Flyfishing Journal, October 10, 2025 deadly flies © Chuck Stranahan
For Jan, the Brindle 'Chute isn't too deadly, just deadly enough
"Do you remember the time," my friend Steve began, "When I was fishing your Snowshoe Emerger on Skalkaho and had to take it off?"
I did, and Steve went on to recall the details. There was a blue-winged olive hatch on a cloudy day, about this time of year, and the fish were keying on the half-in, half-out of the water emerger stage of the fly.
Trout will do that with a blue-winged olive hatch. Every stage of the hatch will be on the water at once, and they'll eat only the flies in one stage of development and let the rest go by.
That madness-inducing behavior isn't too hard to understand, really. The hit what was on the water first (until they switch), what's most numerous, or what's most easily captured. You can score if you have the right fly (and the right tippet and leader, standing in the right place, and get the cast in).
The literature says they're being "selective." I don't think it works that way. In the case of the blue-winged olives that Steve got into, the trout were reflexively feeding on the most visible and most easily captured fly in front of them. That happened to be the stage where the bugs were trying to hatch on the water's surface, and still had their wiggly little abdomens suspended below the surface film and their fluttering wings beating on top. For the trout, easy pickings.
Steve had two burly Skalkaho cutthroats take the fly deep into their gills. He had to cut the leader, return the trout to the stream as best he could, and hope they'd survive. He didn't want to risk killing other fish, so he took the fly off.
At certain times, there's something about that Snowshoe Emerger that brings more aggressive strikes to the artificial than the naturals.
I had that experience on the Missouri – same fly, no blue-winged olives in sight, and a pod of big-sized browns were almost secretly sipping midges. You had to slow down and watch carefully to see them.
I had two #18 Snowshoe Emergers with me and tied one on. It was about three times the size of the midges the fish were taking.
"Here goes," I thought as I made my first cast, "We'll see what happens." I wasn't hoping for much, and was surprised when a brown in the eighteen-inch range exploded on the fly, ran, jumped, and ran again nearly into my backing.
I landed that one, the first of eight, lost at least that many, and had to quit when I broke off my second and last fly in a huge brown that headed for the strong current midstream and with the line forming a big bow between us came to the surface, shook like a bulldog until the leader parted. It didn't take long – over and out, time to rejoin the family downriver.
I've never had to take that fly off for fear of killing too many fish, as Steve did, but under the right conditions, you could say it's deadly.
Another fly that falls into that category is one I seldom tie these days and rarely fish.
When I was tying commercially for Orvis many moons ago, before overseas fly tying changed the market, I was tasked with tying the Art Flick series of nymphs. I finished the order and had random small piles of three colors of dyed seal fur (now illegal), natural hare's ear, fox, and muskrat on my bench – and the seal was too valuable to waste. I also had half a coon hide with clean fur harvested from a roadkill.
I blended it all as the basis for some big, ugly nymphs. Today, I call the pattern the Mongrel. It's had worse names in the past. The first time I tied it on, I had to dispatch the first two fish that hit it – gill-hooked and bleeding. Since then, I only fish it when nothing else works, and take it off if I must.
Then there's the Brindle 'Chute. I've never had to take it off for fear of killing too many fish, but there are times when its success is almost silly. My wife Jan will start every fishing trip with it, and only take it off when something else is decidedly more effective. For her, the Brindle 'Chute is just deadly enough.