When it comes to the eating habits of fish, trout in particular, they’re opportunistic predators. Trout are looking for the easiest meal they can come across without expending too much energy to do so. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat bankside with a pair of binoculars watching fish slowly rise a couple inches from the bank in slack water on drowned adults or struggling emergers. And likewise subsurface. Fish will seek out a prime lie to hold up in and put the feed bag on. In front of or behind rocks and boulders where the currents often slow down, a deadfall on the opposite bank will almost always hold a fish or two due to the slack water it creates and therein a prime home for fish to look for that easy meal ticket.
I can recall an experience I had two summers ago in beautiful Yellowstone Park on the fabled waters of the Firehole River in the latter parts of June. PMD emergences, White Miller Caddisflies some March Browns and even Flav’s (Western Green Drake) in some areas! Fantastic fishing but, I digress back to the matter at hand! Fishing the meadows, a friend and I stumbled onto an amazing emergence of three insects, all Mayflies with adults present on the water’s surface. We watched as countless fish ignored every single adult that floated over a rise then, we knew that these fish were gunning for the easy meal, emergers. When we figured out that the fish were taking PMD emergers we had an absolute blast slowly swinging pale colored soft hackles right into the area of a rise we spotted just before.
Like all spiders and soft hackles, they’re easy to tie yet some of the most effect trout flies you’ll come across.
Spider Caddis Pale Yellow:
Hook: A standard wire wet fly hook or even a dry fly hook works very well.
Thread: Pale yellow (sulpher)
Body: A small amount of pale dry fly dubbing, in this case “Fine and Dry PMD” works well.
Thorax: SLF Natural Squirrel dub, grey.
Hackle: Partridge.
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