The fly box · No. 21 of 36
Gold-Ribbed Hare’s Ear
Stout mayfly nymphs, caddis pupae, and nothing in particular, which is its strength.
- Kind
- Nymph
- Hook sizes
- 10–16
- Season
- Spring, summer, autumn
- For
- Trout and grayling
- At the vice
- An easy tie
The dressing
| Hook | Heavy-wire nymph hook, barbless, sizes 10–16 |
|---|---|
| Thread | Brown or tan, 8/0 |
| Tail | A small bunch of guard hairs from a hare’s mask |
| Body | Hare’s mask fur with the guard hairs left in, dubbed in a taper |
| Rib | Fine oval gold tinsel, four or five open turns |
| Hackle | None; the picked-out thorax fur serves as legs |
| Wing | Wing case of a slip of cock pheasant tail or mottled turkey over the thorax |
| Also | Thorax of darker, spikier fur from between the ears; optional underbody of lead-free wire or a 2.4–3.0 mm gold bead |
Tying it
- Lay a thread base to the bend and tie in a short tail of guard hairs.
- Tie in the oval gold tinsel and dub a tapered abdomen over the rear two thirds of the shank.
- Wind the tinsel forward in open turns, tie off and trim.
- Tie in the wing case slip on top of the shank, pointing back over the body.
- Dub a rough, full thorax with the darker fur, leaving room behind the eye.
- Pull the wing case forward, tie down, whip finish and varnish.
- Pick the thorax out at the sides with a dubbing needle.
Fishing it
Reach for it when nothing is obviously hatching and the water has a little pace: riffles, pocket water, the broken throat of a pool. Fish it upstream on a dead drift with 5X (0.15 mm) tippet, alone on a greased leader or hung two to three feet below a buoyant dry fly. In spring a size 12 near the bottom covers the stout stone-clinging nymphs; in summer an unweighted 16 fished a few inches down is taken for an emerging pupa. A slow lift as the drift ends often brings the pull.
Where it comes from
Nobody can say with certainty who first dubbed a hook with the fur of a hare’s mask. The dressing is a traditional English one, well known on the chalk streams in the nineteenth century as a winged floating fly, and the nymph grew out of it. Its speckled, spiky fur traps air and moves in the current, suggesting a dozen different creatures at once.