Here in Virginia, it gets a little hot and cold, often all in one day. This can make for a tricky fly selection, especially in the winter months when it’ll sniff 50, but your day will start with frozen eyelets. 

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But there is one bug that feeds families of schooling fry, that gives all anglers a lifeline to small-stream nirvana: the mayfly.

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I like to save the last of my morning thermos for when I scan the first pool for risers. I have it on pretty good authority that there will be none, but fly fishing is built on a pretense that there are stringent rules that, more often than not, have slightly better than a 50/50 shot that they’ll work.

Brook trout often get a bad rap for their gluttony. 

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Whoever swears they’re an easy take likely hasn’t fished for them the morning after your little mountain stream touched freezing. The wild ones are fingerlings more often than not, which doesn’t equip them with much of an appetite– especially in the winter months when they slow their metabolism down to the appetite of a picky toddler. 

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But there are days when buggy romance gets the better of us. Frozen fingers be damned, we head to the mountain before the gas station cellophane-wrapped breakfast sandwiches are plucked from their stations. My favorite days on the water are the sunny ones that break a cold spell. Winter still fends off most anglers, even on its uncharacteristically warm strings of days, whatever that entails anymore. 

As a fly angler, your hopes and dreams are often waiting for you on the underside of a freestone river rock. 

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Caddis casings stick, nymphs scatter about, and if you’ve got your glasses on, you’ll know what size to tie on that day. If rock flipping doesn’t provide any dead giveaways, a bead-head nymph or a WD 40 for the shallow streams is generally as good a shot as any that you’ll have in tricking a fish. A size 20 should do it. My rule of thumb is if you’re over thirty and you can thread the tippet with no problems, you should probably go a little smaller. 

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Fly fishing, in its purist iteration, should be immersive.

The fabric between what makes a fish a fish, a bug a bug, or me an angler should be blurred by the time your boots drip out of the river for the last time. You are the emerger basking towards the surface in mid-day light, you are the brook trout that every passing angler has cast to because you happen to fancy the swirl at the top of your pool, and surely, you’re all cold.

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Nymph fishing is, by and large, the most productive way to fish for trout. 

It is also, in my opinion, mainly something to do until the sun crests over to your side of the mountain and blankets the water with steady pulses of sunshine. With sun, the nymph pupa sprout wings and shimmy their way to the surface, where trout gleefully rise to sip their lunches from the conveyor belt above.

Seeing my first handful of buzzing insects and tail slapping is when I ditch the nymphs for an emerger. 

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You’d think it could be hard to notice the surface break of a five-inch fish, but in the pleasant trance that is a trout stream, your senses are keen on the slightest errant movements. The sounds of the river lull you into hyper-fixation, so you can even hear their playfully thrashing strikes. 

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When the water is hovering around 40 degrees, and you are yet to take lunch, the splashes that appear to be surface eats are actually errant tail whips as the trout are barreling towards a subsurface meal. That is where Foamback Emergers and Flashback Pheasant Tails earn their place in your fly box.

Your fly is inching towards the top of the water column; keep your line taught as you dance your fly somewhere between a sunken and surface imitation.

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In the madness that is tricking fingerling trout, a fresh pot of coffee provides a paramount shift to the afternoon hatch. What better source for a percolator than a pot of stream water pushed through your Sawyer Squeeze filtration system?

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It is to be taken just as the sun tips to the opposite shoreline and fuels us for an early evening of angling. Between the coarse sips of coffee, I shove my nymph box to the bottom of my pack and tie it on a Dun.

You could fish your whole life with the imitations of the mayfly lifecycle, and I could fish my whole life with just the dun patterns. 

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In the interest of being a well-rounded angler, I resist the temptation of tying on a Kelly Galloup Hi-Viz Compara Dun and slinging it with empty retrieves all morning until the fish catch up to my dry fly schedule. But tempted, I am. 

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Mayflies don’t live for but a day in their final metamorphosis, and when they do mate and pass on, their shells of life fall to the stream to feed thankful trout. And we are there with them, watching and casting Rusty Spinners until the shadows of night fog our lenses. It’s on the edge of nightfall that I am most pleased to have spent the light of day with my feet in the river. 

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Cold as they may be, they will thaw– as will I.

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