Lady Heather
. . .My first attempts at developing a good dry fly for gray days all
suggested simplificatiion. This was a difficult concept for me to
accept - all of my patterns were supposed to be dazzling deviations from
the norm, caricatures that attracted even as they imitated important food
forms. But on dark days active trout showed a preference for basic,
drab flies; and each new version of the Lady Heather evolved into a
simpler pattern.
From the beginning the Lady Heather was meant to be a Trude variation.
The differences were the mixed grizzly and gray hackle and a prominent
egg sac. That egg sac ended up being the biggest problem with the fly.
It was lime green or burnt orange on the first test versions, logical
choices considering the coloration of real insect eggs, but trout shied
from those bright hues on gray days. We left the egg sac off on some
test variations, but in the close comparison of head-to-head fishing a Lady
Heather with a gray egg sac (that no one remembered tying) did better than
the fly with the all-cream body. That gray ball at the rear of the pattern helped
becaused it provided a contract with the cream body and white wing without
the brightness of the earlier egg-sac imitations.
The test gave me my gray-day pattern --a downwing, easy to see, riffle-water
dry fly. It broke one of the oldest axioms in fly fishing. Gray day, gray fly.
It was drab, except the white wing, but it wasn’t all gray. The Lady Heather
did as well or better in tests against my other favorite patterns for cloudy days,
the Gray Trude and Gray Wulff.
The Lady Heather has another interesting quirk. It caught more brown trout than
other flies in overcast conditions; the all-gray flies did better on rainbows. Many
anglers have noted that browns have an odd affinity for the color white. My
experience with the Lady Heather bears that out. Brown trout come further
to take a Lady Heather, especially under the darkest, most threatening skies.
Materials
Hooks: 10-18 (standard dry fly, TMC 100).
Tail: Dark blue dun hackle fibers.
Butt: Gray muskrat fur (dubbed.)
Body: Cream fur (wrapped or dubbed; thinner than
the butt.)
Wing: White calf tail.
Hackle: Grizzly and dark blue dun (mixed).
Originally published July 24, 2000 on Fly Anglers Online by Gary LaFointaine.