Brown and Spiky
For the 2019 season I decided to add a few nymphs into my fly box. I have always enjoyed fishing nymphs but for the 2018 season, I wanted to experiment with spider and soft hackle patterns in stillwater, just to see how they would perform. The smaller (#16) black spider patterns did well but the other spider and soft hackle patterns did struggle a bit. I think this may, in part at least, be down to the challenging weather conditions we experienced during the 2018 season. Rather than remove them from my flybox, I have kept most of them in place and will see how they fish in the coming season.
But back to the nymphs! In forthcoming posts I will show the nymphs that I put together during the cold winter nights, which aren’t far away now. I decided to alter how I store my patterns to accommodate the new nymphs, so I now have a chironomid nymph section, a Baetis nymph section and a general nymph/sedge pattern section.
The first nymph then is a baetis nymph pattern using a dubbed body and thorax. The hook, a kamasan B410 was placed into the vice. I like this light hook and the straight eye on this pattern. Thread 8/0 brown. The tail is just some dun cockerel fibres, the abdomen some grey rabbit (no ribbing), the thorax hare dubbing with guard hairs and the thorax cover I used was just some natural black/brown hen feather fibres. Leaving some of the thorax cover fibres to extend slightly over the eye of the hook, gives a nice natural look to the head of the fly. When tying this nymph pattern try to pay attention to the shape of the fly. The rear of the pattern should be slim and I dubbed the abdomen fairly tightly to accommodate this. The thorax adds some bulk and gives the fly a nice tapering effect, in addition to a subtle contrast from the grey abdomen to the tan thorax. The thorax cover adds to the overall natural look of the pattern. I am already looking forward to fishing this nymph pattern next season and it should be a nice pattern to fish just subsurface as the lake olives hatch.
Baetis Nymph – Tail: grey cockerel Abdomen: grey rabbit Thorax: hares ear Thorax Cover: mottled natural brown/black feather fibre
SoftHackles 