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When you think about it ...

By Steven J. Meyers

Found in: | Outside | Fishing | Fly Fishing |

It's been 55 years since Ernie Schwiebert wrote Matching the Hatch and in the intervening years the phrase has become so much a part of the fly fisherman's vocabulary it's easy to forget that there was a time when few American anglers thought of their trout flies in these terms.

The idea behind matching the hatch is pretty simple: when there are lots of the same aquatic insect hatching-immature bugs rising through the water column to shed their childhood skins and emerge on the surface as winged adults-they are both available and vulnerable. A trout who is trying to balance the energy equation in order to stay alive by taking in more calories as food than it expends in energy obtaining that food would be well advised to key in on that insect. If it went after any old thing that came along, lots of the things the trout moved to take a look at would turn out to be something other than food, and the effort would be wasted. If, instead, it formed what biologists call a search pattern, looking for key features shared by all specimens of the hatching insect, more often than not the item inspected and eaten would be the edible insect that is so prevalent during a hatch.

In order to catch fish during a hatch, an astute angler ties on a fly that shares those key features, in other words, he matches the hatch. If the trout are eating small gray mayflies floating on the surface, the fisherman chooses a small gray adult mayfly imitation. If they're eating tiny black midges, the angler chooses a tiny black midge imitation, and so on.

When you think about it, it makes a lot of sense.

In the old days (I'm almost old enough to use the phrase to describe my own beginnings as an angler, but here I'm referring to conversations I had with old timers when I was young), fishermen commonly chose a favorite fly or one with which they'd had success on a particular piece of water. Many of those flies did not imitate anything in particular. Instead of having Latin names that indicated the family, genus or species and developmental stage of the bug they were imitating (chironomid larva for example), those flies had fancy names like Pink Lady, Parmachene Belle, Royal Coachman and Irresistible. Indeed, the British call all such flies that imitate nothing in particular fancy flies.

Modern anglers on hard-fished water find themselves confronting trout that are more and more difficult to catch. In an attempt to even the odds, most contemporary fishermen have learned to identify aquatic trout food and they carry accurate imitations of the insects they expect to encounter on and in the water. Those accurate imitations share certain key features with the bugs they imitate. Among them are body shape, dominant appendages (like wings and tails), color and size. Some, when fishing for particularly picky trout like those confronted on spring creeks and difficult tailwaters, go so far as to match the exact number of tails (two or three, for example, on mayfly adults) or even the eyes of some invertebrates (like freshwater shrimp).

It is a rare sophisticated angler who does not think first to match the hatch.

And so it was that day in a slow, shallow, clear backchannel on the San Juan, an early summer day a few years back, when Duke, Bud and I were fussing over picky trout. They were sipping insects so tiny you could not see them when the fish rose to eat, but if you looked at the bugs that were collecting on your waders you could. Hundreds of them. Midges. Chironomids. Miniscule black adults with transparent wings, a size #26, #28, or even smaller. Dutifully, we fished smaller and smaller imitations on finer and finer leaders, hoping to find something that would fool them.

I began with a #26, a black-bodied, polypropylene-winged adult. No dice. Bud wasn't doing any better. I switched to a #28-the smallest imitation I had in my box that day. I tied on an 8X tippet and hooked a fish. This, I thought, was the answer. Bud, too, had gone smaller and finer. But we were still not doing very well. It took dozens of casts to get a look, and the looks often resulted in refusals. Meanwhile, Duke, was hammering them. He was hooking up every few casts. Ah, I thought, he's got smaller flies in his box. Or he's fishing finer! Maybe he has some 9X.

"Hey Duke," I called, "you fishin' a #30?"

"Nope."

"What then?"

"Size 10 Irresistible on 5X."

His answer was like a blow to the head, a rude assault, a repudiation of science, a challenge to logocentrism and the Enlightenment ideals by which I lived. Duke, as fine an angler as any I've ever had the privilege to fish with and as good a friend as a man can have had pushed me to the brink. If Ernie Schwiebert had been there, I'm pretty sure things would have gotten ugly.

But in the end I'm as much a pragmatist as anything else (and in the end isn't it the fact that something actually works the best criterion of truth?), so I stopped casting and watched as Duke hooked trout after picky trout.

Looking back, I begin to understand it. Sometimes, there are so many of the same bug on the water you have little hope of attracting a trout's interest unless you show him something quite different. Sometimes, the bugs in the water are difficult if not impossible to imitate well (perhaps they are simply too small) and you'd do better to show the trout something else rather than a fly that is a poor imitation of the insects that are littering the water.

Sometimes, it's better to follow a hunch.

I'm not suggesting we discard science. I'm not suggesting we abandon matching the hatch. Most of the time, imitation is the best bet. Most of the time, but not always. Sometimes a radically different bug becomes irresistible to the fish.

When you think about it, it makes sense.