Purple Craze

All about flies Fly Tying
1

Saw a purple fly posted here yesterday, one of Wally Wiese’s go to BWOs.

In seven years fly fishing down in SE Idaho on moving water for trout, I don’t recall ever hearing a reference to the “Purple Haze” or any purple flies for other than Steelhead fishing. If I did hear a reference, it was so isolated and irrelevant that it didn’t stick.

I get up here to Western Montana and was promptly informed that the “Purple Haze” is one of the, if not the, most important flies you can fish on the moving water around here, and that is a lot of moving water. When I asked one of the local experts ( and it might have been the guy who came up with the fly in the first place ), I was told that it had something to do with how the color purple is visible in water. Honestly, the explanation didn’t make a lot of sense to me. But that is on me, not on the guy who gave the explanation.

So when I saw Wally’s fly yesterday, it got me to wondering again about the purple craze and what it is all about. Thought maybe some of the BB members would have some experiences and insight into the whole thing, and could shed some light on the subject.

John

P.S. I’m not knocking the fly or the color purple, or any advocates of purple flies. Just trying to get more information and opinions.

2

You may have read Rick Z’s lastest article where he was using a purple furl-tailed mohair leech pattern and catching a lot of crappies (along with some bass and bluegills)?
Purple DOES catch fish. Its long been a favorite color for plastic worms used to catch bass.
Its probably a color I should use more. I’ve had success using purple woolly buggers on the warmwater fish around here, and have caught carp on purple boa yarn leeches. Had big fish of some sort break my line while using a big fluffy purple fly of some sort. I’ve caught a number of salmon on “egg-sucking leech” patterns that had purple bodies/tails behind the orange head.
So…I don’t know if I would say its the best choice a LOT of the time, but purple certainly does work well at least SOME of the time.

3

And a snipe and purple soft hackle has been a very popular pattern since the 1800s. I think with that, however, the purple silk would probably darken when wet and go more towards black (at least to human eyes).

  • Jeff
4

Probably the explanation you got was that, purple is more visible because light in the violet end of the spectrum penetrates more deeply into the water. That doesn’t explain why a purple dry fly would be effective. Sometimes they just work better than a natural color.

5

John,

The Purple Haze has been credited to Andy Carlson, who runs Bitterroot Anglers in Stevensville, about 20 miles down I-93 from you. I heard about it a few years ago, supposed to have mystical powers on a river a few valleys over to the east, good for everything from March Browns to BWOs. Haven’t hit those hatches there but I’ve used a purple bodied Convertible on my home stream and the browns like them. Still think they like peacock better, but it’s a good second choice.

Regards,
Scott

6

My experience with the color purple began about 28 years ago, on the East Walker River, here in CA. One slow, June day, around noon, I tied on a purple R.A.M. Caddis…I have been a believer - in that color… ever since

PT/TB :wink:

7

Hi,
Would this be considered sacriligious? (sp?) - a sin? For a PMD

Or an olive body CDC winged BWO

8

John, I love the purple fly. WELL done!

9

You could make a case it does explain it. There is the theory that blues purples and violets are favorite colors in general, because they do aid feeding at depth, and even more so at dawn and at dusk when those colors predominate. In the dry fly case, if a fish lying several feet or more below notices a drifting dimple in the surface film, any color perception the fish has will be of ambient light reflecting off the body of the drifting fly. Reds and yellows fade quickly, as viewed from below. Greens will show up as green when red and yellow already appear as gray. A drifting blue purple or violet body will be brightest of all–as viewed from several feet below. And–if you buy the theory–blues purples and violets are, after all, a favorite color. A color fishes have biologically evolved to be most sensitive to. So that normally bottom-feeding riffle potato will more likely rise all the way up, when he sees his favorite color.

10

I tie a nymph I’ve kinda dubbed my “catch-all” because it does just that. It has a purple ice dub thorax/hot spot, and seems to be something the fish like.

If you’re bored, look up the color “junebug” used for bass plastics. It does very well!

11

Just to be clear - that is a Wally Wiese fly, not one of mine.

John

12

… ideas, experiences, and theories.

My initial reaction was, and still is, that color is the last of the priorities in fly selection, the first three, in order of importance being size, silhouette, and action, and then color.

Before Andy Carlson ( it was Andy, Scott ) explained his thinking to me, I had asked him if the fly worked because it presented a very dark and stark profile to the fishies. He almost seemed to take offense at that suggestion. At this point, I still think that that is a really possibility, to the extent that the purple fly might in fact have some advantage over other flies, at least in some situations.

One thing that strikes me as humorous, on a local note, is how people talk about the “purple haze.” Like mentioning that you caught fishies with one is special somehow. It always strikes me that “well, yeah, if that is what you fish that is what you are going to catch fishies with.”

