At the Vise: The Alder Fly

When my fishing buddy Joe Kelly shot a turkey last spring, I felt complicit enough to lay claim to a few of the big tom’s tail feathers. We’d spotted birds while out with some gals hunting for early season morels, the tasty mushrooms that offer a good reason to wander about in the woods when the trout in our home rivers are just coming off their spawning redds, in no need of pestering from anyone. A week later, we were driving backroads to a jump-off point into a canyon reach of a local steelhead river when a pair of hens scurried away from our approaching truck. We were all set to fish again the next afternoon, only to discover that overnight rains had blown out the river, turning it from a milky, snowmelt green to the color of cardboard or khaki trousers.

“Guess I’ll go look for a bird,” said Joe as I finished unloading my gear from the back of his truck.

He phoned that evening and said he got one.

I hurried over to Joe’s house to inspect the kill. I’d been looking for feathers, not the usual quills from the wing, commonly used for Muddlers, but instead, the dark, copper-and-chocolate striped tail feathers. But not the longest primary tail feathers, either, the ones that create the striking halo like display if you find a tom posing for a bunch of hens. Just forward of the longest tail feathers, you can find another sweep of quills that are about half as long, almost symmetrical, heavily barred, with just a splash of ginger along the uppermost margins — the perfect feathers for tying the wing of an Alder wet fly.

The pattern, claims Dave Hughes in his book Wet Flies, was first tied in 1858 by one Charles Kingsley, who fished the fly on the River Itchen, hallowed waters in Hampshire, England. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a real alderfly — in England or anywhere else. In photos, they look a lot like big caddisflies, which I do see a lot of where I look for trout. Hughes tells us that alderflies, unlike caddisflies, are lousy swimmers; they don’t float, and they tend to sink without really swimming. Hence the wet-fly pattern, one that Hughes believes fishes most effectively without giving it any action, allowing it to sink through the water column, where it often gets eaten, until you finally retrieve enough to start your next cast.

This is usually on lakes or other stillwater fisheries, ones where trees line the shore. Hughes says he’s had little experience fishing the Alder Fly in moving water; where it’s proven most successful, he says, is where “a current tongue peters out into a deep pool.” Then, in the very next sentence in this discussion of the Alder Fly, Hughes offers what I feel is his most important thought on the matter: “But I’m never sure when I do this whether I’m imitating a natural alderfly or just showing the trout a fly that looks like something good to eat, as likely to be mistaken for a dark caddisfly as for an alderfly.”

Exactly.

We return, once more, to a phrase that describes many of my favorite trout flies: looks like something good to eat. Very often, that’s close enough. Just this past weekend, on a reach of unmolested water where I was pretty certain the caddis would stir once the sun went down, I inspected my lineup of Alder wet flies and thought, Yes, that should do nicely. Like many anglers, I often fish light-colored caddisfly patterns, for the simple reason that most caddisflies, although certainly not all of them, tend to be pale. But most everyone I know who fishes on or near the surface in low light agrees that trout and other fish, looking up, see dark flies best because of the silhouette they create while backlit by the sky above, even when we reach the point when we can no longer see the flies ourselves.

Whether the spectacular trouting that followed after I tied on a little Alder Fly and began swinging it through some likely chattering caddis water had anything to do with my choice of fly will probably remain a mystery. Downstream, Joe Kelly said he caught 30 fish that evening without moving from a certain rock, all with a big, ugly nymph that could have eaten a dozen of my Alder Flies if it were an actual bug alive in the water. You never know. But I liked the looks of my offering as an approximation of a small dark caddis — and I certainly liked how the trout, many of which ended up taking me into my backing, came to the surface and smacked the swinging cast with the ferocity with which trout often take caddisflies swimming through their feeding lanes. You know what those evening head-and-shoulder rises look like — the ones that actually reveal trout pivoting back toward deeper water after they rush to the surface to nab swimming caddis pupae or ascending or egg-laying adults. In my eyes, there’s nothing prettier, if only because I feel an unusual amount of confidence swinging sparse little wet f lies downstream to this sort of rising trout. That evening, they climbed all over my Alder Fly.

Of course, who’s to say: they might have taken a size 14 Hare’s Ear just as well.


When I returned home and sat down to refresh my stock of Alder Flies, I was struck by the simplicity of the original pattern: three common natural materials, although all of them might not be on every tyer’s bench. I believe in substituting materials whenever I don’t have immediately at hand what a specific pattern calls for, yet now and then in this column I also recommend acquiring certain materials, if only because I think tyers will find them useful for more flies than the one I’m describing.

A cape of furnace wet-fly hackle, for example. Like badger hackle, furnace feathers sport a dark stripe along the stem, which gives you that saucy two-tone effect when you wind the feather around the hook shank. Contrast between parts of a fly has always seemed to me a critical element — more important, perhaps, than actual color. Of course, all such notions may have more to say about what I like than what interests a trout. I can go on and on about how that dark patch at the center of a wound furnace hackle feather creates the impression of both the head and the thorax of an emerging or adult aquatic insect, but I’m really only telling you why I reach for a certain pattern, one I believe will do the job when I know I have fish feeding in front of me. When the fly works, I want to say “See? I told you!” — when in fact, all I really know is that I didn’t scare the fish away.

