SPRING CREEK HATCHES - WHERE EAST MEETS WEST
There are many spring creek waters scattered across the United States and each is unique and different. Though they share some common ground, they soon can and will frustrate the visiting angler who has failed to properly prepare for the trip.*
That was a nice little piece on spring creek trout fishing.
I'm always trying to minimize my fly assortment. It's sort of a Holy Grail of my own personal fly fishing style. Thus, I usually try to find threads of commonality (pun intended) among the various styles of flies that imitate the same insect(s) and focus on them in a variant of the one I find most appropriate to the challenge. I end up fishing a lot of basically Wulff-style dry flies as a result...although most of mine are slimmer than the originals and tied a bit further back from the eye. But we have the advantage of better floatants and synthetic materials than Lee and Co. did when they were creating this style of dry fly patterns. So I can get by with more "creative license" and still get them to ride well on the water. In tiny dries, I tend to tie thorax variants and no hackle/spent wing flies.
An example of this would be to continue your use of the Sulfur mayfly variations. For a dry fly, I tie 2. 1 for choppy water, and 1 for flat water. I tie them in a variety of sizes from 14-24, with the choppy water version stopping at 18. The choppy water version is basically an Ausable Wulff, but (as I said before) somewhat lighter in body mass than a true Wulff should be. And I will tie them with both hackle and hair tail materials. The hackled versions are more sparsely dubbed, while the hair-tailed version are pretty much a typical Wulff pattern. I usually use poly sparkle yarn for the wings instead of calf tail and dub the bodies with buoyant synthetic blends. On the smaller, more delicate, flat-water fly, I go to a thorax style fly with a poly yarn wing. Tails are tied with hackle fibers or micro-fibbets. Bodies are synthetic blend dubbing material. I usually start these at 16 (only a few) and tie down to 24, focusing on the 18-22's. And I use Light Cahill/primrose colors including cream, primrose, pale yellow, and pale gray/dun.
For nymphs and emergers I use Dave Whitlock's Red Fox Squirrel Nymph, PTN's, and one of my own creations, a primrose-n-pearl soft hackle (with/without bead depending on the application). The RFSN is my "deep diver." It often functions as an attractor and weight on a 2-nymph rig with either a smaller PTN or PnPSH as a trailer. But my favorite way to fish below the surface with these flies is with the PnPSF alone as an emerger/traditional soft hackle. And probably the most effective method is to drop a PnPSH off of a size 14-16 Ausable Wulff!
These are the only flies I use for Sulfurs. And I have a lot of success fishing waters where these mayflies are prolific.
Nice article. Incidentally, Centroptilum esla had been reclassified as Centroptilum asperatum.Quote:
The sulfur duns on the western spring creeks are Centroptilum elsa and are size 20 and 22.