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Thanks for the encouraging words guys. If I can manage some half-way decent fotos, I'll try to post some more examples of the hairwing wetflies I'm tying.
Yes, UC redbands seem to prefer the winged version, & our fish count has gone up since we've started using them. I think there has been a lot of confusion regarding October caddis, & that reinforced by writers who insist that this insect crawls from the stream to complete emergence. And yes, that is one of its hatching strategies, particularly on streams possessing shallow bars with finer sediments. But these are an incredibly adaptable bug employing more than one strategy, depending on stream geology, for the most part, I suspect. October caddis are abundant in the UC & an important hatch here, & the imitations bring up some of the biggest trout of the year. The river here has very steep banks dropping off to deep water quickly. The river bottom is a rubble of skull-sized stones which offer the transitioning pupae safe shelter from the trout. The shoreline stones are inhabited by a bazillion hunting spiders waiting to engage any helpless bug emerging from the river. Crawling out of the water to transition would not be the best strategy here, & that evidenced by the fact that you find very few OC casings on the riverside stones. But you do see a lot of the big caddis emerging from the water, where they rise from the bottom fully winged. The winged emergers are strong swimmers & move quickly through the water column, which is probably why the winged pattern makes a good swinging fly, the swing & lift simulating the movement of the natural flymph.
Old Hat, we are on the same page regarding a catalog of ancient hairwing wets. I was surprised when a short walk through the archives of ancient trout flies didn’t turn up many hair-winged wetfly designs, paired quill & feather wings seeming to dominate the old trout flies, & hair, as a ‘wing’ or topping, mainly reserved for the construction of salmon & seatrout patterns. And that surprised me because I find a topping constructed of hair (fur) provides more lifelike action & obfuscation than quill. I suspect quill, initially, was seen as the obvious material for simulating the shape of mayfly wings – the Victorian tiers seeing things through literal eyes – the earliest designs drab & meant to be imitative. As the art progressed, & the idea that trout will try to eat things that look like nothing in life progressed, the basic design elements grew a fanciful branch reaching into the mode of attracter flies resembling nothing in life, becoming ‘reaction baits’ or ‘lures’. The multicolored, stacked quill wings of the old patterns represent the zenith of the tier’s art, yet those exquisite patterns have all but completely fallen from general usage, & I suspect the main reason for that is the time & mastery required to tie trout flies possessing the intricacy of classic Atlantic salmon flies. Yet, I think, we might have tossed the baby out with the bathwater in this, as the idea behind the artful colorations of the old flies still has solid merit in creating effective attractors. I’ve found hair toppings to be much more effective than quill, & it’s much easier to stack colors with hair than it is with quill. I might even go so far as to say the winged wetfly style faded from popularity, truncated due to the ambiguous effectiveness of paired quill wings. In my opinion, based on my own experience astream, the working elements of the productive hairwing style which persists in salmon/steelhead patterns, has only begun to be explored in trout flies. The hairwing wetfly field is wide open design territory.
