The idea for this fly started up at Georgetown lake fishing with my buddies Bryan and Sep. Georgetown lake is a shallow, spring-fed lake that sits around six thousand feet in the Pintlar mountains. It’s a super fertile lake that gets loads of pressure and handles it just fine. There’s enough food to feed the thousands of rainbows that the State stocks each year with enough left over to sustain a healthy wild brook trout population and a half a million small kokanee.
According to Bryan, there is a window of time in late June through the first week of July where the damsel hatch and the skittering caddis overlap in such a way that you can cast dry flies all day and into the evening and catch reckless rainbows and brookies to your heart’s content. Over the last three years I have yet to experience this and have the feeling it is a lot like trying to hit the perfect Salmonfly hatch. Invariably I should have been there a few days sooner or later or it just didn’t really happen that year. And yet, like the Salmonfly hatch, the prospect of fishing big dries to aggressive fish keeps us searching and hoping that this will be the year it all comes together and we get the best day of fishing ever.
What Bryan said we needed was a fly that can be twitched and skated. I have found that most damsel patterns do not fit this description. There are lots of good patterns out there and many are more realistic than this one, but spent wings drag in the water and just don’t skate. Where this pattern shines is that it is fairly simple to tie, it casts reasonably well, and you can twitch and skate the thing all over and it still floats. Good luck, and here’s to hoping!
Renegade Damsel
- Hook: #12, 2X short, straight eye
- Thread: Uni-thread, 6/0, blue
- Tail: Wapsi foam cylinders, 3/32, blue
- Back hackle: grizzly saddle
- Body: Hareline sts trilobal, kingfisher blue
- Post: white poly yarn
- Parachute hackle: grizzly neck
- Front hackle: grizzly saddle
Here you can see why this fly skates so well.