Sunny summer days and little Yellow Sallies

You see them everywhere - maybe not in blizzard numbers but usually at least a few - all summer long.

They start while salmonflies are on the water in June and they last, most years, well into September, depending on how chilly the nights get.

You'll often find more of them clinging to streamside willows and tall grass than you'll see on the water. When they're ready, you'll see the egg-layers flying almost haphazardly over the stream, then dropping to shed their cargo of eggs into rifled water.

There are at least five separate species that I've identified on the Bitterroot that qualify as Yellow Sallies, and at least as many that I'm not sure of. Could I be looking at early and late cycles of the same species, or male-female differences? They're all similar enough that the species identifications become less important than size, color and the behavior of the bugs that you see.

If you're going by hook size, they come in #12 down through #18 - #14 and #16 being most common. They all have slender bodies in bright to pale yellow, and some have reddish orange tips on their abdomens. They all have two pairs of whitish translucent wings that fold flat over their bodies.

When the females are laying eggs their wings can make quite a commotion. But when they're lying still on the water they are practically invisible. Most of them lay their eggs on the water's surface, but some species dive underwater and swim to the bottom to deposit their eggs. When they're doing this it's easy to go broke if you're fishing on top.

The old-time wet fly pattern, the Professor, is designed to mimic this activity. The Professor has a red hackle fiber tail, slender yellow floss body with a fine gold tinsel rib, a couple of wraps of soft grizzly hackle, and a wisp of natural light mallard flank fibers for the wing.

It slims down to next-to-nothing when wet. Fished on a gentle stop-and-go retrieve it can draw strikes from fish that mysteriously don't show themselves during a flurry of surface activity. A #14 Professor is a fun fly to tie and fish - sorry, I haven't seen one in a fly shop for decades - and can be a secret weapon when trout are keyed on those diving egg-layers.

When I had my shop the late Dave Cooper tied some beautiful little Yellow Sally Soft Hackles for me. The idea had been dormant with me for years, although I'd hesitate to call it "my" pattern as somebody must have thought of it before. It's simply a Partridge and Yellow soft hackle with a red tag, but try to get that much information onto a fly box label. Yellow Sally Soft Hackle is simpler and more direct.

I sold only a few at first. But word spread when people returned for more. I had to reorder bigger batches from Dave.

On lazy midsummer or late summer afternoons when you see occasional small pale insects in the air over a trout stream, chances are they're little yellow stoneflies.

On such a day that seems ages ago but is still fresh in my memory I was sitting on the deck of an ancient private clubhouse on the fabled McCloud River. The afternoon sun was blistering hot and we were waiting for it to cool off a bit. The tall west wall of the canyon would soon cast its shadow on the brawling rugged water below and create a long, lingering afternoon of fishing that would last until the pitch dark of a moonlit evening. Little yellow stones were everywhere.

I wanted a sparse fly that would float in that heavy water to fool those wild rainbows that came crashing to the surface to take those little yellow stoneflies. I tied some with a hollow hair tail and underbody for floatation - red butt, yellow body, sparse grizzly hackle and sparse calftail wing. The fly had no name, then.

Years later, I was surprised to see it featured at Tim Tollett's Frontier Anglers shop in Dillon. There were heavy hatches of yellow Sallies on the Big Hole that year and Tim told me that Chuck's Yellow Trude was the hot fly.

The fly never received much publicity. You had to know about it. Last time I checked, though, it still works on the Bitterroot, Blackfoot and Rock Creek in addition to the Big Hole.