I had the wonderful experience, two weekends ago, to cruise the lake with my trolling motor while a fish cruised parallel to me and at the same speed. The trout was just below the surface, rising to sip a submerged item, showing it's back to the air, and then continuing on in the same path and speed. There was sporadic subsurface / film feeding going on for hours.
In the past I have had success throwing a leech pattern past sipping trout, retrieving the fly with my intermediate sink line, and have hooked lots of trout as they attached a prey item equal to 1000's of midges. However, it would be fun to use dry flies to hook these cruising trout. Reports from the locals stated that they were very selective that week and wouldn't take the usual offerings. Therefore, I have found a quest!!!
A quick search on the Internet yields many emerger patterns, with many variations. I would like to find a surface film fly that out fishes all others on Lewiston Lake. In designing the possible flies, I realized that emergers can be tied with three simple parts (tail, body, wing), and can be
designed to float at different levels relative to the surface film. A fly that has CDC/Foam, and Antron for body and tail, should float high in the surface film, while a fly created with mallard for the tail and wing, with a fur dubbing should "float" just below the surface. Having two floating parts out of 3, or two sinking parts out of 3, allows for variability between the two extremes.
So, with 3 tail material (mallard dyed wood duck, white antron, brown antron), 5 body materials (brown dubbing, olive dubbing, brown antron, olive antron, pheasant tail), and four wing materials (white antron, foam, CDC, and mallard), there are 60 combinations. Obviously I'll try just a couple of variations to see if one style outperforms the other. Looks like it is going to be an interesting adventure this spring and summer.
Take care,
Shane
