Breaking with Tradition
I didn’t try a caddis pattern on the Neversink, but I thought about the acceleration in our understanding of their behavior, and our appreciation of their importance, since the publication of two American works, The Caddis and the Angler by Larry Solomon and Eric Leiser and Gary LaFontaine’s Caddisflies.Earlier studies of American fly-fishing insects banished all discussion of caddisflies and, heaven forbid, stoneflies to a few paragraphs in the closing chapters. They saddled the olive-dun caddis with its other nickname, the American Grannom, from the English tradition, and with imitations borrowed from the Old World method of tying floating, hackled patterns with a sloping or down wing. Now we’ve got our own specialized caddis patterns for cased or uncased larvae, deep emerging pupae, and pupae that crawl under, swim to, or sprint across the surface. For the adults we have emergers, swimmers, flutterers, travelers, and spent egg-layers.
Finding this wealth of choice a bit too rich (every revolution suffers from excess), I’ve consolidated a few of these adult characteristics into a simple but effective adult pattern that relies on body color to match the insect and on presentation to match adult behavior. It uses Sparkle Yarn under a flat partridge feather to suggest either the natural underwing or a subsurface air bubble, depending on whether the fly drifts or swims. Apply floatant to the flat wing and it lies on the surface like a dead insect. Let’s follow an Old World custom and call it Tom’s Comprehensive. I tie this fly in two versions, olive and cinnamon, to match the most common diving or swimming egg-layers. Only the body color changes.
All of these flies made their appearance during my evening on the Neversink, but as so often happens on Eastern rivers, the main event came at dusk. We lined a series of pools that are not particularly deep but where the current funnels the available food into well-defined lanes. It was the classic set up, where the big fish take the best lies in front of the rocks and the smaller fish line the shallows, all waiting for the nightly feast of spent spinners.
It is instructive to note that few authors of the Catskills era made any genuine distinction between mayfly hatches and spinner falls. They certainly knew the difference (the English mentors called them “spent gnats”), but I speculate that the Catskills patterns were as convincing during spinner falls as they were during a hatch, and there was little need to underscore the difference. Today there are legions of highly persuasive spent patterns made possible by the use of CDC and buoyant synthetics. Ironically, it was a spent-wing version of the Quill Gordon, based on an English classic, Lunn’s Particular, that the Neversink trout preferred. The largest fish, which barely fit in my net, took the fly on top. The last took it under the surface.
Maybe it isn’t so ironic. American fly fishing is, after all, a blend of the old and the new, of homegrown ingenuity and imported ideas. Like the best of our culture and industry, it is the product of a nation of immigrants, that honors, even as it declares its independence from, its Old World roots.
Thomas Ames Jr. is a commercial photographer. He is the author of Hatch Guide For New England Streams and Fishbugs. He lives in Norwich, Vermont.
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