There is a spring creek fishing theory–popular with many spring creek and tailwater guides–that says “change pattern if you get multiple refusals from a regularly rising fish.”
But change to what?
If you change to any other fly, regardless the shape profile, if the new pattern has the right size and the right colors, you will increase your chances. Or so goes the theory anyway. And I believe that theory. I believe shape (up wing, spent wing, cripple, half-hatched emerger, etc) does not matter much. What does matter is size and color. In the surface film, riding high, flopped over, upside down, trailing a shuck, it doesn’t much matter. But size and color do matter. That’s what my circle of guiding buddies have always said. And so it seems to be. If a particular fish has refused your sparkle dun (or your classic Catskill pattern) 3 or 4 times in a row, switch to almost anything else…as long as the new fly has the right size and the right color. Then you’ll have a better chance of a hookup.
If you watch a thick hatch in action (that’s hard to do when you are the fisherman, and easier when you are the butler…I mean guide) you see all manner of profiles: with a shuck, without a shuck, upright, drowned and spent wing, one wing crumpled, legs still trapped in the shuck, on its side, half emerged, still largely nymph like because most of the body is still inside the shuck…in the surface film or on it. The fish don’t seem to care what it looks like. If it’s the right overall size and vaguely the right color they take it.
But if the wing or the body is substantially the wrong color or too bright or too dark, and most of all if the dimple is too big, then they will refuse. I’ve watched fish cruise up and down in repeating elliptical circuits picking off every natural dimple that comes along, regardless the profile. My fishing experience supports that too. Changing from Sparkle Dun to emerger, or to spent wing, or to no-hackle often does seem to change the response of a refusing fish. My speculation is that it was the change in profile that changed the response. And that any one of a number of new profiles would have worked just as well. That’s what they all told me when I first started working as a spring creek guide at George Anderson’s Yellowstone Angler: “Hey Sandy, don’t forget to change flies when they refuse!”
The interesting thing about that claim–if you believe it–is that it substantially discounts the importance of any one particular pattern. If you do believe that claim, then the important thing is to have a rich variety of patterns in your box, and to cycle through them, almost randomly, all day long.
