Checking the July Hatch Chart

[Byron haugh]

Checking the hatch chart for my trip this summer. Drakes should be around my location at that time.
Looking for "reasonable" room rates in the area too - none to be found though.

So, decided to tie a Drake. Hope the trout there can't count!

[hook549]

Nice ty,when the trout learn to count we all should give up the pursuit..>')))))><

[herefishy]

Nice looking fly, just wondered - a lot of the Green Drake patterns I see are ribbed with a pretty vivid yellow - is that important?

[pittendrigh]

One thing I've noticed about Green Drakes (well two actually) is that A) the ones on my home river, the Gallatin, only drift for a few feet before taking off and B) their abdomens twitch and wiggle vigorously as they ride along.

Twitching abdomens on a dryfly would be more or less impossible to imitate. But maybe not impossible for emergers.
Also, because they do drift as duns for a relatively short distance only, I find myself wondering if emergers are a more powerful way to fish. If I get to Green Drake hatch this summer I'll have to do some carefully controlled experiments (fish with both and see what happens).

[pittendrigh]

...I remember "guiding" Sammy Knowles on the Gallatin, four or five years back. Sammy is a bonefish guide par excellence from Deadman's (Deedmon's) Cay, Long Island. Sammy took Rodney King's (owner of the Bozeman Angler) invitation seriously, and came to Montana one summer to fish. Sammy has won the Bahama's bonefish tournament several times. So he really knows how to fish.

I had him up above Gallatin Gateway on the Gallatin, on a cloudy, rain-threatening day in July. I wasn't a guide anymore at that point. I was just showing an old friend a good time. Just as a huge bank of thunderheads approached at noon or so the water became alive with dimpling fish and drifting duns. Sammy knew how to fish, but mending line for moving currents was new to him, and it took a while to master. And then, for each strike, he'd wait two seconds and then strip-strike the line, which was just about two seconds too late. When the hatch finally ended he looked at me and said: "Now I know why all you guys from Montana come down to the Bahamas and strike the bonefish too soon!"

I also noticed only a few rises to drifting duns. There were a few such rises. Maybe even a few more than only a few. But most of the dimples happened when there was no drifting adult to watch. So most of the fish, it seemed to me, must have been slurping emergers.

[Byron haugh]

Nice looking fly, just wondered - a lot of the Green Drake patterns I see are ribbed with a pretty vivid yellow - is that important?

herefishy
May be the photo. The ribbing is a yellow floss, so it is pretty bright in color in real life................

[DG]

Herefishy, don't forget that the bugs are not identical from one stream to the next. The (grandis) drakes I used to fish in northern Cali had no yellow bands, nor did I bother with any segmentation in the body when I tied them. My best fly for them was always a CDC winged may, although I bought and fished a pattern that was fairly close to what Byron is showing. They also did tend to sit on the water for a while, unlike the ones on the Gallatin. Usually it was a fairly sparse hatch, but there were days I had a dun every square foot on the surface, with fish gulping madly.

[JohnScott]

... with the drakes, but my limited observation and most of the material I've found on them suggests that they do tend to come off rather quickly. When I was designing a fly for a potential drake hatch on a Montana backcountry stream late this summer, I decided to go with a cripple / emerger thinking that the fishies were more likely accustomed to leisurely eating cripples than chasing duns. This is what I came up with.




The potential drake hatch turned into a real drake hatch. And this fly took some pretty nice fishies. ( This example is a bit tattered, for better or worse. As tied, the CDC is a loop wing over grizzly hackle which is trimmed thorax style. )

John

[Byron haugh]

Thanks
How about posting a pic of the fly as tied?

[herefishy]

Tattered flies are a sure sign of success.