I haven’t really considered tying and fishing any purple flies but I’m still willing to experiment if something comes along that is convincing - Sandy’s theory being the most interesting offered so far. The thing that comes back to me, however, is that the fishies, if they see things similar to how we see things, and I really don’t know about that, will see something dark when all the colors are gone, so the purple starts out being close to what they will finally see, which is why I asked Carlson what I did at the get go.

Another thing that comes back to me time to time is an observation by an acquaintance who had a Ph.D. in entomology and who was the most complete angler I have known. When talking about using a blue body on a damsel dry, he mentioned you might as well use black as blue, because when the fish looks up he is going to see the dark silhouette, not the color. Maybe that is a fact, or maybe it is a stumbling block I can’t get by ?? But it does jibe with the priorities in fly selection, in order of importance, of size, silhouette, action and color.

John

13

Wow that makes you think… maybe you can get away with tying all your drys in black and just have multipal sizes. It sounds kinda crazy but it might not be that unreasonable?

14

The only other “traditional pattern” I can think of that uses purple thread is the Kite’s Imperial, but the body is covered with heron herl.

I think there is something in what John says.
Cheers,
A.

15

There are any number of stories out there about the old guy who fished only two dry flies - a light Adams and a dark Adams, in appropriate sizes. That isn’t me, by the way.

I don’t mean to discount color as a factor in the success of a fly, just to prioritize it. Harley, the Ph.D. I mentioned, when tying a fly would occasionally say something like “Color ?? Yes.” and then pick up some color or anther and proceed with the tying, usually a color that you wouldn’t associate with the fly / pattern he was demonstrating.

On the other side of the coin, I had the good fortune to learn fly tying in SE Idaho where Jimmy’s All Seasons Angler in Idaho Falls held Saturday morning fly tying demos from roughly mid November through mid March featuring the best fly tiers / anglers in the region. You can’t help pick up some things over the course of six or seven years watching so many really good fly tiers / anglers do their thing - and most of them did emphasize color, and none of them emphasized purple.

Getting back to purple, like any other color, on a fly that is way outsized, inappropriately shaped, has a gross action about it and is poorly presented, ain’t gonna catch a fish. Or maybe it will. :shock:

John

16

This.

Hold a fly up to the sun or a lamp. The fly looks black, no matter what the color.

I once suggested that depending on where the sun is, dries will appear to be black to the fish roughly half the time.

In A Modern Dry Fly Code, Vince Marinaro tells a story about Halford and Marryat tying flies one morning before going fishing and accidentally not dubbing a body. They found no difference in their fishing, but Marinaro points out that they never followed up on this discovery. Marinaro couldn’t be bothered tying bodies on his thorax flies.

17

Beat me to it. A light wing, that is easy for the angler to see, still looks dark against the sky. But there have been times that a gray bodied has been rejected and a cream bodied fly, in the same configuration, has worked. And there are times that only a black fly will work. And sometimes, for unknown reasons, a purple fly seems to work better.

Violet is at one end of the visible light spectrum and red is at the other end. Maybe these colors are efffective in a fly because they are more visible under certain light conditions.

18

Fly fishing is situational. Don’t you have to define the situation?

If there is a size 16 PMD hatch going on and the fish are keyed in on it, good luck with a purple fly!

If there is a baetis hatch going on and the fish are keyed in on it, you might catch with a properly sized and styled purple pattern: If you look at a dubbed olive body after it is wet, it is very dark - approaching the same color as the “purple” fly.

If there is no hatch, a dry fly becomes an “attractor” and, I believe, the dark body provides just a dark sillouette for the fish.

Make any sense?

19

These days I typically catch 5x as many fish on purple mayfly patterns during hatches compared to realistically colored mayflies. This goes for PMD as well as BWO provided the skies are gray. The cripple posted at the top of this thread in #16 is the one mayfly pattern I’m never without.

20

Makes sense to me Byron.

The purple color may function as an attractor better than red because purple light penetrates further into the water. So more deep fish may come up to get a better look.

But lets also be clear that when the fish decides to take the fly, it has a very good look at the fly and can refuse if the fish is selective and the purple color does not match his search profile.

So it does depend on the situation as Byron says. If the fish are non selective and sampling the drift, a purple fly may indeed get their attention. But when the fish are selective, I think matching the actual color and shade of the natural will work more effectively than using purple.

There is also the ever present population dynamics as I’ve mentioned in the past. The degrees of selectivity vary within a population and there may be some fish that take the purple fly even if the great majority refuse it.

That is what fly fishing is. It is a search for a fish that is susceptible to our offering. Not all fish will be, and it a common error to believe that those fish that do take our fly represent the majority or even a significant portion of the fish in the population.