Category Archives: Wet Flies

The Drowned Ant soft-hackled wet

Farmington River dry fly angler extraordinaire Don Butler likes to say, “Ants is good food.” He’ll get no argument from me – or the trout. As we move into deeper into summer, terrestrials — ants, beetles, hoppers, crickets, and even field mice — become a significant food source for opportunistic feeders. This fly is a variation of the classic soft-hackle Starling and Herl. All I’ve done is add a few wraps of thread to form an ant-like body segment. You can also treat this fly with Frog’s Fanny and fish it like a dry. A lethal summertime wet, especially on small wooded streams with wild trout populations. I also do very well with this fly on the Farmington River. Now, I’ve never seen an ant tread water in a three-knot current, but I get plenty of trout fishing the Drowned Ant on the dangle. This pattern is so impressionistic it could easily double for any number of darker bodied caddis or stoneflies. Only trout know what they think it is, and at the very least, it’s that it looks like something alive and good to eat. I almost always have this fly tied on my wet fly dropper rig from June through September.

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Hook: 1x fine, size 10-18
Thread: Black 8/0
Hackle: Iridescent starling body feather
Body: Two strands peacock herl, twisted on a thread rope
Segment: Working thread
 
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A head-on view. Starling is a fragile hackling material, but it does wonderful things in the water.
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Tying notes: For a more durable fly, make a rope of herl and thread before you wind the body. I tie this on a fine wire hook, and fish it as the top or middle fly in a three-fly team. When I was working this pattern out in my head, I considered using a more solid material for the body, like wool, working thread, or floss. But there is something about peacock herl and its mystical ability to attract fish that enchanted me. Besides, peacock herl is a traditional material, and seemed a proper nod to the heritage of wet fly tying. There are all kinds of feathers on a starling. Look for those iridescent purplish ones to add another subtle splash of magic to this terrific little fish-catcher.
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The Drowned Ant Soft-Hackle Rogues’  Gallery:
 
7/21/13, Farmington River
BigWildBrownFarmy 7:13
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 8/12/14, Farmington River
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The Light Cahill Winged Wet

This is a classic American wet fly, named for Dan Cahill. Ray Bergman wrote in Trout, “If it was necessary to confine my assortment of flies to only two or three, this would be one of them. Basically, it is an Eastern pattern, particularly effective in the Catskill waters and similar Eastern mountain streams.”

High praise indeed. I’ve been fishing this fly with great success for years. So when creamy mayflies are coming off on the Farmington — or any river for that matter — the Light Cahill winged wet is usually  the first fly I’ll tie on. There’s something about wood duck that states “buggy” and “alive” in no uncertain terms. I usually fish at least two of them on a dropper rig, and look to target specific rising fish. Trout will hit the fly on the dead drift (mend your rig like you would a dry) and at the drift’s end. Just let the flies sit there – and hold on. Some of the most violent takes I’ve ever experienced while trout fishing have come on this fly.

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Hook: 2x strong or 1x fine, size 10-20
Thread: Tan 8/0
Hackle: Light ginger or cream hen
Tail: Fibers to match hackle
Rib: Fine gold oval tinsel (optional)
Body: Hareline Dubbin #1 Light Cahill, or light fox
Wing: Wood duck

Tying notes: Sometimes I tie this fly with a tail of wood duck or partridge, or substitute partridge for the hackle. Sometimes I’ll add a gold rib. While all these iterations work, the fly pictured here on a 2x strong hook is the one I fish the most.  I like to keep the body sleek and tapered, so no dubbing loop. It’s a pretty straightforward tie, and you can crank out a bunch in a short time. I’ve seen some versions of this fly where the hackle is clipped off the top half of the fly, but I leave it on. I tie the wing in last.

Farmington River Report: Fishing under the Hendrickson hatch with wet flies

After’s Wednesday’s hatchstravaganza, I decided it was a moral imperative the go back to the Farmington on Thursday. Unfortunately, the time-space continuum prevented me from attempting another daily double. So I sacrificed a repeat of the morning caddis frenzy for Hendricksons in the afternoon.

