Doesn’t hurt to try blue. It is the secret formula that everyone knows about and whispers to fellow anglers over a pint or a glass of bourbon in Pulaski.
I’ve got an awful lot of robin egg blue estaz and glo bug material, and flies, but I rarely use it. I have better luck with white, cream, orange and especially various shades of yellow.
My belief is it really doesn’t matter as long as the fly looks translucent when wet.
As a practical matter, trout eyes have only rods, no cones so strictly speaking, they see on a grayscale, not a spectrum. Kind of like a black and white tv for anyone else of my advanced years. Your brain sees a black and white picture and immediately assigns color to the various shades of gray.
The trout’s brain, though smaller than its eye, notices the subtle changes. It has no point of reference to assign color. Think of it like putting a pale blue egg next to a pale yellow egg, snapping a picture with your phone and converting the image to black and white. There will be subtle differences.
But I almost always start my day steelhead fishing with a pale to bright yellow egg pattern. My stated reason is because the wet version most closely resembles the color and general look of the fresh trout and salmon eggs I have seen.
But if I’m not getting hits, I do what we all do: ask the guys who are getting hits what they are using and switch to that. Sometimes it’s blue. Sometimes it’s a giant stonefly.
But when people ask me, I always recommend yellow, all else being equal. And I’ve caught plenty of steelhead over the years, mostly on yellow.
My brain knows that the reason is probably because that’s mostly what I fish with, but my fishing instincts say, “stick with what works.”
I suspect that if I used blue the way I use yellow, my catch would be about the same.
And the guys who swear by blue (the way I swear by yellow) always fish with blue, which means they catch most of their steelheads with blue.
But they do love it, and there’s a steelhead bait available in Pulaski called blu-goo that is popular enough to stay on the shelves, even in the inconspicuous bait refrigerator at the (mostly) flies only shop Whitaker’s.
There a plenty of digressions to be explored over bourbon or beer about things like the effects of blue skylight and yellow sunlight and how it reflects off a fly on a cloudy day, or at first light or whatever.
Decades ago my dad came to the conclusion that you catch fish with the flies you have faith in. But he left me well in excess of 1,000 salmon and steelhead flies and all colors and materials are well represented, including blue.
So yeah, tie up some blue eggs. You might clean up when everyone else is thrashing the water to a froth and not getting a bump.
Or not.
