Stanislas Freyheit
Pheasant tails are taking fish since decades. Shrimps are killer nymphs. Any kind of caddis pattern will bring you a lot of fish if you perform the good drift. But, wait a minute, have you ever seen a real caddis or mayfly larvae on the river?
Haven’t you noticed that their body was translucent? It means that light is passing through the bodies of all the beasties you can find in the river, and we fish since decades with opaque materials like feathers and dubbings…

I’m always playing with new tying materials according to what I observe on the river. One day, I decided to try to produce luminous flies in a large range of colours, from brown to dark green for trout, to pink and flashy chartreuse from grayling.
Then I started playing with seed beads, consolidated with deeply polymerized UV cure. The first results were encouraging, because the nymphs where colourful and translucent, but still, I wasn’t happy with the general shape of the nymphs.
So I let this project aside for several months, and spent more time fishing than trying new projects on the vice. One day, I decided to put more creativity in this project, and decide to focus on the wing bag. I have clearly seen that what was missing in this new pattern was an evocation of the wing bag. And finally, by adding this simple hump on the back of the fly, I finally gave birth to a minimalist, but super catchy pattern of perdigon.

Since years, I was restrained by the colours of the opaque material, and then suddenly, I entered the luminous world of seed beads, and millions of combinations where possible to design nymphs. But it’s not that simple, because certain colour combinations are good for fishing, whereas some don’t. I have a strange feeling about that, but there are colours I will never mix to fish for trout. For example, the copper and blue colour is a very bad mix to me, whereas a copper body mixed with an orange spot is a catchy fly.
So far, one of the best colour associations I found was orange mixed with a silver wing bag. The mix between chartreuse bead an olive body is also a deadly colour to trigger the attack of ambushed trout. I am a grayling lover, and when it comes to grayling nymphs, there’s no colour limit! Although classic olive, copper and cream nymphs a very good grayling nymphs, you can allow yourself to have fun on the nymph colour choice to fish for graylings. Never forget that graylings are both curious and greedy, and they love to see new flies!

If you are looking for some more light in your fly box, go for the luminous perdigons, the trout and graylings of your river will love to see more light in your drifts…