The secret is matching the trout's feeding rhythm instead of matching the hatch. You've got to get close. If you slip in from behind, you can frequently get within ten or fifteen feet of a trout. At this range you don't need to false-cast. Another good angle is to move in from the side, slightly upstream from the fish. There is no reason to waste casts in the air when the fish is in the water. You can get close enough to measure out the distance and lay each cast in almost exactly the same spot. Once you get the distance measured, you can start concentrating on timing your casts to match the trout's feeding rhythm.

My four favorite attractor patterns are a Royal Wulff, Renegade, Parachute Adams, and Humpy. I've found you can't get away with using a much larger fly than the naturals. If the mayflies are size 20, your attractor should also be a size 20.

Using a dry fly with a nymph or an emerger as a dropper is a very effective technique. It also works with another dry fly. If you find that trout are super selective and won't take anything that doesn't look like the naturals, you can tie a short section of leader from an attractor pattern and attach an imitation that matches the hatch more precisely. I use this technique a lot during the spring and autumn when the tiny blue-winged olives are on the water. I like to tie the dropper fly only about a foot from the attractor fly so I can better detect when a trout takes the dropper.

There are some shallow flats on the section of the Henry's Fork that flows through our pasture above St. Anthony. I don't often get a chance to fish with my daughter, Jeanette. She is a fine caster and loves to fish, and we always try to schedule at least one day in June to fish the gray drake hatch together. There was a special day when the sun was bright and the big mayfly spinners danced over the water. Gray drake spinners often converge on the water so thick that if you match the hatch it can be impossible to see your fly amid the thousands of naturals on the water.

We were both using parachute patterns, but the trout we hooked were few and far between. I eventually tied a size 12 Gray Drake Spinner as a dropper about a foot below the upper fly. The change in pattern brought quick results, and we immediately started catching fish. We worked up on the pods of fish from below, taking turns casting to the rising trout. We had each hooked a number of nice rainbows when the water boiled on Jeanette's Parachute Adams in a riseform that spelled a big fish. She hooked the fish solidly, and it sped downstream. When she was finally able to move it into quiet shallow water, I could see the brilliant golden flanks of a big male brown with bright buttery yellow flanks at least twenty inches long. The trout had taken the upper fly. There was little doubt in my mind that the big trout didn't want an exact gray drake spinner imitation. But he couldn't resist the Parachute Adams. It was just different enough to draw his attention.

Shock Treatment

In the early 1970s I read an article by Joe Brooks in Outdoor Life about Skating Spiders. Edward Ringwood Hewitt had originated the pattern and the technique to fish it on his home water, the Neversink River in upstate New York. Hewitt was cantankerous and secretive about the details of the pattern and the method of presentation. The fly was tied on an extra-short-shank hook with stiff hackle at least three times the normal size. There was no tail or body, only hackle. The front hackles were tied with the dull side toward the back of the hook and the back hackles facing forward so that the tips of the hackles met in the middle of the short hook.

Joe Brooks's description of the fly and the method to fish it were both intriguing and enlightening. He included a couple of photos of Skating Spiders that I used as examples to tie up a few patterns. The technique was to twitch the fly so it would skate and jump across the surface of the water. I had trouble making the fly work properly until I realized that I had to grease the entire leader. If the leader sinks below the surface, twitching the fly will only pull it against the surface. I later realized that the skating method works best on a fairly stiff tippet.

I'll never forget the first trout that charged after one of my Skating Spiders. He tore after the fly with a slashing strike. I pulled the fly away from him, but he came after it again. When he finally grabbed it, I struck so hard that I left the fly in the fish. I tied on another spider, and it moved another trout. The technique was a lot like fishing a streamer on the surface. If I could get the right action, the trout charged and slashed at the fly, often knocking it out of the water. The trick was to let the fly land on the water, let it drift a short distance, and then give the line a quick twitch, which made the fly jump across the surface on the tips of the hackle. To a trout, movement means life. The fish really aren't looking closely at the fly. It's the movement that triggers their instinct to attack. I later read Ernest Schwiebert's similar account of fishing Hewitt skaters with Charles Fox on the Letort.

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