And what about those turkey tail feathers? Do you really need them to tie a successful Alder Fly, especially if you are actually going to use the fly to fool fish feeding on caddis? In the end, these may well be rhetorical or theoretical or even philosophical questions, answers to which might not prove forthcoming if we haven’t yet resolved them over the 162 years since Mr. Kingsley first flung his latest concoction from the banks of the lovely Itchen. I’m OK with that. When I stumbled into camp at dark after clobbering fish with the Alder Fly, I found Joe sipping a beer; he waited politely for me to describe my success before he related the slaughter in which he had just participated. Nevertheless, I was moved to suggest that I may have hit upon a new — for me — red-hot pattern, one that was sure to terrorize trout up and down the river.

“Just like your flymphs,” said Joe, handing me a bottle. “Or was it the Dark Hare last time? The Wet Caddis? The Zug Bug?”

He had a point. Fishing had been pretty good the past couple of seasons. Maybe I had it right from the start — your fly is the last thing that matters.

But unless you try them all, how will you ever know?

Materials

Hook: Standard wet fly, size 12 to 16

Thread: Black

Hackle: Furnace hen hackle

Body: Peacock herl twisted into a dubbing loop

Wing: Secondary turkey tail feather

Tying Instructions

Step 1: Secure the hook in the vise and start the thread directly behind the eye. Now’s as good a time as any to review the traditional method for tying soft-hackled wet f lies, with the hackle lashed to the hook before creating the rest of the fly. The technique calls for orienting the hackle feather so that when you wind it back to the body of the fly, the feather fibers curve toward the aft end of the fly while also allowing you to lock the hackle stem under wraps of tying thread. Strip any waste from the stem of the feather up to a point where the fibers are about one-and-a half or twice the width of the hook gape. Point the tip of the feather ahead of the hook eye with the convex curve of the feather facing you. Directly below the lowest fibers, lash the stem of the feather on top of the hook shank, just behind the hook eye. Some soft-hackle feathers — especially traditional Hungarian partridge — are easier to deal with if you first flatten them with the tips of your thumbnail and the nail of your middle finger.

STEP 1
STEP 1

Step 2: Now wind your thread in even wraps back to the start of the hook bend. One of the reasons I like traditional wet-fly hooks such as the old Mustad 3906 is that the hook shank is surprisingly short; you don’t have room to oversize the body, a common mistake with many patterns, especially imitations of caddisflies, the bodies of which should be disproportionately smaller than the wing. You should end up with a small fly on a size 14 hook, a hook still large enough, however, to sink plenty of steel into the business end of a large trout. For an Alder Fly, I create a dubbing loop — that is, hook a dubbing-loop tool (or hackle pliers) around the tying thread about three inches below the fly; then, while maintaining tension with whatever tool you use, catch the thread at the top of the loop with a wrap at the bend of the hook. Lay down an even layer of thread wraps forward to a point about one-third the hook shank back from the eye of the hook. Wax the legs of the loop and insert a couple of strands of peacock herl. Spin the loop so that the herl gets trapped by the twisting legs of the loop and, as the twists tighten, you end up with a rope of herl woven into the twisted thread, which will prevent the herl from breaking as soon as a trout begins to gnaw on the fly. Finally, wind the herl rope forward to where you’ve positioned the tying thread, catch the rope under thread wraps, and clip the excess.

STEP 2
STEP 2

Step 3: Now clip your hackle pliers to the tip of the feather extending ahead of the fly. Make several turns of hackle, starting behind the hook eye and progressing back to the body of the fly. Catch the hackle stem under a wrap of thread and then advance the thread through the hackle two or three times until the thread is directly behind the hook eye. Trim the excess hackle feather and, if needed, stroke back the hackle fibers and tidy up the hackle with a few more wraps of thread.

STEP 3
STEP 3

Step 4: For the wing, I use a one eighth-inch to three-sixteenth-inch wide sections of fibers from both sides of a secondary turkey tail feather. Much as I try to fashion a pair of those classic wet-fly wings, however, the thin tips of the turkey feathers generally lose their shape, and I end up with a ragged bundle of fibers, much like you get when tying a caddisfly with stacked elk or deer hair. The fish don’t seem to mind. These bundled feather tips are generally quite supple, which means you get a lot more movement than you do with hair, and they allow the fly to sink a bit more than hair does, although a couple of nights ago, I kept noticing that my Alder Fly was waking in swift current just below the surface before trout pounced on it. Tie in a wing that extends at least to the bend of the hook, clip the butts of the wing fibers, and create a tidy head. Whip finish and saturate the thread wraps with lacquer or your favorite head cement.

STEP 4
STEP 4
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