Recently I have been examining a couple of stone flies I have preserved in a little jar of alcohol that came out of the belly of a rainbow trout this past spring. I wanted to try to better mimic these flies and this is what I came up with so far. Rather than tying the biots in for legs and leaving them straight, angled toward the rear of the fly – I creased them forward to make them look like actual legs and what a difference this makes. Now it’s starting to look real.
- hook: Tiemco size 6 #2312
- tail: biots
- body: stone fly dubbing ribbed with copper wire
- legs: biots
- casing: scud back
- antennae: mallard flank fibers
The stone flies I have preserved have very light yellowish undersides – so I made a few with lighter colored dubbing, and then used a black or brown sharpie to color the scud back darker. This creates an even truer looking stone fly. Maybe to improve this fly I can add another hump of dubbing and scud back for the actual “head” of the stone fly. If you look at a real stone fly, they have 3 segments, and then their head, which is just as big if not larger than the 3 “wing-case” segments.