Got to my spot at 1pm. Not a bug in sight, not a fish rising, but the Hendrickson hatch on the Farmington is like clockwork. Even though you don’t see anything on the surface of the river or in the air, there’s a lot going on down below. First cast, a mend across some current seams into a pocket, and bam! Just like that, we’re catching trout on Hendrickson wets.

Like yesterday, a good mix of stocker browns, chubby rainbows, and holdovers. This brown has been in the river for a while. It took me several attempts to hook him, but it was well worth the wait.

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The hatch was even stronger today, and as it picked up in intensity, it was harder to catch trout, I think because of the sheer number of bugs in the water. Unlike yesterday, where all you had to do was pick a rise and put your flies over it, there were a good half dozen trout today that I could not entice to strike, and another half dozen that took repeated attempts over the course of an hour. Fortunately, there were plenty of wanton gluttons willing to jump on. I caught trout on the dead drift, the greased line swing, and the dangle.

My rig was a Squirrel and Ginger caddis as the top dropper, a Dark Hendrickson winged wet as the second dropper, and another Hendrickson below it. As the hatched waned, I did see some caddis start to come off, and a few of my last fish took the S&G caddis.

And, like clockwork, it was over by 3:30. Water temp was 53 degrees.

Spectacular wet fly action on the Farmington River

“People tell me I’m the world’s greatest comedian. Ask me why people tell me I’m the world’s greatest comedian.”

“Why do people tell you –“

“Timing!”

Sometimes it’s like that with wet flies. Time the hatch just right, and you can look like the second coming of Joe Brooks. Legions of obliging trout and the right fly don’t hurt, either.

Such was my good fortune on Wednesday. The DEEP had recently stocked the upper TMA with several thousand trout. Armed with this intelligence, I met Todd Kuhrt and his brother in New Hartford, and we were on the water by 10:30am. We had won the April weather lottery, with blazing, brilliant sunshine and temperatures that were supposed to climb into the low 60s. I was rigged up for nymphing, so I wandered off to the head of a deep run while Todd and his brother set up shop a hundred yards downstream.

 A nice holdover brown taken on a Dark Hendrickson winged wet.

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Catching nothing when you’re expecting to bail fish is lesson in humility, and I took my licks for an hour. By the time had I worked my way down to Todd and Scott, I still hadn’t had a touch. They had each taken three on nymphs. The ignominy.

But, sometimes you must endure such hardships to reach Nirvana. I realized that what I really wanted to do on this glorious spring day was swing wet flies, smoke cigars, and relish the fact that I was blowing off all the work to do. So I swapped out my nymph rig for a team of three wets I had tied up the night before: a size 14 Partridge and Green dropper, a size 12 Squirrel and Ginger caddis in the middle, and a classic Hendrickson Dark on point. I had just finished nymphing a run, and now I made a quartering cast downstream. The trout hit just after the third mend. First cast. Wet fly. Squirrel and Ginger.

Life was good again.

It was about to get great.

For the previous fifteen minutes, I had been eyeballing some splashy rises about 50 yards downstream from me. Unfortunately, a spin angler had the area on lockdown. But now he was packing up his gear. I coiled my line in my hand and made a beeline for the trail along the river’s edge. This being a gentleman’s sport, it’s probably uncouth for a middle-aged man to race through the woods with his fly rod just to secure a fishing spot. But sometime we must toss propriety to the wind and indulge our inner barbarian.

 The fly of the morning, my Squirrel and Ginger caddis wet.

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The air was teeming was caddis, and the surface film was being punctured by the slashes of feeding trout. I couldn’t see any bugs on the water, so I figured the trout were taking emergers just below the surface. That’s the cool thing about newly stocked fish on the Farmington. They discover pretty quickly that those food pellets aren’t on the menu anymore. I picked out a rise, and made a cast. Bap! On the caddis emerger. In fact, the first eight trout I caught all picked that Squirrel and Ginger out of my lineup of three. I clipped off the Hendrickson and tied another caddis on. I soon had my first double.

