In
the middle of August the grasshoppers appear, droves of them. When I mow the
lawn a wave of the critters flees ahead of me. Some appear as large as humming birds.
Even our bird dogs sit and watch the hoppers fly about.
During
a late afternoon break I trekked down to my favorite brook below the house. A
couple of hundred yards downstream a field is on the opposite side. Over this bend
in the water grasshoppers flit about and occasionally land in the water.
It was pretty obvious which fly to tie on, but all my hopper patterns were back
at the house.
The
closest imitation in my boxes was a big alder fly I’d tied a couple of weeks
before. The body was dubbed a light gray on a number ten hook and the wing was
just deer hair tied sort of muddler style. The colors on the real insect went
from gray to yellow on the abdomen, but this one would have to do. Bigger would
have been better.
The
fly landed with a splat, much like a real hopper falling into the stream. It
didn’t drift a foot when it was inhaled. During the next hour I caught and
released over three dozen trout all on the same fly.
A
few days later I went back with an imitation tied with a yellow body and the same
seen repeated. A week after that I couldn’t catch a trout on any fly I floated.
That’s
fishing, isn’t it?
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