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| This dressing excludes the lead wire that Pat Proffitt recommends, and uses a size 14 dry fly hook rather than the down eye, 2X long, 2X heavy hook with a perfect bend Pat Proffitt assigns. This dresses uses a lightly-variegated, smoky dun grizzly hackle and a brown furnace hen hackle. |
Hook:
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6-16
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Thread:
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Black
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Tail:
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Brown and grizzly hackle fibers
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Body:
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Muskrat dubbing
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Hackle:
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Soft brown and grizzly hackle
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Although the fly is billed as a nymphal pattern,
the basic, tied-in-the-round design of the Pat’s Nymph is essentially a tailed soft hackle dressing. L. J. DeCuir
includes this fly in Southeastern Flies
(2000) with two others developed by Pat Proffitt, “a legendary fly fisherman
of East Tennessee,” classing the set of three as “mountain flies—simple by highly
effective.”
DeCuir notes two variations for dressing the Pat's Nymph: a copper wire rib for the full length of the body and/or partridge
substituted for poultry hackle. He points out, as well, that local, East Tennessee tiers often simplify the dressing by leaving out the grizzly hackle, using instead only brown hackle for the tail and collar.
In a chapter of Masters on the Nymph (1979), "Advanced Nymphing Techniques," Chuck Fothergill describes a Muskrat Nymph that is dressed much like the fly many anglers in East Tennessee also refer to as Pat's Nymph. Fothergill dressed his Muskrat with brown hackle for the tailing and hackle, with lighter tying thread. He notes that "this simple pattern of brown and gray has proven itself for years on countless rivers and lakes." |
