Decent flies, but there ain't no such animal as "Irresistible." They'll catch until they meet up with that fish that has been caught before. Unless you can make that fly flutter on the water, then like many other patterns it will be very Resistible to a wised up trout.

 

Decent flies, but there ain't no such animal as "Irresistible."

... and Tup's Indispensible can easily be dispensed with.

... and Lunn's Particular wasn't so particular.

... and Kite's Imperial was really quite modest.

... and a Humongous is only about 2 inches, which isn't at all humongous.

... and a cat's whiskers contains no cat parts.

... and a Viva bears scant relation to the 1960/70s car made by Vauxhall

... Etc... 🤪

 

What did you use for dubbing

 

All I can tell you is that it is called Olive Sparkle and is part of a range I bought off eBay years ago.

 

You know, it seems there's still a lot of noise to be made about Duffer's Fortnight.

 

Duffer's 8-10 weeks for me
It's easy pickings in the first few weeks at Powdermill, however, with maybe 60%+ people fishing catch & release, those trout do seem to get a lot pickier after a while. Chucking out an oversized Grey Wulff will only get you so far, especially if you don't degrease your tippet every couple of casts or so...

Has everyone else noticed that the M/F season has started a good fortnight or so later this year as opposed to last?

 

That's a nice looking pattern but I do wonder if the cdc will benefit it much. I would have thought that it would be useful as a sighter but the floating properties of cdc would be lost on this fly as it won't be in the water due to the hackle holding the fly up.
The mayfly is well and truly on locally but with a few good evenings and massive falls of gnat the majority of the fish are now totally fixated on the gnat.
I was out yesterday and there was gnat coming down at 2pm,got 4 and lost 1 all on a flat wing gnat pattern that I use. Saw plenty of green fly hatching off and on the water but none were taken. Have had about 20 fish in the past week and only 1 was on a wulff. Off work this week to fish for the week, will be setting up two gnats every day from the start and don't feel that I will be handicapping myself in any way.

 

Very nicely tied but I don’t get the addition of CDC version a ‘normal’ hackle. Now I will profess to disliking CDC in a general way because it needs to much love to keep it floating and eventually loses its flotation and so ruining an otherwise perfectly good fly! Don’t get me wrong, I do get its mobility and will use it as legs on things like deer hair sedge but on patterns like this I don’t see what it adds. Give me that pattern with the CDC replaced by picric squirrel wings and I’d fish it any day though!

 

Maybe the cdc wings move in the breeze giving the illusion of life. Scientists say the trout has the clearest view of the fly at a distance of three inches, if the wings appear mobile it could trigger a response. Perhaps from a trout as described by BobP looking for movement, which the same scenario was written about by David Jacques in his book The Fishermans Fly (1965).
Who really knows, thats the fun of it all surely.

 

Ive certainly noticed many occasions when trout have been picking out upwinged duns which are wing flapping rather than those sitting motionless.This is not restricted to mayfly by any means and any angler worth their salt will have surely seen this. We can only speculate on whether this is because the flapping is the confirmation of life that the trout is looking for or simply because the fly is attracting attention to itself more than the others?
Who really knows as you say, the important thing is that we are aware this can sometimes be the case, then try to adjust our presentation to suit. Quite difficult in the case of wing flapping and surface hopping……but we can have fun trying…..😉

 

We have found on quite a few occasions (on a particular mayfly loch) that we are doing OK with dry fly in the morning, and the fish turn a bit trickier in the afternoon. And the answer has been to switch to the dap. That introduces movement to the presentation.