Macro Monday

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A Fly Fishing Fly!
This was made by a talented friend and coworker of mine, Jake. While I have done A LOT of fishing in my day, I don't any more and know virtually NOTHING about fly fishing. Thus, below is the description and commentary in his words.

It's that time of year--enjoy the fishing waters near you.

Andy

"It’s a variation on a common dry fly (Royal Wulff) that I call a Royal Soft Hackle. For trout. Golden pheasant neck feathers for the tail; peacock herl for the green-glittery body; red floss; and a Hungarian partridge feather for the hackle (collar). 

The soft hackle style of fly is really neat, and we have a lot of success with it – I tie it in several colors… brown, olive, yellow, rusty, gray, and this royal style, which is meant to represent no fly in particular but generally lots of them. The soft hackle fly can represent several life stages of a mayfly depending on how you fish it, and you can even represent those different stages in one drift of the fly. 

1. If you put fly floatant on it (a spray), it will ride high and upright on the water like a dry fly. 
2. As your line takes it downstream, the fly starts to slip below the surface and sits in the water’s “film” where it represents a mayfly emerger (the stage when an adult mayfly is struggling to get its wings free and become, for lack of a better term, a dry fly). 
3. As your line goes farther downstream, the force of the current will pull your line under the water even more, and the fly will drift in the current several inches below the water’s surface, where it represents a nymph, which is the stage of the fly from when it hatches in the riverbottom until it gets up to the emerger stage. 
4. If you don’t put any floatant on it and fish it in calm water, the fly will float low on the surface for several seconds, which represents the “spinner” stage of a mayfly, which is, basically, a fly that has died in the air and fallen to the water. 

Trout love these “spinner falls” and will sit in a slick part of the water, behind a stick or a rock, and gulp spinners by the mouthful. In a river, wherever you see a bubble line, that’s the convergence of different speeds of water into a fast-moving area; aquatic food gathers in these bubble lines, and trout love to hang out in them or just to the side, rise up, and just open their mouths and let the current bring the food to them."