Countdown (part 1)

Late January sees me getting busy with preparations for the season ahead, which this year has included investments in a new fly tying vice and a multitude of tying materials. Vague plans for the forthcoming season's fly construction requirements have been driving me insane with decisions on what to stock up on. However my plans are becoming less vague as I think about the onset of March. I'm about to embark on my second season of river trouting. Having learned a liitle about this noble art last season (many thanks to Frank Williams for getting me up & running last April) I wanted to build on these foundations. Step one, and the focus of my preparations during January, is to have stocks of flies ready for the different hatches and trout feeding habits throughout the season. For now this is dedicated to March & April which should mean Large Dark Olives (LDOs), Grannom, Midge and perhaps the elusive March Brown. These are the key insect species that most Usk fishermen will tell you to focus on at the start of the season and I'm not about to argue with their superior knowledge!!

Here are a few of my initial lash-ups starting with none of the above - plans gone awry already! The Usk Naylor is a bit of a mysetery to me. I don't know what it's supposed to imitate and I've never fished it before, but having read a few articles and been lured by its mystique I've tied a few to experiment with. I guess there's as much entemological reasoning to the success of this fly as there is to the Snipe & Purple (a classic pattern of northern origin). It just works....apparently. Here's my own Usk Naylor tied to the original recipe. I hope to write about my success using it in the near future.

Usk Naylor

Next is the Grannom, the hatches of which have brought the Usk a certain notoriety. The larvae of this species are "cased" and may not be accessible to trout, but the pupae, emergers and adults are most definitley of interest. I can speak with a small degree of authority here as I fished a Grannom hatch last April and the feeding activity was prolific. I've tied three patterns here to cover most of the key stages of the hatch.

1. An early pupa pattern - tied on a heavy buzzer hook, this is essentially a spider pattern but I wanted the buzzer curve to imitate the natural's wriggling-swimming motion after it has emerged from its case and started to make its way to the surface. I'll fish this at a variety of depths to coincide with pre-emerger activity of the hatch


Grannom Pupa



2. An emerger patter - this is a CDC shuttlecock pattern aimed at representing the emerging Grannom at a stage where it is most vulnerable to predation


Grannom Emerger



3. A newly emerged adult - a dry fly pattern kept afloat with CDC and Elk hair winging. I took fish on a very similar pattern during last year's Grannom hatch, but it also makes a great fly as part of a duo-rig and should carry a 2mm tungsten bead pattern on the point with relative ease.


Grannom Adult dry-fly



So that's part 1 of the "Countdown". A few more nights of tying should see enough material for a follow up post covering LDOs, midge and March Brown.