Crazy kids. My first double of 2013.

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OK, so they were just dumb stockers. But, it’s hard to embrace self-loathing when you’re having so much fun. I waved Todd and his brother down so they could get in on the caddis orgy that was – hard to believe – building in intensity. I can’t say it was a fish on every cast. But I also can’t remember too many drifts that didn’t draw a strike. All you had to do was look for a rise, then swing your fly over it.

It would have been unfair to expect a repeat on the lower TMA. I really just wanted to see if the Hendrickson hatch was in full swing. Turns out that it was. We got to our target pool around 2:00pm. Same intense, splashy rises, and the air thick with windblown Hendrickson duns. Same drill, too: find a rise. Swing your fly over it. Come tight to the take that was sure to follow. Unfortunately, Todd and his brother had to leave at the height of the action, but I stuck it out for another 45 minutes until the hatch wound down. Upstream, it had been all stocked browns; here, the fish were bigger, with a substantial number of fat rainbows and a few big holdover browns in the bargain.

 Ending on a high note: the best fish of the day was my last, this chubby holdover brown hen. 

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That night, I noticed a little sunburn on my hands. My arm was pretty sore, too. Life’s tough, you know?

The Squirrel and Ginger Caddis Emerger

When it comes to soft-hackles, feathers get all the juice. That’s perfectly understandable. But certain furs – like fox squirrel – make excellent hackling material. The results are often deliciously buggy.

This humble creation is something I made up a few summers ago. I took the Ginger Caddis Larva fuzzy nymph and swapped out the standard wet fly hook for a 2x short scud hook. Added a flashy rib. And replaced the rabbit fur thorax with a hackle of fox squirrel.

The first time I fished this fly was on a brilliant July day that was devoid of hatch activity or rising fish. The sun was high, the air was steamy, and felt a little foolish for making the drive to the Farmington. Until I started hooking fish after fish on this little caddis emerger. It was the middle fly in a team of three, and the trout stated in no uncertain terms that this was their favorite.

The Squirrel and Ginger is a fine introduction to fur-hackled flies. It is fairly easy to tie. Best of all, it’s a wet fly you can have confidence in.

The Squirrel and Ginger

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Hook: TMC 2457 (2x strong, 2x short scud) size 12
Thread: Orange or hot orange
Body: Ginger Angora goat
Rib: Green Krystal flash
Hackle: Fox squirrel fur
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The Squirrel and Ginger Rogues’ Gallery

7/8/13, Farmington River

Brown Buck 7:8:13

4/24/13, Farmington River

Bigbrown hen

7/31/13, wild brown, Farmington River

WIld Farmy Brown 7:13

4/29/15, 17″ holdover brown, Farmington River

Fat Farmy Hen 4:15

A Fuzzy Nymph: The Ginger Caddis Larva

Ever heard of a guide fly? In case you haven’t, guide flies have two qualities: They can be tied quickly, and they are high-confidence fish magnets. The Ginger Caddis Larva is such a fly.

It’s one of those flies that, if you saw it in the bins at your local shop, you might not give it a second look. But the trout certainly will. Angora goat is one of my favorite tying materials. It takes on a translucency underwater, and the fibers trap miniature air bubbles much like an emerging or diving caddis might.

The Ginger Caddis Larva is a quintessential fuzzy nymph; I fish it as nymph, bouncing it along the bottom, then as a wet, letting the fly swing up toward the surface. I’ll also fish it as a straight wet in a team of three flies. If I don’t get a strike, I let the fly sit there at swing’s end.

This pattern lends itself to dozens of variations. Try it in Insect or Highlander Green. Get some black or brown Angora and make it a little stonefly. Add a soft hackle (like partridge). Give it a bead head. Swap out peacock herl for the hare’s ear thorax. You get the idea.

