Late summer & fall, the terrestrial patterns come
more into play. It’s grasshopper season, up until the first frost knocks them
out of commission. And where grasshoppers are scarce, ants & beetles fill
the bill for many of us – & that while the most ubiquitous insect of the
season orbits our sweaty heads or fishy hands menacingly, or perhaps, landing
on our exposed calf to incise a V-shaped chunk of meat & delivering a painful
sting on top of the wound when swatted.
I suspect it might be the devilish nature
of yellowjackets, & our stand-offish attitudes toward them, responsible for
the wasp’s lack of consideration as good bait. We don’t like to think about
them. Most of us see no poetry of grace embodied in a fat insect sporting
electric prison stripes, an aggressive attitude, working mouth parts & a
stinger. That’s not to say we ignore the yellowjacket entirely, we don’t. The
McGinty, a cute rendition in most of its incarnations, is still
fairly well-known, though I doubt it gets nearly the play it got in the last
century. In their writings, Ray Bergman & Roderick Haig Brown noted the
importance of yellowjackets as trout food, & offer imitations, as have
other observant writer-anglers – yet the
yellowjacket still remains largely unconsidered & absent from fly
boxes, & that may be due to those nasty habits I mentioned, I don't know. I want to say I think them the most reliable trout stream terrestrial to imitate, while I (regularly) struggle to avoid those kind of empirical remarks reflecting no other but my own experience.
(The largest trout I ever caught on a
dryfly was on a floating yellowjacket imitation.)
Yellowjackets are common around water, particularly
in late-summer through autumn, pretty much everywhere trout are found. They
hunt other insects over the water & the wind knocks a lot of them down while
they struggle to fly holding their prey. Periodic checks of stomach contents show
evidence that trout like to eat yellowjackets & do so whenever the
opportunity shows itself. I’ve often found multiples, indicating the wasps
are fairly available in the water at times, particularly when it’s breezy. And yellowjackets have a long season, so no doubt trout are used to seeing
them.
Being heavy, wasps don’t float well,
usually breaking the surface tension while struggling on the water, &
drowning, making them available to trout throughout the water column. I suspect
trout eat more drowned yellowjackets than they do live ones. Though I fish both
wet & dry versions, the wet version presented here gets the nod as a staple
pattern for fishing the water in fall,
East or West, September into October. I tie these unweighted & fish them
with a floating line, most often cast upstream & drifted, high-stick style,
but also quartered & swung.
Yellowjacket
Hook: #8-#10 –
Thread: yellow
Ribbing: black
3/0 uni-thread
Abdomen: I
build a tapered ‘dumbell’ shape with yellow sewing thread, then tie in with
yellow tying thread & wind to the tip of the abdomen well down the hook
bend, form a little stinger, then tie in the rib & yellow floss, finish
shaping the abdomen with the floss, then wrap the rib forward, seven turns,
over the abdomen – once the rib is formed, I continue, solid through the girdle
area & onto the thorax hump with the black thread. Coat the abdomen with
two or three coats of Loon Hard Head for a durable, realistic abdomen.
Thorax: black
rabbit dubbing
Wing: a tiny
clump of puff taken from the base of a dyed-brown mallard flank feather, CDC or
marabou – when wet, this reduces to just a hint of color, simulating the
brownish coloration we see at the base of yellowjacket wings – the glassy puffs
found at the base of mallard flank feathers are my favorite material for
imparting the hint of wings or creating miasma – bags of dyed mallard flank are
available at low cost & have a lot of uses
Hackle: soft
grizzly, dyed yellow
Head: black
dubbing in front of the hackle – & finish
