Mayflies and Vampires

Mayfly duns are the classic design problem in fly fishing and fly tying history. If you wanted to design a new way to make mayflies you could try to chip away at all the usual design goals and criteria: faster and easier to tie, more realistic, better floating or any combination of the previous three, but the new fly still would still to work well and catch fish, else what's the point?

Unfortunately, at least for the ambitious mayfly designer, most of the good work seems to have been done already. I haven't seen anything both new and practical in a long time. Some of today's best practitioners, like Rene Harrop, Craig Matthews and Shane Stalcup are now making what look to me a lot like the best mayfly imitations ever made. Being the best ever is no small achievment. But their work is still mostly derivative: new color and material combinations combined with unparalleled craftsmanship--not fundamental design change.

Another interesting although not necessarily popular concept is the idea (especially for small mayflies) that pattern design doesn't matter that much anyway. I do tend to think pattern makes a lot less difference than many people think. If you're fishing a Pale Morning Dun hatch in July, well yes of course, you do need to fish with PMD imitations, else you won't do very well at all. But which one or ones? The answer, I think, is lots of patterns rather than fewer. Changing flies, from a rich variety of patterns in your box, matters a lot. When you're casting over a fussy riser on the far side of the spring creek who has aleady sniffed and refused your best efforts more than once, the best thing to do is to change the fly. And it doesn't necessarily matter so much which fly you choose, as long as it's got a different look than the last one. The multiple-look idea, if you believe it, inevitably tends to discount the importance of any one particular pattern over another. The undeniable success of Neal Streeks' bare bones thread flies definately provides strong support for that position.

When I was still guiding, some years working 20-25 days on Montana's Paradise Valley spring creeks, I'd usually begin a spring creek day at the fly bins at George Anderson's Yellowstone Angler. I'd ask my customers to show me their fly boxes and then I'd start picking out flies. I always had some favorites--usually the latest and greatest stuff from Rene Harrop--but the favorites did seem to change from week to week, even if the bugs didn't. For spring creek and tailwater fishing over fussy small insect eaters, I do believe in the multiple look idea. I really don't think any one pattern is necessarily that much better than the next.

If you stand in the creek at noon in July, during the peak of the Pale Morning Dun hatch--if you can bring yourself to stop fishing and just watch for a bit--you'll see the bugs present themselves in a wide variety of states, postures and sillouettes. Some never seem to get their wings open and drift by crumpled up on their sides, hopelessly tangled in their entrapping nymphal skin. Some are upright but still trail a shedding skin while others lay drowned and dead, with spent spinner-like wings. Many do ride the surface tension completely upright. You can watch the fish cruising along elliptical circuits in shallow water, often racing each other to the next arriving dimple in the surface tension. On heavily fished waters the fish can be spooky and hard to catch. A Royal Wulff isn't likely to work well during a Pale Morning Dun hatch. But an incredibly wide variety of yellowish wet dry and floating/sinking nymph-like patterns will work just fine.

Despite all that, tying complex mayflies is still one of my favorite things to do. I do have some unusual mayfly designs here, flies that are indeed creative new ways for making mayflies. But I can't really argue they accomplish much more than fly tying amusement. My bottom-mounted parachute ParaNormal Mayflies do float well, and they do catch fish as well as any other pattern. But I can't honestly say they catch fish any better. I make them because I like to.

In addition to late winter fly tying amusement, complex mayfly ideas and designs wield great power in the editorial realm. If you write anything even vaguely new or original about mayflies, no matter how obscure or even bizarre, you will almost certainly get your work published somewhere. But if you write anything related to what might be referred to as lures or lure-like flies, on the other hand, like a vampire before a cross, the fly fishing editor will fall back in horror, cowering behind a raised forearm. Like a fly fisherman's yin and yang, the mayfly and the lure model the very depths of the contemporary consumer age piscatorial soul.

I present the following mayflies for what they are: complex but fun patterns for the fly tier: not essential patterns that catch any more fish than than any other. When I'm fishing over a pod of slurping spring creek or tailwater rainbows, I do like to fish with my own fancy mayfly creations, along with a host of other more traditional flies as well. Impractical Mayflies