Tricorythodes stygiatus

Come the Fourth of July attention around here turns to the spring creeks and the Trico hatch which comes off -- to a greater or lesser degree -- every morning until the first frost.

The hatches have been mostly quite good this year and I've burned a lot of gasoline and pissed away more than my fair share of mornings getting out of bed well before dawn and heading west to Pennsylvania for three hours of technical, intense, focused fishing followed by the long drive back.

I've been doing this for quite a number of years and caught my share of fish, but it is in the nature of fishing the Trico hatch that one never feels one has done as well as one ought to have. Fish are rising everywhere -- on some especially good days feeding as if they were baleen whales harvesting krill -- and you catch, say, three or four or five fish, not including the ones you merely prick and ones you break off. Occasionally you do a bit better; sometimes worse. It looks for all the world like it ought to be barrel shooting...but it ain't.

Not for me, at any rate. Honesty compels me to admit that I've frequently watched friends and strangers, upstream and down, do better than I. While the obvious conclusion might be that I'm just not all that good at it, I prefer to attribute my relative lack of success on those occasions to either an inferior location or the fact that none of the roughly two hundred flies in my trico box; purchased and home-tied; in sizes ranging from #22-#26; in an enormous array of pattern types, materials, and subtly differing colors...none of them are as good for that precise time and place as what the fellow out-fishing me is using. Fortunately -- like a duffer who hits the green with a long iron now and then -- I have just enough good days to allow me to cling to my illusions.

As an aside, people who have never fished with such small flies and the gossamer-fine 7x-9x tippets they require in order to allow them to drift properly (to say nothing of the virtual impossibility of threading 5x tippet through the eye of a #26 fly), wonder at the acuity of vision and exquisite touch they assume such fishing must require.

Tempted though I am to claim possession of such rarefied faculties, the simple truth is that the same conditions that make such fine terminal tackle necessary make its use feasible. The water is so smooth and slack that you are, in fact, able to see and track your tiny fly, assuming you cast well enough to know where it landed in the first place, and so clear that you can see the fish rise up, open its mouth and take. It does so deliberately and without haste, having all the time in the world as the fly drifts ever-so-slowly overhead, thus not triggering your startle reflex and allowing you to tighten up with the requisite gentleness.

There is a kind of rough rule of thumb for pattern selection. The males tend to emerge at/over night or very early in the morning and the females just after sun-up, so at 7:30, with the fish just beginning to rise and the spinner swarms just starting to form, a black bodied (or very dark brown; I've convinced myself that such minutiae matter sometimes) parachute with dun-length tails in #24 or #26 seems to be the choice. It's very likely to be the wrong choice, but one has to start somewhere.

By no later than 9:00 the spinners are starting to fall and with any luck at all the fish are steadily on the feed. Sometimes the fish seem more keyed in on males, in which case a spent-wing, black bodied (or very dark brown), long tailed pattern in #24 or #26 may work best. Sometimes, they seem to prefer the females, which calls for a #22 or #24 spent wing pattern with a white body (or green to mimic a pre-oviposting appearance; lots of controversy regarding whether the green version is either necessary or effective) with long tails and a robust black (or very dark brown) thorax.

The spinner wings are tied with antron, zelon, organza, hackle tips, CDC, Krystal Flash, "wonder wings" (a fairly fussy concoction made with hen hackle, created by Chauncy Lively and championed by Bob Miller), snow shoe hare foot fur...you name it. Sometimes they all seem to work. Sometimes one much better than another. Sometimes none of them do.

Typically, whatever you tie on, the first good cast and drift over a rising fish will result in anything from a good long look, to a skittish, slashing, short-strike, to a confident take. It goes downhill from there. The next cast over that fish -- assuming he didn't take the first time -- will be met with a brief, skeptical inspection. The next; complete indifference or a contemptuous little wriggle out of your fly's path. And by some mysterious process worthy of study by a more capable mind than my own, the fraudulence of your offering has been communicated to all the other trout in the area, so the promising reaction you received from the first fish on the first cast is not replicated should you turn your attention to another, notwithstanding that no fish conversation was observed taking place, and the second fish is distant enough from the first and at such a different angle that it hasn't yet seen either your line or fly.

Which of course raises the age-old conundrum of whether and when to change flies. It is easy to become convinced that your current offering is futile, but the fish are avidly feeding, the clock is ticking, and it takes time to change flies; sometimes a fair bit of time if the eye of your #24 fly is partially thread-obstructed and your eyes ain't what they used to be. Have any of you noticed, by the way, that the light conditions (shade versus sun, background, etc.) optimal for seeing the eye of your fly clearly are precisely the opposite of those that allow you to see the end of your tippet...and vice versa?

All too quickly, almost abruptly, you realize that it's over. The fish, so numerous minutes before, have -- sated -- seemingly vanished. So you wander the stream, looking for some last few stray risers or casting blind, trying to tempt them with Griffith's Gnats or ants or beetles before reluctantly concluding that you and the fish are done for the day and it's time to head home.