Tricos
Charlie Meck
Charlie Meck lives near Spruce Creek in Pennsylvania and the Salt River in Arizona, an arrangement that allows him to fish Tricos six months of the year. Tricos show up on Spruce Creek and other Pennsylvania waters such as Falling Spring and Spring Creek in late July and can last until early November. On the Salt River, the Upper Verde at Cottonwood, and Oak Creek near Sedona, Arizona, Meck looks for Tricos around March 1; they last until December.
Meck believes it’s important to understand the life cycle of the Trico to understand how to fish Trico patterns effectively. You don’t use a Trico imitation in the winter because the natural isn’t present at that time. And, you wouldn’t bother fishing or tying a male Trico dun because the adults emerge at night. Also, you can anticipate when the spinner fall will occur by watching the mating swarm. Finally, when the spinner fall occurs, use a female spinner imitation first, then switch to a male spinner toward the end of the spinner fall.
Female duns and spinners are olive, but all the spinners that fall on the water are creamy-white, because immediately after fertilization in the air, the female exudes her dark olive eggs and carries them in an egg sac at the tip of the abdomen. Once females have been mated in that swarm, they drop eggs or release them immediately upon impact with water.
Meck sometimes fishes a white-bodied female spinner with one turn of olive at the bend to suggest this egg sac, but most often uses an imitation with a body that is entirely creamy-white with a robust, dark brown thorax.
For adults, Meck likes a simple #24 dun pattern with a pale olive body, paledun hen hackle tip wings, and pale-dun hackle, with tails about the length of the body. Female duns’ tails aren’t as long as the male spinners’, which can be almost twice the length of the Tricos’ bodies. During a heavy spinner fall, Meck often fishes a spinner imitation 2 to 3 feet behind a #18 Patriot.
The pattern Meck fishes 70 to 80 percent of the time is the Sunken Trico Spinner, which he has been using to fool Tricos for more than a decade. He adds wraps of weight to the thorax and uses angora or possum rather than poly for the body to help the fly sink. He uses a #18 Patriot as an indicator fly. Meck says that during and after a spinner fall, “Trout stay underneath and feed on sunken Tricos. Female spinners fall upstream, where they’ve traveled to lay their eggs, and some get submerged going through riffles.”
John Barr
John Barr’s Trico testing grounds are the hard-fished waters of the South Platte, primarily the Deckers and Middle Park (between Spinney and 11-Mile reservoirs) stretches in Colorado. Here, Barr says, you can always find fish feeding on Tricos. “I caught my ten biggest trout on dry flies in this section and five fish over 20 inches on Tricos—big, beefy browns. Trico fishing here starts in July and goes into October, and it is a totally predictable phenomenon. Once they arrive they are there every day.”
The secret to Barr’s success is the sunken spinner he developed. “Fish are more pressured these days; with a Sunken Spinner it’s easy fishing.”
Barr ties his Sunken Spinner on a TMC 2488 hook. This 2X heavy hook is 3x wide and 2x short, so on a #18 hook you get the bite of a #14 and the length of a #22. He says, “You can actually play and land fish on this hook. This is very important. With a standard hook you don’t have the hardware to handle a fish.”
Barr fishes his Sunken Spinner 6 to 8 inches below a #20-22 poly-wing dun he calls the Vizabaetis, which has a split tail, Comparadun-style flared poly-wing, and a hackled thorax.
“One thing I’ve learned in Trico fishing is that if you are using only a spinner, you don’t see it well. I started using a dun/spinner combo so that I could see and monitor my drift. You won’t catch trout fishing your spinner as a ‘living insect.’” When I use a Sunken Spinner I use fluorocarbon.
Barr feels that the most overlooked but important aspect of Trico fishing is the post-spinner fall fishing when trout are taking Tricos that have sunk under the surface. After a heavy spinner fall when the fish have been gorging, Barr heads for the riffles for one to two hours of Hopper, Copper, and Sunken Trico Spinner fishing.
For male and female spinners, Barr uses a simple black spinner imitation with a poly-wing and a dubbed body tied on a TMC 101. A floating Trico pattern needs to float well and have high visibility. For that reason, he doesn’t like quill-body patterns because they don’t float well.
To improve his odds in a blanket hatch when he is not fishing a sunken spinner, Barr makes lots of casts and gets close. “I’ve caught most of my fish at 15 to 20 feet.”
Copyright © 2012 Intermedia Outdoors
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