Damselflys

Attachment 10274
Here are some deer hair and mono damsels. I used strands of organza ribbon for the wings . These are tied on a size #18 dry fly hook.


Thanks for looking .

Fred

Very nice Fred, Do you fish these? I ask as I've tied similar but never fished them. Damsels crawl in and out of the water using vegetation or rocks, the adult is rarely available to trout as a food item.

Cheers,
C.

Both the immature tenerals and the mature damsels are effective flies. They get blown into the water. They drown and are taken underwater as sunken damsels.

Damsels have an immature teneral phase and then they undergo a color change to the mature phase. After mating the females must deposit their eggs in the water. Like some caddis they even go underwater to deposit their eggs so they are available to the trout. Being large insects the trout seek then out and they even leap out of the water after low flying damsels.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GtZC...eature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGJMAGYTcpQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLIGywbbNNk

The foam bodied or foam thorax patterns are less effective than the ones that can sink because you cannot imitate a drowned damsel with a foam bodied fly. I tie both the banded blue adult and the tan teneral phase.

http://www.garyborger.com/2010/01/20...d-butt-damsel/

Here's a version with a foam thorax.

http://www.mwflytying.com/patterns/damsel_fly_page.html

When I mentioned the patterns using foam to Gary, he asked me if I thought he hadn't thought of that. That's when he explained that trout love drowned damsels

Thanks Alan . Yes I keep some in my boxes for when the LMB's are going airborne after their living counter parts. These were tied on smaller hooks for trout , but I have'nt got to try them yet.

Silver Creek , thanks for the info and the videos.

Fred

... Silver Creek, that being Silver Creek ID, Silver Creek flows into the Little Wood River, and more of the water in the Little Wood below the confluence with Silver Creek is Silver Creek water than Little Wood water.

Several years ago while we were exploring the area, we saw the most awesome hatch of damsels and dragonflies I could ever hope to see, on the Little Wood, which really should be called Silver Creek. All the colors imaginable from the freshly hatched green to the brilliant blues for the damsels and the whole range you could expect to see for the dragonflies.

Quite the display, and one I don't expect to see again.

Nice display of your hatch, Fred. Hope you get a chance to fish them, soon.

John

P.S. If you can find some blue antron, you might try a furled extended body damsel. Tom Banyas of Pocatello ID was the first person I ever saw tie a furled extended body fly and it was a damsel. The first FEB I tied was a damsel, which fished well on Horseshoe Lake, just outside the SE corner of Yellowstone.

Thanks John ,I appreciate the comments and info.
Fred

Here's a portion Gary Borger's book, Fishing The Film in which he describes a day of fishing damsels with John Goddard from Great Britain.

http://fishfliesandwater.com/2010/04...rpt-and-a-pic/

"I'd already tied a dozen flies for John [John Goddard], and he had them secured in his boxes. Quickly we knotted them on, and began to hit fish immediately. I didn't have to tell John why I had used acrylic yarn for the post, rather than a strip of foam. John already understood the perils of the egg-laying damsel. One blast of wind, and they were on the water, where wave chop soon drowned many of them, submerging the insects just under the film.

Our first presentations were always with the fly sitting on top. Mostly we used the dead-simple Heave and Leave Tactic, cast several feet ahead of a rising fish and just let the fly sit. If a head didn't poke out and eat the fly within a few seconds, then we'd wait longer. That's why it's called Heave and Leave.

But sometimes a rising fish wouldn't take the fly dry. We'd then soak the fly for a few moments, and fish it just under the film, either letting it hang there or twitching it along very slowly with the Strip/Tease. The fish loved it.

In the end, I felt that it had been a spectacular day, but I knew that John specialized in damselfly fishing, and probably had experienced the same or better in waters in Europe. His chuckling all the afternoon should have been a clue, but in the fog of fishing, I had not paid much attention to his personal tics.

"This was the best day of stillwater dry fly fishing I have ever had," John told us later. It was a compliment that none of us took lightly, but it was not an isolated event in our many years of fishing damsel adults. They are truly creatures of the film?over it, on it, in it, and under it. Don't think that this experience is unique to damselflies, however. Any insect that gets in the film can eventually get under the film by riffle action in streams or wave action in lakes. So, be on the alert for sunken ants, beetles, hoppers, inchworms, mayfly spinners, stonefly adults, and so on. Watch the rise forms carefully to help detect fish feeding under the film, more to come on this in Chapter Four."

John Goddard writes this in his book, John Goddard's Trout-Fishing Techniques: Practical Fly-Fishing Solutions

"While there are many patterns to represent the damsel nymph and dry adult, two of the best in my opinion are those perfected and popularized by Gary Borger."

Just to supplement what John Scott said about FEB...

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v1...mselFly001.jpg

Sounds like maybe foam isn't the greatest idea.
Note on this one the thorax foam is tied underneath. The author of the article I got this from said he spent some time and found that with it tied under..... the fly landed upright more often...maybe that's not so important either.

Here's the Borger blue damsel:

http://www.fieldandstream.com/files/...damsel-dtf.jpg

Here's the natural:

http://prairieform.com/blog/wp-conte...-damselfly.jpg

I tied the Borger Blue Damsel for a Flyfish@ fly swap in 1995. Here are the instructions.

If you go to the top of the page and Hans Weillenman's CDC andEelk was in the same swap and it is the first time the fly pattern was published on the internet. A lot fly fishing history occurred on Flyfish@.

http://user.xmission.com/~amundsen/d...utt Damsel Fly