Hook Size: 14/16
When ants fall on the water they usually do so in huge numbers and trout gorge themselves on them. The first thing you are going to notice about our “Perfect Fly” Flying Ant fly is the detail we have gone to trying to closely imitate real flying ants. The wings looks almost exactly like the real things and are set at an angle so the fly want twist on the cast as well as look like the real wings. Notice the added detail of the legs. They are not simple rubber bands like many ant fly patterns. They are made of flexible plastic.
When ants fall on the water (and we wish we knew exactly when that would happen), they usually do so in huge numbers. Many were picked up in one bare scoop of the hand on the Lewis River in Yellowstone National Park. There were thousands on the water. Even so, we were still able to catch several trout on our Flying Ant imitation. We have only run into a large flying ant fall on a few occasions. Once you do and find you don’t really have a good imitation of them, you will regret it.
Trout were gorging themselves on the flying ants in the Lewis River case, scooping them up, several at a time. The falling ants turned the normally difficult to fish Lewis River into a river of frantic trout action. Don’t be caught in this situation without flying ant imitations. If you do, you may as well leave the stream. The trout quickly become selective on them.
How do you fish it? That is the easy part. Just cast the fly into the feeding frenzy. We don’t think it’s effective to fish the Fly Ant Trout fly unless there has been a recent fall of flying ants.
We have found flying ants on occasions where we were fishing for bream and bass a few times. In fact, they are probably more common on warm water streams and lakes than they are cold water trout streams. The Fly Ant is also an excellent bream and panfish fly. It’s a good idea to have a few in your bream and panfish fly box.
Fish the fly without any added weight. You can fish it with or with adding floatants but it will continue to float high and be more visible if you do add floatant.
