One of my biology professors was a bird guy, and he would often use bird examples. During a behavior lecture he showed a slide of a shorebird incubating a massive football-sized plastic egg that it preferred to its own clutch sitting unattended nearby. This was his way of showing us the idea of super normal stimuli- an object with a key attribute that triggers a behavior. The more pronounced the attribute, the stronger the response. A bunch of people asked him how a bird could be so stupid, and he thought for a moment and asked how many wonderbras and maraschino cherries were sold in the U.S. that year. Anyway, the next pattern may work because I tie it so fat and heavy that trout prefer it to the naturals.
The pattern is the Borcher's drake. It was invented by a guy named Ernie Borchers from the Grayling Michigan area, and that is all I know. It is, ahem, a version of the adams, but a damned fine variation. The Borchers drake represents a wide range of dark colored mayflies, and is especially effective during the Hendrickson hatch. Wow, sort of a dark Adams! Does this sound familiar?
Tail: two moose mane fibers, pretty well splayed.
Body: Several long fibers from a turkey tail.
Hackle: Brown and Grizzly mixed, tied parachute around a white deer hair post.
The trick: tie a giant fat body that would make A.K. Best cringe.
I got to know this pattern via Todd Fuller. My wife had hurt her feet, and was having a hard time wading that year. I wanted to take her fishing, so we booked a float trip with Todd in an Ausable River boat. The day was cold and spitting rain, and I asked him how we would be fishing. He replied, dry flies. I am thinking, yeah, right. So needless to say, we got in the boat, he tied on some Borchers, and we got into fish immediately. The damned things would not float 15 feet before being hammered by trout. It would have been a record for me had I any skill at hooking fish. Her feet got better and we now wade, but still fish with Todd when we can.
The truth was that although I had fly fished for 30 years, I had never fished dry flies to any great extent. I viewed dry flies as a prissy technique practiced by pantywaists who were long on equipment and short on physical strength. The guys in the tweed hats who doesn't seem to get on the river before noon, and have their wives set up a table with wine, pate, and crackers next to the BMW. Our lunch would be something like BBQ flavored Lay's potato chips and ding dongs. They never invited us over, so we fucking hated them. Jealousy, of course. Of course, there was one good thing about them. They never fished more than 100 feet from the access, so once you got away from the canoe launch you never saw them again. And I would catch big trout on streamers and wet flies.
But after fishing with Todd I realized that dry flies can be effective and fun. I decided to get into this. I bought a Mercedes at a garage sale and a wine/pate cooler (I actually bring diet pepsi). I looked up the Borcher's pattern and tied a bunch of them. But they did not work well. I did much better during the Hendrickson hatch when using nymphs or emergers. Several years passed. I ended up on another trip with Todd, and one of his flies ended up in my wife's hat. I did not remember this, and only noticed it several weeks later when finally organizing some of our gear (yes, another day of dry fly mayhem with hordes of trout). I looked at the thing, it it hit me: my Borchers drakes were thin and elegant, his were fat. I could not figure this out and finally cut off the body with a scalpel to see what in the heck was underneath. The answer, of course, was the deer hair that made up the parachute post. It takes a surprisingly large amount of bucktail to make a parachute post, and Todd had cut the hair butts off at an angle and length that left a big fat underbody. So fat that you could barely get the turkey tail fibers wrapped up to the tie down point. His bodies were almost hunchbacked.
I tied some fat ones with a buctail-wing-post underbody, and they worked like a charm.
A. K. Best makes a cogent and persuasive argument in his books that mayflies have a thin and waxy body that in most cases is best imitated with quills. He notes correctly that trout have now been fished hard for over a hundred years, and their descendents are likely way smarter than the original inhabitants and we should tie our flies as close to the naturals as we can. He is probably right, but this pattern works and I think it works because it represents a supernormal stimulus. Trout are watching a parade of bugs drifting over their heads, and big fat one drifts overhead that is simply too big and juicy not to eat. It looks like an extra tasty version of the naturals they are keyed in on, so the leviathan rises ...
I use this pattern in the early spring when Hendricksons and black stones are flitting about. But it ought to work as an attractor pattern in your neck of the woods, or any time dark mayflies are hatching. Give it a try.
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