Back to the guide fly thing. Two years ago I passed this fly out at one of my wet fly classes. It was a slow day on the river, but what little action we saw came on this fly (we were fishing teams of three flies, so the trout had a choice). A few weeks later, I ran into one of my students outside the local fly shop. “Steve,” he says, “I need some more of those Ginger Caddis Larvas and I can’t find them anywhere.”

He bought every single Ginger Caddis I had in my box on the spot.

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Hook: 2x strong, size 10-18
Weight: 8-12 turns undersized wire
Thread: Orange
Body: Ginger Angora goat, very spikey
Thorax: Dark hare’s ear

Tying notes: To make it spikey and rough, try chopping the hairs up with scissors and winding them on a dubbing loop. Angora goat has long, unruly fibers that become problematic on smaller flies, so the chopping remedies that. I use high tack wax with Angora, like Loon Swax. I like to underweight this fly. Underweighting doesn’t mean that you’re putting wire under the body – you are – but rather, it refers to using lead wire that is thinner than the diameter of the hook wire. The goal is to help the fly sink, not suck the life out of it.

Classic Bergman Wet Flies Tied With Jungle Cock

Last week, someone used the search term “wet flies tied with jungle cock” to find currentseams. I found that intriguing because I had never tied a wet fly with jungle cock in my life. Sure, I’d done classic steelhead patterns. And untold numbers of flatwings and bucktails for stripers. But not a single wet with that most enchanting of feathers, the enameled nail from the cape of the male junglefowl.

Well, if someone took the trouble to navigate all the way to my humble site, they must have been disappointed when their search came up empty. And so, lonely internet sojourner, I took to the vise just for you. I have no idea who you are. But I hope you come back some day and find the little gift I left for you. And I thank you for the one you gave to me.

Here are four wets from Bergman’s classic, Trout. Clockwise from upper left: Silver Jungle Cock, Dr. Burke, Lord Baltimore, and Secret Pool No. 1. They are all tied on a size 8 1x short, 2x strong hook, the Orvis 1641.

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(upper left)
Silver Jungle Cock
Tail: Golden pheasant crest
Body: Silver tinsel
Shoulder: Orange floss, palmered with grizzly hackle
Wing: Jungle cock
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(upper right)
Dr. Burke
Tail: Peacock sword
Body: Flat silver tinsel with oval silver tinsel rib
Hackle: Yellow
Wing: White with jungle cock
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(lower right)
Lord Baltimore
Tail: Black quill
Body: Orange floss with black floss rib
Hackle: Black
Wing: Black with jungle cock
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(lower left)
Secret Pool No. 1
Tail: Golden pheasant tippet
Body: Peacock herl butt and shoulder with gold tinsel center
Hackle: Claret
Wing: Slate with jungle coc

Tying notes: Some tie the Silver Jungle Cock with a longer shoulder; I kept mine more thorax-like. I think this would make a great steelhead fly. It was the easiest of the four to tie.

You can tie the Dr. Burke with as many or as few peacock sword hackles as you like. I chose four for this size. Trivia: Dr. Burke is Dr. Edgar Burke, the man who painted all the files in the color plates at the beginning of Trout. Dr. Burke is credited with creating the Secret Pool No. 1 pattern.

The Lord Baltimore is the first Bergman-style wet I tied with a quill tail. It was far less intimidating than I imagined.

I didn’t have any claret hackle for the Secret Pool, so I used wine marabou. I also tend to use more golden pheasant tippet fibers in my tails; again, that’s an individual choice for each tyer. No matter how many fibers you use, I like to show the second black band.

The Peter Ross Wet Fly

The next time you fish the Peter Ross, be grateful that his name was not Aloysius Karbuncle. The Peter Ross is a traditional Loch style fly that dates back to the late 19th century. Ross based his pattern on the Teal and Red, another stillwater fly.

This fly is also a popular sea trout pattern, and you can easily see why. I like the contrast of the red, the black, and the dramatic barring of the teal. With its silver body, I’m thinking small baitfish or fry. Perhaps even something shrimpy. Something that looks alive and good to eat. I’ve already used it for steelhead, and I’m going to try it as the point fly on a team of three wets this spring.

