This last full moon of August
truly is the transition moon, bringing blessed rain to wet the fires &
clear the air, finally. There are no insects under the porch light tonight. The
woods are silent. This is The Moon Of Sleeping Trout, the fish shifting feeding
mode, transitioning from the wee summer sedge now dwindled to an echo, ambiguous, hidden for a time, anticipating the larger sedge of autumn
that will fatten them for winter – great gray spotted sedge & October caddis
– due to show, on the waning of this moon.
It's time to dispense with
the summer patterns, so, in tribute to their hard work, I post the last of the
diving sedge, as an addendum to my last post & a sort of end-of-the-skein
for the summer season.
In the last post, Diving
Sedge, I suggested it’s a good idea to carry more than one pattern for
simulating the spent sedges of late summer, as trout do exhibit regional &
daily preferences, for reasons known only to their kind, for the most part. In
addition to the variant of my last post, I find these useful as well for
covering spotted sedge & grannom.
Though both of these patterns
exhibit a different style altogether, they are both tied with a light olive
silk abdomen, which serves well to simulate the shrunken abdomen of the
spinner.
The first is a simple spider,
the hackle, swept back when the fly is swung, serving to simulate the wings; the
other, a hackle-less pattern with CDC wing. And these both have their day.
Diving Sedge Spider
Hook: #12-#18 (#14, mostly)
Thread: camel UNI 8/0
Abdomen: olive Pearsall’s
silk
Thorax: pinkish-brown dubbing
taken from the base of a hare’s ear
Hackle: light brown speckled
hen ~ & finish.
CDC Diving Sedge
Hook: #12-#18
Thread: brown UNI 8/0
Abdomen: olive Pearsall’s
silk
Thorax: squirrel dubbing
Wing: brown CDC – a single
feather tied flatwing style (it will behave better if moistened with some spit &
trained back before tying in) ~ & finish.
