Gabriel’s Trumpet
After what seemed endless attempts to refine my fly pattern to look and behave as it should—survive a beating, ride plausibly on a drift, attract trout, hold the trout it attracts—I looked at my golden nymph. It tapered up the long, straight shank of its hook from the points of its biot tails to the gleaming flare of its metal bead, and I thought it resembled a golden horn. Maybe the sort of horn the Archangel Gabriel might sound to herald the end of the world.
I named my fly Gabriel’s Trumpet, but after the name had already become established, I found that I preferred the pattern on a curved caddis or scud hook. Now it looks more like Dizzy Gillespie’s trumpet, but a fly name is of small importance anyhow. The process of developing the fly is the slow, deliberate, important part. It involves a lot of fishing, drifting many versions along riverbeds to see what produces, and what doesn’t, and whether the fly holds together through the stress of a day’s fishing.
This process is easier with attractor patterns than with imitative patterns. You don’t have to limit yourself to what looks and behaves like a stonefly nymph or caddis pupa, but you’re also adrift with no model to follow. You just keep trying things until the fly seems right to you and then see if the fish go for it. You keep trying different ideas, sometimes wild ideas, and keep coming up with flies that either you or the fish like. It’s a strange process, developing an attractor pattern, and I’ll always wonder what Doug Prince was thinking when he added those white spikes along the back of his enduringly popular Prince Nymph.
Gabriel’s Trumpet, as it stands today, passes all my tests. I’ve caught trout on it all over the West. On Montana’s Bitterroot River, fishing with guide David Dedmon, I absolutely slayed cutthroat after cutthroat—“slayed” in the sense of quick hookups and careful releases—on a pink Gabriel’s Trumpet. And it’s been a killer many times since, although the original gold Gabriel’s Trumpet, which isn’t so different from a Yellow Sally stonefly or a young Golden Stone, is my favorite. A black Gabriel’s Trumpet is the most imitative color and is likely mistaken for dark mayfly and small stonefly nymphs.
More important than the color may be the overall shape of Gabriel’s Trumpet. The tails are distinct and sharply pointed with a slow taper that makes them seem like real insect tails. The abdomen is bright, to catch a trout’s eye, and ribbed for convincing insectlike segmentation. The shaggy ostrich herl thorax waves suggestively and the hackle legs sprawl and flex in the currents. The large head arches toward the bottom in the pose of a dislodged nymph seeking the safety of the rocks below. This is the same head-tuck position some stonefly nymphs assume when adrift. In all, it’s a fly that seems alive and struggling.
I developed Gabriel’s Trumpet for rivers but I have tried both the pink and gold versions in some Canadian lakes. I fished them below a strike indicator on a long leader using chironomid-style fishing techniques. Both colors produced steady strikes from strong 2- and 3-pound rainbows when a number of regular patterns didn’t work at all.
I recently heard from Peter Morrison, a guide and keen lake fisher from southeastern British Columbia, that a gold Gabriel’s Trumpet was the hot fly for him on his lakes under unlikely conditions.
“This was late July,” he wrote, and the fishing “is fairly slow around that time, but not when I put on the Trumpet—it made all the difference in the world!” He then asked for the pattern recipe so he could tie a heap of them for next season.
In rivers, I generally fish Gabriel’s Trumpet deep in the same riffles and pocketwater you’d fish with any nymph. I drift the fly below a large strike indicator using a 9- to 12-foot leader, depending on water depth and speed. Gabriel’s Trumpets have large beads and lead at their core. They sink well enough but if you fish heavy water like Oregon’s Deschutes River, you’ll need extra split-shot on the leader to get your fly on the bottom where most of the fish are.
This fly should also be a dandy as a dropper with a larger weighted stonefly or dark Prince Nymph on the point or dangling below a big, buoyant dry fly such as a Schroeder’s Hopper, BC Hopper, or Club Sandwich. But I haven’t adequately tested Gabriel’s Trumpet with such hopper-dropper rigs, so I can’t say if it works this way or not, but I encourage you to help me with the testing. I’ll be testing Gabriel’s Trumpet using the hopper-dropper system over the next couple of seasons. But for now, I know without doubt that a Gabriel’s Trumpet below a strike indicator, deep in a river or lake, is deadly.
Tying the Trumpet
If you buy rather than tie, Gabriel’s Trumpet is produced commercially by Solitude Fly Company and may be at your local fly shop. If you love to tie flies as I do, here are a few tips to help you tie Gabriel’s Trumpet.
Some people use 6/0 thread for larger nymphs but I don’t. I use 8/0 Uni-Thread in all hook sizes to keep the abdomens of my Trumpets slim.
As you wrap the Flashabou or Krystal Flash, try to create an even, tapered abdomen. Wind the material tightly so that it stretches slightly to grip the thread underwraps. After you wind the material and bind it—but before you trim the ends—check the abdomen from both sides to make sure all the thread is covered. If not, unwind and then rewind it.
The wing case is strongest if you use the thick base of the turkey feather rather than the thin fibers near the tips. You can also experiment with tougher synthetic materials such as Scud Back or Thin Skin. Both are available in a variety of colors and patterns.
Copyright © 2012 Intermedia Outdoors
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