Quote Originally Posted by Micropteris View Post
...Use teams of flies. Let the fish make an instant decision when they have three or five flies to pick from at the same time.....
... to check for the fishies' color preferences. However, trying to fish three to five of these ...



... size 8 or thereabout dry flies at one time is way beyond my ability. And actually, the few times that I have fished more than one dry fly at a time, it seems neither one of them wants to maintain a good drift. There are enough mini-currents in the streams and rivers that I fish that it always seems one fly wants to drag the other, or both pull each other in undesirable ways.

Yesterday, the day started out with a lot of low, dark cloud cover and I was hoping to have the opportunity to experiment with the flies in some "low light" conditions. Unforturnately, by the time I got to the river, the clouds had blown off and it was a typical sunny summer day in Northern Idaho. The only low, dark cloud cover for the day came when a pretty dramatic lightening / thunder storm, which I had to sit out for about half an hour, rolled through the area.

The fishing was slow, at least as to the larger fishies. Fished four or five of the six color combos in the box and, again, it didn't seem to make any difference which color was served up. Most of the trouts were juvenile cutts and steelhead, but I did get a handful of nice cutts. Fished this place for only the second time this year ( in post runoff conditions ) and had several nice fish hit the fly.



For example...



It occurred to me that I haven't included pix from an earlier color experiment with my FEB skwala. It is usually tied in very dark, drab colors - dark browns and deep green olive with a dyed dark brown wing and speckled brown legs. Did a couple variations with fluorescent red and bright white and burnt orange and brown olive FEBs, natural deer hair, and off color legs ...





... and they did just as well as the standard pattern.

John