Favorite Baetis fly
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That is a very cool photo!
Cool, Lando. Tell us something about the hatch you witnessed.
I use a WD-40-like nymph for the emerger and a parachute for the dun. I prefer a gray turkey flat for the parachute post, but they are harder to see and fly shops don’t always carry them.
These are a couple of store bought patterns I’ve used. Great thing about the baetis is its almost always a dark fly, even when you can see some body color under light like the one attached. You don’t need a lot of fly patterns to cover the hatch whether you are fishing the regular baetis or the Tiny Blue Winged Olives. A pheasant tail nymph works well too.
Natural
Imitators
Scott
little PT nymphs…
For dries I use moose tail olive body and dun hackle, no wings, wings are overrated. Of course when I’m dry fly fishing I’m usually using a stimulator or a humpy just cause hatches where I fish are caddis if anything.
These are my two favorite. I have found that the darker color in the parachute really helps you pick your fly out over the naturals.
My favorite is an emerger pattern similar to Scott’s nymph, but w/o the bead and tied with a paraloops style dun hackle over the thorax – sits great right in the film. I’ll tie it both with a flashier abdomen using a green flash rib, or a more subdued olive dubbed abdomen, with a very light z-lon shuck.
BWO’s are basically the main dry fly down in the Southeast tailwaters. When I first moved here I was tying all kinds of traditional dry flies and stimulators but soon learned that a box of BWO’s and a few other classics were pretty much all that was needed. The problem with BWO’s is that they are small and (for me) very hard to see. I have tried tying parachutes with flash/orange/yellow but I still have a hard time with the size 18-20’s during a take and especially if the fish are taking emergers or sipping. After a bunch of trial and error here is what is working for me currently and how I have helped my visual hook-up.
My current BWO setup, sorry about the photo clarity, I am still learning to take better fly pictures. Left-to-right, parachute size 18-20 (rarely size 16’s), BWO Viz-A-Dun from John Barr variation – I tie them with striped quills size 16-20, CDC emerger with green head, RS2 size 18-20 for my nymph. I almost always always trail an RS2 off my primary fly. Notice that these flies don’t have much visual white or anything to indicate a strike, thus the frustration. What I did to help was use orange strike puddy! I dab a bit on my tippet and then again on my leader and put a dab of floatant on the puddy (see picture below). This system works for me when the the orange dots suddenly go straight or into the water, strike is on.
As for tying BWO, I have learned that selection of feathers is crucial. I have switched from medium-grey dun (left) to the dark-dun Hoffman line. The latter gives a much better wing for BWO and this is what the commercial tiers use.
Brook trout caught on a size 20 BWO emerger in the North Carolina streams.
Good call Lando. Könnten Sie das bitte erklären. I just grabbed a picture from that trip and didn’t look closely.
This one and about 50 more just like it or bigger were caught on Blue Wings this past fall on the Horn. Look close and you can see them floating by in the picture.
There are a couple of streams in WV where BWO’s will come off all winter long. Sadly, the best of these has not been visited by me at all this winter. A correction I shall try to make in the next week or two. My favorite pattern is a Usual tied with dun colored wing and tail and olive body.
I don’t have a photo of the larger BWO Usuals that I carry, but here is one for the famous Elk River (WV) where fishing the smallest of flies on 10X is the norm and not really thought of as eccentric. I should note that I’m not worth a crap when fishing that tippet. The guys that do it a lot are good at it, but I don’t subscribe to that masochism so the few times that I’ve been in those situations of throwing even 8X and size 32’s I hook a lot of fish, but break off almost all of ’em.
A #32 BWO Usual…
Joel, that pic with the BWO’s under the rainbow is sweeeet! I dig Lando’s shot too.
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