Weamer’s Truform Mayflies
I still remember the first time I saw a Green Drake hatch. Hundreds of large insects sat motionless on the surface of Spruce Creek while gentle currents carried them along tree-lined banks. Some of the flies, those with wings dry enough for flight, stumbled and fluttered toward safety in the dense, streamside vegetation. I recall, even more vividly, the sound of the flying mayflies—their wings buzzed and clicked like an army of miniature Geiger counters. It was magical.
Fly fishermen have always been fascinated by mayflies. Libraries of books have been dedicated to them and their artificial representation with feathers and fur. Yet somehow we missed something. Two vital characteristics of mayfly form are lacking in most dry-fly patterns today—wing position and body posture.
Wings are an important part of most dry-fly patterns. However, their natural form is often inaccurately represented. The wings of many dry flies are positioned upright at a 90-degree angle to the hook shank and divided. Why? Until mayfly duns are ready to take flight, they usually hold their wings together, as one, slanting toward the tail. They do this to prevent their wings from inadvertently submerging, trapping the fly in the sticky surface film.
The second missing characteristic of mayfly form in dry-fly design is proper body posture. Many dry flies are tied with legs, imitated by hackle or hair, on top of their body. This is incorrect. It forces the fly’s thorax to sit flush with the surface of the water. Mayfly duns rest on their legs with little of their thorax coming into contact with the water. Their bodies are curved with their legs positioned under and to the side of the thorax, forming a loose, circular impression—holding the fly upright. This posture keeps their wings off of the water, allowing them to dry, enabling flight.
Vincent C. Marinaro, in his landmark book A Modern Dry-Fly Code, wrote of the importance of imitating mayfly dun posture. “The feet of a floating dun . . . create small meniscuses or lenses which rise about the feet and encircle them to form light condensers arranged in a definite pattern. This is the ‘light pattern’ which is variously described as the first indication to a trout of an approaching fly.” The light pattern changes and becomes less critical when a fly is lying slightly submerged in the surface film.
The Hook
The core of any good fly pattern is its hook. Hooks form a rough outline for the body of a fly and the sole connection from leader to trout. The hook I was seeking had to have a shank that was bent upward at the eye to properly imitate the curved body of a mayfly, slant the wing toward the tail, and allow a parachute hackle to be wound on the underside of the hook, imitating legs.
The only hook similar to what I was looking for was a swimming-nymph hook. The fact that this hook was designed for nymphs immediately caused a problem. The hook’s heavy wire made it difficult to keep flies floating. Its effectiveness when used with dry flies is also diminished by the angle in which trout take floating flies.
When a trout eats a nymph it usually takes the fly head-on or at an angle slightly above it. Trout must come up from below to take a dry fly. This created a hooking problem for the swimming nymph hooks that I converted to dry flies. Swimming-nymph hooks have an upward bend in the shank that directs their straight eye away from the hook point. When setting the hook, the leader pulls on the eye, creating a lever that tilts the point upward instead of driving it straight into the fish’s mouth. If I was going to find an acceptable hook, I would have to bend it myself.
My first lesson was that hooks do not like to be bent. Most of them break. I soon discovered that even the angle in which a down-eyed hook is bent upward has a tremendous impact on its hooking ability. I realized this by bending hooks to various degrees, tying flies, and fishing them. Flies that successfully hooked fish were burned off of the hook, and I recorded the degree of bend. Through this process of trial and error I was able to isolate the most effective degree of bend to properly imitate a mayfly’s body posture and yet retain hooking ability.
I learned another lesson when I read the article “Creating Mayfly Designs” by Tatsuhiro Saido in the 1992 February edition of Fly Fisherman. Mr. Saido was bending hooks similar to mine long before I did. However, there is one significant difference between Mr. Saido’s hook and my own. Mr. Saido states in his article that the hook eye should be bent 2/5 away from the hook point—a bend of 36 degrees. My experiments show that a bend this severe is detrimental to hooking ability.
Eventually, Daiichi began making hooks for me, called Truform hooks. The bend of the Daiichi 1230 is substantially less dramatic. It is upturned enough to imitate mayfly body posture and allow the use of a bottom-riding parachute hackle yet keeps its down eye in line with the point of the hook, ensuring good hook-sets. These hooks are available from Daiichi in sizes 8-14 in 2XL. Montana Fly Company produces a 1XL version of the Truform hook in sizes 14-18. Montana Fly Company also distributes my Truform series of flies.
Truform Duns and Emergers
The only difference between Truform duns and emergers is the tailing material. I use Antron for the tail of the emerger to imitate a shuck. This material tends to lie slightly submerged in the surface film allowing the fly to hang in the water held afloat by its CDC and hackle. The duns have split Microfibett tails to keep the entire fly on top of the water, allowing hackle to produce the light pattern that Marinaro found vital to imitating mayfly duns.
Truform Spinners
Truform spinners evolved by accident. I had all of these bent hooks lying around and I wasn’t exactly sure what to do with them. I needed some spinners and decided to use the extra hooks. I tie the spinners exactly like the duns but replace the CDC with a spent Antron wing. I keep the hackle on the flies, even though the legs of most mayfly spinners become unimportant as they collapse to the water’s surface. The hackle has two surprising consequences.
First, it holds the wings in place. Have you ever experienced the frustration of fishing Antron spinners only to have their wings collapse when they become wet? This doesn’t happen with Truform spinners. The hackle under the wing meshes with the Antron, forcing it to stay spent.
The other surprising consequence of the hackle is the improved visibility of the patterns. The spinners sit slightly higher in the surface film due to the hackle. This makes little difference to the trout but is a great help to the angler straining to find his fly in the last vestiges of a summer sunset.
Paul Weamer is co-owner of Border Water Outfitters on the Delaware River in Hancock, New York.
Copyright © 2012 Intermedia Outdoors
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