The Peter Ross

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Hook: 8-16
 (this is an Orvis 1641 size 10)
Thread: Black
Tail: Golden pheasant tippets
Body: Rear half silver wire, front half red angora goat
Rib: Fine silver tinsel
Hackle: Black hen
Wing: Teal flank

Tying notes: When you’re tying a small wet that calls for a body of “half this, half that,” it’s easy to mess up calculating how much area you need on the shank for each section. (Ask me how I know). You end up with a body that’s two-thirds one and one-third the other. Remember to take the head of the fly into consideration. Then, divide the remaining space between where you think the head will end and the end of the shank. There are many ways to tie in waterfowl wings. Some like to create an effect like a quill wing. Others like to fold the wing several times on top of itself, dull side in. Another way, the one I used here, is to tie the wing in small folded sections. For this size fly, I used three sections of teal flank about ¼ to 3/8 inch wide, folded them once, dull side in, and tied them on top of each other.

A Classic Bergman Wet: The Fontinalis Fin

This is a fly with a great backstory.

The Fontinalis Fin Wet Fly

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Hook: 6-16 (this is a 1x short, 2x strong Orvis 1641 size 10)
Thread: Black
Tail: White hackle fibers
Body: Orange wool with fine gold tinsel rib
Throat: Furnace hackle fibers
Wing: Orange mallard married to a thin strip of black or natural grey mallard, then a slightly thicker strip of white mallard

The old-timers up in Maine (or down East, if you’re going for authenticity) who were fishing for brookies thought their quarry was highly territorial. So after they creeled a fish, they’d clip off one of the fins and use it for bait. And what an attractive bait it was: shiny, deep orange, contrasted against dramatic black and white bands.

An enterprising fly tyer named Phil Armstrong realized he could replicate this bait in the form of a married-quill wing wet fly. And thus was born the Fontinalis Fin. “Fontinalis” from the second half of the brook trout’s taxonomic name, Salvelinus fontinalis. “Fin” for rather obvious reasons. What a brilliant concept.

The real McCoy

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While it’s tempting to look at the flies featured in the color plates of Berman’s Trout (this fly appears on plate 10) as more of an exercise in tying legerdemain than practical fish catchers, I can tell you from experience that this fly does work. It’s pretty simple as far as married quill wings go, and the rest of the pattern is something anyone with basic tying skills can do.

Tying notes: If you’ve never tied a quill wing, don’t start. Your first quill wing can be the fly-tying equivalent of the Bataan Death March. While I was kidding (mostly) about not starting, I think it took me over a half hour to tie my first quill wing — and that was accompanied by a generous use of rather colorful language. Once you get it, though, the process becomes easier. I’m often asked at classes and demos, ‘How do you glue the different quill sections together?” You don’t. The edges of quill fibers are like velcro — they stick together quite nicely. There’s a specific technique to matching quills (the wings should be a mirror reflection of one another) and marrying the sections. Perhaps someday I’ll post them. In the meantime, you can probably find a good how-to by doing a web search. Also, the quill wings should sit a little higher on the shank so as to not hide the body; I was in a rush to finish this fly, so I plead sloth.

The Catskill Wet Fly

I first learned of the Catskill when I read Ray Bergman’s classic, Trout. While it lacks the garish palette of the majority of the flies that appear on the color plates at the beginning of the book, the Catskill is nonetheless an attractive fly – albeit in a rather understated way.

There’s something seductive and buggy about wood duck. The soft brown hen hackle will collapse and pulse in the current, contrasting nicely against the orange floss body. It’s easy to imagine this as an over-sized caddis. Or at least as something that looks alive, and good to eat.

I tied it large, but I can see going down to about a 16 or so with this fly. Although I have not yet fished it, I already have supreme confidence that it will be a fish catcher.

You can, too.

The Catskill

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Hook: 1x short, 2x strong size 8-16 (this is an Orvis 1641 size 10)
Thread: Black
Tail: Wood duck
Body: Orange floss under brown hen, palmered
Wing: Wood duck