (or gear), even I find Wyatt radical. A half-dozen patterns?
Makes me want to throw out the contents of most of my fly boxes and start all over again.
What’s common to most of the few generic patterns that Wyatt shares in What Trout Want is his reliance on flies that sit in the surface of a river, lake, or stream, not on the water’s surface. These are either damp dry f lies or surface or emerging nymphs. Call them what you will, they’re often fished dressed with floatant, but rarely entirely dressed, because Wyatt believes that trout are nearly always more apt to take a bug struggling to breach the surface film, rather than one on top of the water that might fly off at any moment.
Hence the Jingler. It’s a dry fly, sort of — or at least a pattern to be fished with adults on the water, the fish up and looking for them. There’s no way, however, it’s going to ride high and dry like, say, a Humpy or a palmered Elk Hair Caddis, on the tips of the partridge feather wound in as a secondary hackle perpendicular to the hook shank. Instead, by saturating the partridge with floatant, then fluffing it again into separate fibers, you’ll get them to keep the fly from sinking, drifting on the surface with fibers splayed in the manner of legs, unfolding or collapsed wings, an almost jettisoned nymphal shuck, or any other appendage, healthy or tweaked or otherwise, that makes a fly resemble something alive that a trout is eager to eat.
Of course, any claims as to why a pattern works are always suspect. Wyatt offers countless firsthand examples of trout refusing or ignoring a cast, which is the moment when so many of us generally feel compelled to change flies, and then the fish finally eating that same fly when a better or at least different cast is presented. That’s more or less the basis for Wyatt’s thesis: yes, your fly does matter, but if the size and silhouette are close, and you construct the fly so that its abdomen settles down below the surface film, then you really don’t have to fret over color or other details, just make sure, instead, that you manage to present the fly correctly, which usually means a dragfree drift, one that hasn’t already alerted the trout by way of a misdirected line or leader or even waving rod tip.
Easy? Hardly. But it’s an attitude that places the weight of the responsibility for success squarely on the trout angler’s shoulders, rather than trying to convince us that our success depends on our ability to create or acquire or somehow discover the right fly. The right flies already exist, claims Wyatt. We just need to know which ones to choose — and how to use them.
A fan of Bob Wyatt, Finlay Wilson has settled on the Jingler as a fly he turns to when mayflies are on the water. Any mayflies. He doesn’t worry about genus, species, number of tail fibers, or even the exact size. Although Jinglers are often associated with March Browns and other early season mayflies, Fin believes in his Jinglers the way that some of us used to believe in the Adams, the way that UK anglers believe in the Grey Duster, or for that matter, the Greenwell’s Glory. Something new? According to Bob Wyatt, if you believe trout can think, can remember, and grow increasingly educated over time, you’ll inevitably feel the way to fool them is with new and better f lies. But if you realize, on the other hand, that trout are hardwired to eat while at the same time remaining acutely sensitive to their always dangerous surroundings, you’ll choose flies that are close enough to what trout like best — emerging or drifting aquatic insects — and focus on casts that these same fish simply can’t refuse.
Materials
Hook: Standard dry fly, size 10 to 16
Thread: Rusty brown 8/0 UNI-Thread, or similar
Tail: Coq de Leon
Rib: Tying thread
Body: Mix of scruffy dubbing material from a hare’s mask
Hackle, aft: Brown dry-fly hackle (called “red cock” in the UK)
Hackle, forward: Partridge
Tying Instructions
Step 1: Secure the hook in the vise and start the thread behind the hook eye. Cover the hook shank with touching thread wraps, leaving the tag end of the thread to use later as ribbing. Forward of the bend of the hook, tie in ten to fifteen Coq de Leon feather fibers so that the tail ends up about the length of the hook shank. If you like the look that results, make your final thread wrap under the root of the tail, causing the tail to tilt slightly upward.

Step 2: Almost everyone who fishes the Jingler comments that it seems to work best the more scruffy or straggly it looks. Your dubbing mix should reflect that notion. Still, less is better. Create a slender dubbing noodle on your thread, guide the noodle up the thread so that the top of it touches the hook, and then wrap the noodle forward, creating a thin, but slightly tapered body. Stop well short of the hook eye, leaving lots of room for the two hackles to come. Now rib the fly with several evenly spaced turns of tying thread from the tag end left behind earlier.

Step 3: For the first hackle, select a feather with barb length about one and a half times the hook gape. Strip the lower portion of the stem. With the concave or underside of the feather facing you, the tip pointed toward the tail of the fly, tie in the feather by the remaining lower stem. Make four or five turns of the hackle feather. Again, the common belief is the scruffier the better — you don’t need to try to set each turn of hackle right in front of the previous turn.

Step 4: Now choose a small partridge feather with strong barring. If you are selecting a feather from a skin, these are the feathers around what would be the neck of the bird. Pinch the very tip of the feather and gently stroke the remaining fibers toward the butt of the stem — you are trying to leave just a few fibers at the tip, which will be the tie-in point. It’s a little tricky, but if you can now clip off the point, leaving just a bit of the tip stem and the butts of the tip fibers, you can tie in the feather, concave side facing forward, directly in front of the previous hackle without needing to trim away any excess stem or excess tip fibers. Make sure, however, you get a few tight turns of thread against the tip. Now, keeping the concave or underside of the feather facing forward, make two or three turns of hackle, one in front of the other. The small partridge feather won’t allow for excess hackling. Secure the butt of the stem with several tight turns of thread.

Step 5: Create a small, tidy head, whip finish, and saturate the thread wraps with lacquer or your favorite head cement.When fishing the Jingler, Fin dressed the combined hackle with a liberal coating of floatant without dressing the body or tail. Then he brushed back and blew on the hackle fibers to separate them, and he was good to go.