Springtime fly selection

[TimMurphy]

Dear jay,

Yes, I definitely missed that Troy mentioned the Prince in his post.

I'll amend my first post and say that I'm surprised more people didn't mention the Prince.

I love that fly but then again I've never even tried a Zug Bug so what do I know about anything? :-D

I just like to fish junk!

Regards,
Tim Murphy :-D

 

[1stfly]

I was looking at a prince type pattern in my fly tying book -- I have a lot of peacock hearl. I've also tied some greenie weenies, after a few normal colored ones I experimented with some blue ice chenile. UGLY!

afishinado wrote:

1st fly...you mentioned that you are not a "match the hatch" guy, so we all proceeded to give you hatch info. We just can't help ourselves!

Ahhh, my eyes are burning. :-D

I might be able to go into a diatribe about why I don't generally think that you need to have an exact match the hatch, but I'll let it rest on this: I've caught trout on many Panther Martin spinners that look nothing like the things entomologists dream about. They do however imitate these things, therein lies my general principle. If I can get an approximate "action" of an insect a trout will take the fly. I've caught many bass on a bubble gum colored fluke and I don't see many of them swimming in the susky. (Maybe the brown toilet trout, but not a bubble gum colored fish.)

I'm also the type of person that if I got into match the hatch I'd go too far. "Hey honey look, this is a caddisfly sub-species only found...." I don't think my wife can take any more of my science talk than she already does.

-Chris

 

[afishinado]

1st fly,

You’re 100% right, but sometimes it is necessary to match the hatch - try this simple approach. Tie some generic dry flies, mayfly type and caddis type in different sizes - smaller to larger, and different colors - light to dark. An EH caddis can pass as a stonefly. When you see a light colored mayfly, match it to what you have in you fly box. Don’t worry about the scientific name, as long as you have the size and shape right, matching the exact color doesn’t matter. If the insect is active on the water, try to imitate that action, if the flies are still, dead drift it. Do the same thing for generic nymphs – light to dark, and small to large. That’s it! Leave the entomology BS to the FF geeks who argue that hatch is the Paraleptophlibia Adoptiva species or Ephemerella Deficiens. You'll be catching fish while they get out their microscopes and field guides. Good luck

 

[Bamboozle]

I often "scratch" the hatch too except when the elusive "Marlborous cigarettis" hatches in abundance on the local AT. When it does, I always have a few of these available!

 

[bede]

How can you not belive in "match the hatch," with regards to fishing dry flys.

Fishign most hatches on Penn's without matching the hatch will result in being skunked.

Early spring there are only a few big hatces, no sense not matching them. BWO's and Grannoms. Midges (cut the split tail of last years tricos, you wont need tricos for a while anyway).