It’s predator time: the soft air of dusk in summer, dawn on a spring day, or under a low sky of bruised clouds brimming with February snow, when you know you are throwing that fly into harm’s way. Time to see that shadow, so familiar when gracefully ferrying across the current to pick off morsels in the drift, turn stone killer; come up on its fins and hunt ahead of that big broad brown tail. Set aside fishing snacks, the Skittles and Cheetos of our day-to-day fly boxes, and tie on a 24 ounce steak on 15 pound test. Make it swim as though sick and injured; life’s not fair down there.
It is streamer time.
Streamer time is what you make it, many hued and multi-faceted, from elegant married wings, ubiquitous buggers, lead-eyed Clousers to modern, multi-sectioned articulated patterns, imitating that which swims: sculpins and minnows, suckers and shad, trout, in creeks, rivers and lakes, fresh, salt and sometimes purely in the tyer’s imagination. Big fish eat small fish, and not always as small as one might think.