A couple of weeks ago I guided Susan Thrasher. She is a repeat client. I always enjoy fishing with her because she is a guide (she owns a nice lodge on the Caney Fork River in Lancaster Tennessee) and is also a Federation of Fly Fishers Certified Casting Instructor. To say that she is an accomplished angler is a bit of an understatement. In addition, she had career as an executive in a large international engineering firm.
We fished the Catch and Release section at Rim Shoals and it was a gorgeous day. It was sunny with no wind and a high temperature of seventy two degrees. I rigged her rod with the usual suspects, a ruby midge below a cerise San Juan worm (the flies that I have been fishing with great success for months). We began drifting and were into nice fish immediately. The hot fly was the ruby midge.
After a while, she asked if she could use her favorite fly. Now my business philosophy is that the day belongs to the client, so I said sure. She ties a size fourteen black thread midge with a tungsten bead on a scud hook and has had great success with it on the Caney Fork and other rivers. She wanted to see if it would work on the White. The fly was way bigger than the midges I have seen, on the White (the ruby is a size eighteen) and I was interested to see, if it would work here. We clipped off the ruby midge and tied on her fly. We were into fish immediately and fished that way for an hour or so. In the process, we caught a lot of trout.
She wondered if her fly would out produce the ruby midge. I proposed a simple experiment. We would rerig her rod with her fly as the lead fly and the ruby midge as the dropper. Once again, we were into fish immediately. We didn’t count but it was pretty apparent that her fly was catching the majority of the trout. We replaced the ruby midge with another of her large black midges.
We noticed that several trout were hitting the strike indicator. We went back to my suburban and got an extra rod that we rigged with a Western pink lady grasshopper and used her fly as a dropper. We took a couple on the hopper but the black midge caught even more trout.
I was intrigued and asked the name of the fly. She said that she really didn’t have a name for it but often referred to it as the miracle midge. I knew of another fly pattern with that name and suggested that she call it the Thrasher, her last name. She liked that.
We fished until around four PM. She landed well over sixty trout most, of which, were caught, on the thrasher. As other boats came in with friends of hers, in them, they asked if we had fished with her fly and how well we had done. I answered yes and very well. It was what they had expected.
Sometimes we learn of new fly patterns, in unexpected places. I took the fly that was still, on my fly rod, below the grass hopper and gave it to my commercial fly tyer at Blue Ribbon Fly Shop to reproduce. I want to fish it myself and see if it works for me too. I think it will and that it will be a fly that earns its own keep.
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