On more than a few occasions I can recall peeping feeding trout from a distance, presenting my rig in a productive manner, not to disturb the feeding and right as my flies should be chomped they are promptly snubbed. A re-cast with the same rig yields the same result, a look and a snub. The third pass prompts general disarray and with that the fish simply swim away from the flies even with my best attention to presentation and drift. Right in front of their trouty noses and they say no. I often wondered if part of the issue was simply the overabundance of glitz, flash and sparkle. Many of my flies have flashback wingcases or krystal flash for tails something that perhaps the trout just say no to at times. My solution? Prepare a decent quantity of natural, plain jane looking flies. I mean, shit often I’m putting my flies in less than four feet of gin clear H2O, tell me they can’t pick it out? Using only the wire rib as an attention grabber, these Thread Headed Scuds are weighted lightly to have less of an impact on the presentation which can always later be altered with a split-shot and they are damn nasty looking. No tails, not sure if that was a good call or not, didn’t want to use flash, could have used hackle, antron, ect but chose not to. I think the picked out dubbing makes the fly and I’m sure trout will let me know.
