Stealth Stonefly
This is a dual purpose stonefly pattern tied on a jig hook. It can act both as a dry fly and an indicator
You may not have noticed at a first glance, but this detached body stonefly imitation is tied on a jig hook, a long shank #14 jig hook to be precise. Why? Because it’s designed to be a dual-purpose fly.
Firstly, it can be fished as a conventional dry fly. I tie many of my dry flies on jig hooks as the angled front of the hook pushes the hook eye and therefore the knot and the tippet near the fly under the surface when the fly lands. No tippet sitting in the surface film glinting in the sunlight to spook the fish. Very sneaky and stealthy. Secondly, dry flies tied on jig hooks are ideal for using as indicators, but we’ll come to that a bit later.
The fly’s name comes from the way the fluorescent pink sighter is attached. Rather than being tied in on top of the thorax, the pink yarn is pulled up through a small hole in the foam thorax cover. The bright sighter allows the fly to be easily seen at a distance or in rough water but is concealed from fish looking up from below.
The segmented foam body is constructed on a foundation of hollow braid held on a needle.
Braided monofilament fly line backing is ideal for the job and is easily threaded onto a needle by alternatively pushing the braid over the point and then sliding the compressed braid back.
So now you’ve tied one, how do you use it as an indicator with a nymph underneath in a duo?
It’s simple, and very effective too. Tie the stonefly to the tippet at the end of your leader and then tie the tippet to your nymph to the eye of the hook below the leader knot. In contrast to the New Zealand method the nymph link does not interfere with fish taking the dry fly and cannot slip off the bend. It is also, unlike tying the dry fly on a dropper, easy to change the depth of the nymph simply by making the nymph link longer or shorter. For faster changes carry a couple of nymphs tied to different lengths of tipped ready to swap when the water gets deeper or shallower.
The version I tie is 3 centimeters/1.2 inches long overall which is just fine for fishing my rivers. In the UK the imaginatively named common medium stonefly is 3 centimeters long. However, if you fish elsewhere in the world there are some 3,500 species of stoneflies of different sizes which you can imitate by scaling up or scaling down the same pattern. You may be fortunate to fish the rivers of the western US where the giant stoneflies or salmon flies hang out and are 80 millimeters/3 inches or bigger. In that case you’re gonna need a bigger hook.
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