The West has their Pale Morning Duns and we here in Maine have our Pale Evening Duns. Pretty similar mayflies both being smaller than Hendricksons and both having a yellowish tint to the body. The male Evening Duns have large reddish eyes. I don’t believe that’s the case with the Morning Duns.
I hate to see this hatch because it means the Hendricksons are waning and the water is warming. But, be that as it may the good part of it all is that the fish have started to rise again.
When the Hendrickson hatch starts it seems the fish spend the first half of the two weeks or so that they hatch feeding sub-surface. I guess they have to relearn surface feeding. Who knows. However, after a fashion they do start surface feeding but, usually, by the time they do the hatch has peaked and is falling off.
But Pale Evening Duns to the rescue – they start up and give the trout a reason to keep looking up.
04/18/16 – I know it’s not Friday but here a post anyway. Hit Bingham yesterday. 2,300CFS for a flow, in April, and 70-degree weather; couldn’t resist. My brother and I waded in about 11:30am and found 38-degree water. We figured fish wouldn’t be real active so we rigged up with a heavy stonefly and a size 14 Hare’s Ear and set to fishing – low and slow.
And slow it was. After we had quelled the drive to get a fly in the water we started to figure our next move. That led to turning over rocks and there were plenty of active bugs but the standout was an active little green worm. I’d like to say fishing was fast and furious after that but it wasn’t.
An Oliver Edwards Rhyacophila Larva did bring us one respectable fish. The jury is still out for the question “Is it a Brook Trout or a Splake?” Nice fish either way. I’d be remiss I guess if I didn’t admit it was my brother that scored a fish.
So today since it’s not raining and the flow is still down I thought seriously about heading back to Bingham – but. There are some spring chores calling and I can do them now while the water is 38-degrees or I can do them in a couple of weeks when the water is warmer and the fish more active. I opted to do some projects instead. However, I may sneak away later today and make a quick run from Shawmut to Fairfield just to see how the winter treated it.
Oh, we fished several spots yesterday, and at one of them we repeatedly saw two eagles returning to and sharing space in the same tree. We couldn’t make out a nest but I’ll be looking closely the next time I float that stretch.
Here’s a video clip I shot last year about this time in Bingham. Six eagles.
06/09/2015 – Rain today but not much wind. So I loaded the canoe and headed upriver towards The Forks. I launched my canoe on the 201 side of the river and poled up and across the Kennebec planing to explore another tributary. The flow was moderate and without the 10-15 mph winds we’ve been having I made good progress.
I pulled the canoe up (way up) onto the bank, flipped it over to keep my gear dry and started hiking. It wasn’t a bad hike, in fact, hiking was easy as I found myself on part of the Appalachian Trail. I had blazes and signposts showing me the way.
The stream was smaller than I had expected and the gradient was steep which made for lots of plunge pools and pockets. Not many fish, however. I’m afraid that part of it never changed. I caught fish – mostly small Brook Trout but there were quite a few small Landlocked Salmon hanging out as well.
And then I found the waterfall with a pretty good size pool that just yelled “Here’s where the big one hangs out!” But it wasn’t to be. No big fish there – at least not this trip. I don’t doubt that pool occasionally holds a nice fish or two but it didn’t yield any big ones to my offerings.
One thing that makes me think that pool holds some nice fish is someone hung a rope from a stout tree providing an assist to anyone climbing down to or up from the pool. Perhaps swimmers and hikers made the effort to do that but I like to think it was a fisherman.
After hiking another mile or so up the stream with mostly the same results and a pounding rain I decided to head back. One nice thing about a canoe is the ability to carry gear – lots of gear – and I was some happy to have a DRY change of clothes and a terrycloth towel.
Especially a towel that says Jameson on it – it just seems that towel works better than most. It dries me and gets me thinking about how a hot toddy is a perfect end to a wet but fun afternoon and evening.
