At the end of their reproductive efforts, the ephemerals, completely exhausted, take a rest on the river surface and let to the water current to transport them downstream, while they wait for the end of their life. The river gradually become, so, the erratic grave of many small insects, which can be easily preyed by trout and grayling.
The “spent”, in other words the dead ephemeral which lies on the water, looks like a small creature with transparent and sometimes fringed wings, and with the body often red. Such insect can be well imitated by one of those classic flies with the wings completely spread and built with pale cock hackles. In alternative to the cock hackles, if we need a fly able to reproduce more verisimilarly the ethereal aspect of an ephemeral, we can use the cul de canard feathers, giving life, in this way, to a small Spinnerino. This fly, thanks to its wings made with the “magic plume”, appears, from the point of view of the fish, really similar to an dead ephemeral, and for this reason we can induce a selective trout, or grayling, to take when other patterns of imitation resulted ineffective.
The “spent”, in other words the dead ephemeral which lies on the water, looks like a small creature with transparent and sometimes fringed wings, and with the body often red. Such insect can be well imitated by one of those classic flies with the wings completely spread and built with pale cock hackles. In alternative to the cock hackles, if we need a fly able to reproduce more verisimilarly the ethereal aspect of an ephemeral, we can use the cul de canard feathers, giving life, in this way, to a small Spinnerino. This fly, thanks to its wings made with the “magic plume”, appears, from the point of view of the fish, really similar to an dead ephemeral, and for this reason we can induce a selective trout, or grayling, to take when other patterns of imitation resulted ineffective.
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INSTRUCTIONS
I take the first step of the building process of the Spinnerino by fixing the hook into the vice jay and tying in the red thread on the shank, which I use for nailing, over the bend, a some fibres stripped off from a Coq the Leon hackle and a fine stem of a natural red cock hackle
Now I wax a short stretch of the thread and I distribute a pinch of red seal’s fur, or polypropylene, on it, forming, with the fingers of a hand, a compact dubbing
I wrap the seal’s fur dubbing around the three rear quarters of the hook shank in order to create the body. With open turns of the red hackle stem, I make the body ribbing
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I strip off some small tufts of the longest fibres from both sides of a pair of natural grey cul-de-canard feathers and I tie in them over the hook section interposed between the body and the hook eye
I spread the cul de canard fibres in two forelocks and, with crossed turns of thread, I fixed them so they stay perpendicularly to the hook sides. I make a clean cut to the tips of the two cul de canard tufts, reducing these wings nearly to same length of the fly body
I create the fly head with some turns of the red thread, which is then finished with a whip-finish
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A light layer of clear varnish uniformly distributed over
the head will prevent the thread to untie itself, increasing the
resistance of the Spinnerino
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MATERIALS LIST
HOOK: regular shank size 20 to 14
THREAD: red
BODY: red seal’s fur (or substitute)
RIBBING: the fine stem of a natural red cock hackle
WINGS: natural grey cul-de-canard fibres
THREAD: red
BODY: red seal’s fur (or substitute)
RIBBING: the fine stem of a natural red cock hackle
WINGS: natural grey cul-de-canard fibres
