Mayflies Fishing & Tying
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Mayflies: Fishing introduces the aquatic insect's life cycle in trout streams, when and where trout eat them. Learn how to rig, which imitations to use, and how to present and fish flies through a mayfly emergence.
Entertaining stories enhance and enlighten techniques to encourage trout stream fly fishing. Useful charts enhance descriptive pictures.
Mayflies: Tying teaces basics techniques which expand to intermediate and advanced tying skills as you to tie families of mayfly nymph, emerger, adult and spinner imitations. Over 35 specific patterns, hundreds of photos and clear descriptions will allow you to tie hundreds of different mayfly patterns.
A spring day, realizing winter's chill is gone, warms the water and increases a trout's metabolism. The trout must eat more, and, after a winter of small but abundant midges, are ready for increased insect variety and size. Mayfly nymphs, growing through the winter since hatching from eggs laid last fall, are starting to move, and willsoon fill trout bellies. Their instars over, mayflies are ready to begin the final stage of their short, but important, lives.
By late morning on the spring day, the observant angler will see flashes of light, light reflected when trout turn to intercept a driting mayfly nymph that will not compete its life cycle, but has served part of its purpose. What fly? Rig? Approach? Cast? the angler wonders.
After fooling a few trout, the thorough angler begins to observe dimples on water below the riffle; trout are causing the disturbance when they intercept a drifting mayfly that has made its way though the riffle's gauntlet of feeding trout onto the surface of the run below. A change is required to meet the surface feeding activity that will continue for several hours to come! What is it?
Within another half hour or so, as trout follow the most abundant mayfly activity, the rises are further dispursed, and more purposeful, as trout snouts poke through the mdeniscus to welcome a drifting mayfly adult whose wings have not quite dried enough to fly off, molt, mate and lay eggs that will populate Fall's generation of its kin. An hour, maybe two or more, of fabulous sight fishing is in store for the prepared, curious, ever-learning fly angler. There are challenges when variable currents align with trout selectivity, which first foible then continue to build both observation and fishing skills.
Eventually, the surface activity seems to wane, and the stream and its denizens become quiet. But wait! - at the tail of the pool, a few dimples once again appear. This time, however, there is no visible insect on the surface as was earlier the case when first wing buds and then a miniature sailboat ragatta drifted along. What is this the trout are eating? Further observation discovers dead mayflies, mayfly spinners, inexorably spent following their short foray into the air, used up from mating, then laying eggs, they drift on. The bodies that now escape being eaten by trout will dissolve, sink and add to the detritus elixer upon which their progeny will feed, thrive and grow, before feeding trout girth, and the angler's hopes, each for its own future.