All week I have walked around eying the Forsythia that is fairly popular in landscaping of my neighborhood. It came into full bloom this week with millions of diminutive yellow flowers threatening eventually carpet lawns across the area.

Photo of Forythia by: Krzysztof Ziarnek, Kenraiz, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

On the Gunpowder this weekend, water temperatures were breaking into the 50′ F range by 11am and there was a simultaneous midge and stonefly hatch starting at about 1 pm. I started the day early though and left around 2pm with one fish shy of 10 on the day. I wanted double-digits but that stretch of river was getting crowded. I’ll have to fish faster next time.*

I should look into stonefly patterns at some point. These were almost as long as my thumbnail, with a black skinny body and light dun downwings. Interesting to observe that in flight their body-length wings make them appear relatively large, while at rest they become quite slender. None were spotted on the water’s surface — but I wasn’t seriously looking.

Today (Sunday) I installed screens in all but two of the house windows. SEEB had to hold the ladder on a few climbs as the house has inclines on all sides and our ladder doesn’t have extendable feet for non-level surfaces. It is nice, particular on the second floor, to have the windows open and a nice breeze blowing through.

Tying notes: I tied up a handful of heavier nymph patterns this afternoon (Pheasant Tail bodies on size 14 jigs w/ CDC & black squirrel collars) using 3.8mm tungsten beads. Threw in a few Perdigons on 3.2mm beads. The heavier weights will come in handy when flows in the GP get higher. Tonight, I returned to struggle with Sparkleduns. After tying midges the last couple of months on Veevus 14|0 and 18|0 thread, dialing in the amount of torque to use when cinching down deer hair wings (on 6|0 Danville and 8|0 Uni-thread) snapped a lot of thread ruining a good deal of work. Mid-week last week I tried to tie up a half dozen and failed spectacularly, not able to get a single fly to my liking. I believe I started w/ Nanosilk 30D then, but the GSP kept slicing the deer hair. Moved to wider non-gel-spun threads, but again with the snapping. I tied up Comparaduns last year, and didn’t remember having so much trouble — hoping these notes come in handy in years to come.

Lesson tonight: tying in the wing first is probably best. If the thread snaps while cinching the hair down, you’ve saved time by not tying in the shuck and starting the underbody first. SemperFly NanoSilk 50D worked well tonight (w/ wax applied). Splitting the wings at some point would be interesting, as would mixing in some sighter material in the wings — at least w/ this dark dun-wing pattern I am tying. The Varner short-fine (dun) hair that I was so stoked about actually doesn’t work that as well as I was hoping. Not to say that it can’t, but it is so short that getting enough of it into a mid-sized stacker is a bit of a work-up. The fineness of the hair is amazing though – best I’ve seen tbh – so I may figure something out yet. On a lark, I used the shittiest ‘compardun hair’ I have (from Hareline) and made it work. I now have a whopping two dun-wing sparkleduns now for my efforts. If they catch a fish one day, I hope I remember that those were the two flies that were such a pain in the ass on a random Sunday evening in March of 2024.

currently reading: FilterWorld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, Kyle Chayka
last full listen: Long Time Coming by Sierra Ferrell