Category Archive for : ‘Fly of the Month’

Steve Suitor’s ‘Red Legged Scud’

This month’s fly is from Steve Suitor, whose poem Gone Fishin is featured in our newsletter. Steve lives in Tasmania and fishes those highland lakes frequently. His scud patter, featured here, has defeated a lot of those cagey and wary highland browns. It’s fairly easy to tie and looks very edible.

Steve’s tying and fishing notes are brief: do not add weight to the fly. It must sit lightly on weeds to allow it to move from a trout’s pressure wave as the fish approaches.

This month’s fly is another from Neil Grose’s inexhaustible supply of new and effective flies. Neil worked as a professional guide in Tasmania for 12 years, and more recently has taken on editing the Victoria and Tasmania Fishing Monthly publication that appears in newsagents and tackle shops each month (obviously), and is filled with beaut articles and reports on the fishing both here in Victoria and in Tasmania. Neil still lives in Tasmania. He fishes regularly and continues to catch lots of trout. His notes on the Red Tag Royal

David Featherstone’s Caddis Nymph – the DF Special

This month’s fly is one of David Featherstone’s – and it’s a pattern that has caught him a pile of fish, including the three superb browns in the photo below.

David tells us that this fly was first tied in the early 1960s to represent a Caddis ‘nymph’ (i.e. caddis larva, such as a stick caddis). In one form or another caddis represent up to a third of a trout’s diet, so caddis patterns are both important and effective. And right from its inception

Bernard Holbery’s Steavenson River Dun

Tying materials:

Hook:                  Standard Dry Fly – hook sizes 12 – 20 (the smaller the better).

Tying thread:       Brown 8/0.

Tail:                     A few fibres from a ginger cock hackle (small sizes), or pheasant tail fibres (larger sizes). These are tied onto the hook shank first, and then the CDC feather stem is then tied in as the base for the body. At this point the brown thread which is tied over the CDC stem to form the body is also used to wrap the tail fibres to the CDC

Mick Hall’s Beadhead Brown Nymph

Last month we presented David Martin’s wonderful dun pattern – the Detached Body Shaving Brush. It is undoubtedly a very effective fly, but is quite an intricate pattern to put together. This month we’re at the other end of the scale and presenting a fly which is extremely easy to tie and very effective too.

Some years ago I was watching Mick Hall constructing nymphs to use in his teaching classes on nymph fishing in the Thornton area, typically on the Rubicon River. He was turning them

The DBSB – Detached Body Shaving Brush

Pattern Details:

Hook:           A strong, light, short shank hook, sizes 12 or 14. Possible choices are Black Magic F12 or F14, Tiemco model 2488, Kamasan B420 or Partridge 15BN Klinkhamer #20 hook.

Thread:       Dark brown – 8/0 to tie the abdomen, then 6/0 to complete the fly.

Tail:             A bunch of 10 – 12 fibres from Rhode Island red hen saddle hackle feather.

Abdomen:  1: A cylinder of firm closed-cell foam – 8 mm long by 2 mm diameter, coloured dark brown with a waterproof marking pen.

2:

The Single Plume Tip CDC Fly

This issue of our newsletter carries an article by Jeremy Lucas describing his experiences fishing the River Eden in the UK. Jeremy often uses a limited number of small dry flies (sizes 17, 19, 21) in his river fishing, and a popular choice is the Single Plume Tip CDC, which he claims catches 75% of his fish caught on the dry.

Why even bother fishing a dry fly when studies show that much of the food found in the stomachs of trout is taken subsurface