What Of The March Brown

Ah, but it was a difficult season…

Low water came early and the fishing to the big bugs, the oft championed bringers of leviathan, suffered the most. Warm bright days and low, clear water are not the recipe for catching scores of trophy trout. They were about most certainly, and indeed they fed, but confound a cruising trout that chases big struggling nymphs just beneath the surface when there are drifting duns up top.

Such days can become the dry fly man’s bane.

It is quite the show to watch, this spectacle of cruising and busting flies unseen. I cast for hours to the splashes with emergers, crippled duns, soft hackles. Perhaps I should have simply thrown rocks. I have seen this before, often with the Green Drakes during low water springtime when the flies were more abundant. Bulges and explosions here and there, with never a dun disturbed.

I have wondered if perhaps those emerging nymphs swim and wriggle more frantically with the lack of steadier currents, for such days invariably occur in flat water. The trout are there, as are the mayflies, but duns drift unmolested day after day.

I truly thought a special soft hackle might tempt at least a fish or two, and I crafted them carefully: touch dubbed lightly with spiky, reflective blends of mottled fur, soft wavering barred tails of wood duck flank and partridge hackles specially chosen for color and pattern. My friend Tom who dearly loves and honors the English North Country traditions would doubtlessly have approved. Dead drifted on an upstream cast, swung gently down and across, or twitched through areas with activity, method was no matter. The trout said no!

The dry fly man’s bane? Perhaps, though his curse is so often his blessing!