Prey's Beauty

A Mayfly from Hell

From Life

When I take the kids to park I never leave my camera home. I mostly take pictures of my children, but, as my son pointed out, I also take a lot of pictures of bugs.

This is a mayfly. The picture was taken with strong underexposure, and finally accidentally edited with Picasa's Tint filter.

Fly Fisherman's Entomology 101

I call it a yellow may fly with huge¹⁾ orange eye balls. An online translator gives it a Latin name of crocus may no per ingens orange oculus balls.

Simplify: A size 18 yellow dun.

¹⁾ Hugeness here is relative to the size of a bug.

X-Caddis

I love caddis patterns. They are very important in my waters although caddisflies may not be as beautiful as mayflies. One of my favourite emerging mayfly pattern is Sparkle Dun. This pattern in very similar to tie as X-Caddis. I like simple patterns best, so I added few X-Caddis emergers to my selection.

Sparkle Dun

From Fly-patterns

X-Caddis

From Fly-patterns

Summer

I haven't been able to go to fishing since last week. This is the best caddis time of the season - so I'm not too happy about it. Soon the water will get too hot for bigger trout. Most of them will swim to the depths of lakes.

But this is not just yet - there is still time.

Yellow may fly emergers

It has been quite a cold spring and early summer, but the temperature is finally rising here in eastern Finland. Yellow beadhead nymph pattern has worked well for weeks, but this morning I finally saw Yellow May Flies hatching and yellow #16 Sparkle Dun pattern was working like a dream.

Largest grayling that I catched was something like 35 centimeters long (about 14 inches). And I had three others that were more than 30 centimeters (12 inches) and few smaller ones as well.

A nice way to start a week.