Over the weekend, I hit the swift river below route 9 and caught several trout on my favorite dry dropper rig.  It’s fairly simple rig and consists of two flies that are easy to tie.  I had success with rainbows and brook trout on the same two flies.  The brook trout alternated between taking the dry fly or emerger, and the rainbows seemed to prefer the smaller emerger fly in a size 30.

Here I am fishing to some risers hanging out behind this log.

The dry fly I use is a size 24 Griffith’s gnat.  I’ve written about my personal success and history of this fly here.  While my dry fly choices tend to stay a little more static, on Saturday, I decided to switch things up with the dropper fly.  I recently purchased some size 30 hooks, and wanted to try out a few emerger patterns.  I used 6x tippet, and it can be challenging to thread through the hook eye, but works well if you hook into one of the heavier browns or rainbows at the Swift.  I use the heaviest tippet I can get away with because it helps prevent me from exhausting the fish, and as if I needed any further motivation, I also hate losing flies.  By the end of the day, all that was left of the CDC emerger was a bit of thread.

I also caught a few heftier rainbows while tightlining with my new sighter system early in the day, but the temperatures hit 75 degrees on Saturday afternoon, and my intentions were to catch trout on dries.  I can’t wait for more warm weather and rising trout.

Here’s the simple, but tiny emerger pattern I tied and used as a dropper.  I tied it about 8″ below the Griffith’s gnat, and added a single micro shot to get the size 30 fly down a bit in the water column.

Recipe:

Hook:  Varivas 2300 Ultra Midge #30

Body: Black thread and copper wire

Wing: White CDC