They have sex appeal, as much as any ungainly, prehistoric looking creature with four wings, six legs and long, probing antenna can, and this time of the year, anglers will go to great lengths to seek them out. And of all the stoneflies, none are sexier than Pteronarcys, the big, hulking salmon flies.
It is a shameless display of duplicity on behalf of the angler, because ultimately its not the stonefly they are really after, but the fish who feed on them – rather like making friends with the plain looking girl in order to get to know her good looking friend.
Just like no one told the bumble bees they shouldn’t be able to fly, adult salmon flies push the limits of physics as it relates to aerodynamics. Their ungainly flight and heavy, clumsy water landings make them irresistible to a trout in the mood for a serious shot of protein.
June is the month when they are most active, and sometimes seeking them out means going to lengths an angler may not normally contemplate, like scaling sheer cliff faces, scrambling loose scree fields, crossing rivers nipple-deep in water so cold it burns, walking miles on uneven boulder fields, just to get yourself to a place where the hatch should, by rights, be.
Except sometimes its not. Sometimes the salmon flies are being coy, not behaving at the behest of the ultimately ignorant angler, instead moving to rhythms and cycles only they are privy to, rhythms and cycles that have served them well for thousands of millennia.
It was still, of course, a great day on the river. Fish were caught, if not on the finger-sized dry flies we’d hoped. Limbs and joints were stretched and contorted, used in ways they don’t get used often enough. Solitude was found, good company enjoyed, and at the end of the day the appetite had been whetted to come back next year, same place, same time, and try again.
