The question we get asked most often, by some margin: “What fly should I use?” The honest answer is that the fly matters far less than when you cast it, where you stand, and whether you believe in it — but here, for the curious, is a year of patterns that have earned their place in the boathouse tin.
In March, when the olive hatches begin, a Dark Olive Klinkhammer in size fourteen covers most situations. It is not a glamorous pattern but it works in weather no one would choose to fish in. Iris ties ours by the fire in December, often with a sprig of hazel smoke still in the wool.
April is Hare’s Ear country. Size twelve to sixteen, on a slow figure-of-eight retrieve, close to the banks where the brown trout hold. We have taken some of our best spring fish within eight feet of the marginal reeds.
What makes it work is not the fly. It is twelve days in May when the lake is doing something extraordinary.
May belongs to the mayfly, and to our house pattern, which is honestly nothing special in a book — a size ten on a light wire hook, claret hackle, CDC wing. It is the same recipe my grandmother wrote into the ledger in 1971. What makes it work is not the fly. What makes it work is twelve days in May when the lake is doing something extraordinary.
Summer is a question of movement. June rewards evening sedges. July, when the lake warms, calls for damsel nymphs deeper in the water column — slow retrieves, long pauses, and the patience to not strike on the first pull.
September and October are, in many ways, our favourite season. The first frost sharpens everything. Pike begin to move. A Muddler Minnow in size eight — brown, chunky, buoyant — has caught most of the lake’s largest predators over the last decade. We keep a small tin of them in the boathouse rafters, above the stove, because the heat seems to dry them differently.
Ask your keeper what he or she is using today. The answer is almost always the right one.