Fishing Wales: Dave Mee's River Flies - Fishing Visit Wales

Tying and Fishing Tips
The best all rounder, used as a stimulator when nothing is hatching or during a hatch of sedges. The Tan Klink is hard to beat and is always in my flybox, an excellent fly for trout, grayling and occasional chub.
A couple of tips for the fly when tying kink the hook under the thorax.
I’ve found tan to be one of the best colours but experiment and find colours that suit your fish.
Hackles I like to use are Grizzle or Cree, but have used red game from time to time.
When fishing, only gink the post not the fly. How the fly sits in the water appears to be crucial to their success, you don’t want the body to float but sit beneath the film with just the hackle in the film and the post sitting proud so you can track the fly on your cast.

Tying and Fishing Tips
I’ve used this fly to great success in England, Wales and Norway again it is a general pattern which works well when sedges are about, but will also bring fish up when nothings hatching. Watch out for the takes, they can be really vicious!
Tying tips, I some times clip the hackle underneath, but as yet I have been unable to discern any noticeable difference in the performance of the fly. The length of the CDC wing can be varied quite a bit. I normally tie them in too long and then draw the feather back so that the tips are about equal or just inside the end of the abdomen.

Tying and Fishing Tips
An excellent emerger pattern for sedges on the river. There’s not much more to be said about this pattern. Easy to tie (But then a lot of the most successful flies are), you can play an enormous amount of tunes with this fly in terms of altering the colours and hackle to suit your fishing and fish!
My most successful colour combination has been the tan and peacock, but others that are worth trying are amber and brown or olive combinations.

Tying and Fishing Tips
This has been my standard pattern for bugging for the past 10 years or so. Again like many of my patterns you can play various tunes with the tying and weight of the pattern to suit the fishing conditions. I use a number of dubbings, normally hares ear or mask, but if I want a really spiky bug I use squirrel dubbing. If you fancy it I also some times add a little orange or red dubbing to the mix in the thorax region.
I have caught throughout the year on this pattern on freestone and chalkstreams alike.
One of the most important issues is getting the weight right for the fishing conditions you face I normally use Tungsten beads but also often add a few wraps of lead as an underbody, which also helps secure the bead. I have found the B160 range to be my preferred hook for beaded flies, it has a slightly wider gape and the bead seems to slip on that much easier.

Tying and Fishing Tips
I started to have good success with this fly in 2003, after finding some lovely Awesome Possum dubbing. It’s a really fantastic dubbing, just the right mixture is soft hair with a few guard hairs mixed in. Like the ‘Flash back’ you can vary the dubbing colours and weights to suit conditions, my best colours are natural or tan for the abdomen and brown or olive for the thorax. I have tried the fly with a flash back but the plain nymph seems to outscore the flash back in my limited trials so far.

Tying and Fishing Tips
Hydropsyche is probably one of the most common caseless caddis in the UK at least in terms of its distribution, take a good kick sample in any riffle in a freestone river and 10-1 you will have the juicy little devils in your net.
The examples here are lightly weighted on heavy hooks, the weight can be varied to help. I have tied and fished these on really heavily pre-weighted hooks with some success in Norway.
The tying sequence is quite tricky and may take a couple of goes before you get the right result. First weight the hook, catch in thread and run it down to the bend. Tie in the anterior hooks (CDC) and catch in the Ostrich herls underneath the hook. Take the nymph skin and cut a strip 4 inches long, cut a diagonal slip at one end and catch it in at the base. Keep the thread at the tail end, wind the nymph skin to the head and tie off with a new bobbin of silk at the head. I use Roman Moser power silk tie off and whip finish. Now go back to the Ostrich herls. With the original thread follow the segments fixing the herl to the underneath of the fly; stop three to four segments short of the eye and trim. Now for the legs, take the silk into the next segment, and catch in two pairs of legs, repeat the process so that you have 3 pairs of legs, and whip finish. The fly is finished with pantoning the nymphs skin.