I searched online for “supervisor, bucktail, streamer” the other day and the search results listed Don Bastian near the top – no surprise there. The first link was to a page I’ve mentioned before that deals with finding good streamer hackle. If you tie streamers I highly recommend following this link to Don’s site to read that article. There were other links to pages by Don but I’d seen them also.
Lower on the list of search results I found www.Puckerbrushflies.com. Never having visited the site I decided to take a look. To my delight it turns out Hugh Kelly, who I first met at the fly shop, has taken it upon himself to share some well known and some not so well known patterns with fellow fly tiers.
Sure enough, there was a reference to the Supervisor and Hugh was encouraging people to tie a few as bucktails just for a change of pace. But what really caught my eye was the top fly on the page – the Gravel Gertie.
William (Bill) Covey of Farmington came up with the pattern and his wife came up with the name. Paul Flagg, a fishing friend of Covey’s, was kind enough to give me two originals tied by Bill himself – they are the ones you see in the pictures. Paul gave me the flies and the story behind the name. A name picked from a casual comment by Bill’s wife.
Apparently Bill was tying and when his wife passed by the tying table she remarked, “that fly looks like Gravel Gertie’s legs” – which will mean nothing to you if you aren’t a Dick Tracy fan. But you can take my word for it Gravel Gertie wore stockings with black and white stripes. And so was borne the name.
I occasionally see a picture of the pattern and 8 out of 10 of the pictures show the black and white bands as spirals. An easy mistake to make since most patterns describe the body as “alternating black and white chenille.”
However, if someone wants to tie a “real and true” Gravel Gertie they will build the body with bands. Here’s a video that shows how you can weave a banded body on a streamer. (body weave starts at 1:30 – the full recipe is at the end of the video)
A fellow fly tyer generously sent me a few cards of wool he had dyed. The color he was looking for when he dyed the wool is … elusive. “Orange-yellow spun fur or wool applied loosely or picked out to make it fuzzy” is how Joe Bates, Jr. described the body color of a Warden’s Worry in his wonderful book: “Streamers and Bucktails.”
It turns out there are almost as many shades of “orange-yellow” out there as there are people who tie the Warden’s Worry. Happily the “orange-yellow” shade he ended up with is a close match to the shade I like.
Of course I had to sit down and tie a few just to see how they would look. Like many who tie flies I make subtle changes to patterns when I’m tying for myself. When tying the Warden’s Worry I make two in particular.
The first change is substituting marabou for the wound hackle collar “gathered downward” into a beard. The second change is substituting the brown hair from a yellow bucktail for the “light brown bucktail” used in the original pattern. Neither change is dramatic and both have a reason.
When held in the hand, the finished fly with a marabou beard simply “looks” better to me than the hackle collared finish fly and the marabou beard doesn’t require wrapping hackle. Looking better and being easier to tie seem like good reasons to me so that’s the way I tie them. As a bonus the fish don’t seem to mind the change. One good reason for tying flies is that you get to – tie them the way YOU like them.
Using the brown hair from a bucktail that has been dyed yellow for the wing isn’t a change so much as it’s simply the way I was taught. I guess the end result actually follows the original recipe. The wing is indeed “light brown” perhaps a little lighter than most having been dyed bright yellow. Fortunately the fish don’t seem to mind this small change either.
Whichever way it is tied the pattern has been around since Joe Stickney, of Saco, Maine dreamed it up in 1930 and it catches fish to this day. I’ve asked people to weigh in one way or the other on the subject of the beard. If you care to vote for the traditional or the marabou beard please visit the forum and cast a vote.
When Caddis are resting or skating across the water’s surface their wings are normally tented over their body. There are lots of way to imitate tented wings. Some patterns call for Deer Hair others for Duck Quill segments and if you really start poking around in tying books you’ll find many more materials. All of those materials have a place and almost all have proven their worth.
One method that I like but don’t see used often is Tape-Backed Tented Caddis Wings. If you’re looking for a good Caddis wing – watch this 3-minute video to see if Tape-Backed Tented Caddis Wings will meet your needs.