The fly box · No. 01 of 36
Adams
Mayfly duns of almost any species; in small sizes, midges.
- Kind
- Dry
- Hook sizes
- 12–18
- Season
- Spring, summer, autumn
- For
- Trout and grayling
- At the vice
- A moderate tie
The dressing
| Hook | Standard dry fly, barbless or barb flattened, sizes 12–18 |
|---|---|
| Thread | Grey or black, 8/0 (70 denier) |
| Tail | Mixed brown and grizzly cock hackle fibres, as long as the shank |
| Body | Muskrat underfur or fine grey dubbing, thin and gently tapered |
| Rib | None |
| Hackle | One brown and one grizzly cock hackle, wound together |
| Wing | Two grizzly hen hackle tips, upright and divided |
Tying it
- Lay a thread base from just behind the eye to the bend.
- Tie in a small mixed bunch of brown and grizzly fibres for the tail, shank length.
- Tie in the two hackle tips a third of the shank back from the eye, stand them up and divide them with figure-of-eight turns.
- Dub a thin, tapered body from the tail up to the wings.
- Tie in both hackles together behind the wings, dull sides forward.
- Wind them together, two turns behind the wings and three in front, then tie off.
- Form a small head, whip finish and varnish.
Fishing it
Use it as a searching fly on broken water and as a fair copy of whatever olive is hatching on the glides. Cast upstream or up and across on a 5X (0.15 mm) tippet and let it come back without drag; drop to 6X (0.13 mm) for a size 18 on flat water. No twitch is needed. When fish refuse it, the trouble is usually the drift, not the pattern, so change your position before you change the fly.
Where it comes from
Leonard Halladay tied the first one at Mayfield, Michigan, in 1922 for his friend Charles Adams, who tried it on the Boardman River and came back delighted. Nothing about it copies a particular insect. The mixed brown and grizzly hackle simply blurs into a soft, lively grey that a trout can read as whichever dun happens to be drifting past.