Reverse Parachute Mayfly

I love this Reverse Parachute Mayfly. The one above was tied by me (not very well) using the video below, by Barry Ord Clarke. I didn’t have any “swimming nymph” hooks so I had to just bend a Tiemco 200R hook, it’s a number ten. It really needs to be on a wider gap hook than 200R so I’ve ordered some swimming nymph hooks.

I think this pattern may work well on the local bream population. Bream have very small mouths and the Hexagenia Bilineata of the local reservoir are massive, actually most of the females have a head/thorax/abdomen as long as three of my fingers are wide.

The bream don’t eat them like a trout that just takes the whole bug, bream attack the bug at the head, that’s why I like the Reverse Parachute. They usually get the whole bug but their attack is so swift and vicious they often knock the fly out of the way. Multiple strikes on the same fly with no hook-up are the result. So I started tying an articulated fly so the articulated abdomen would not push the fly out of the way when they attack the head. You can see where the bream below has attacked the large fly at the head:

I also like big flies because the bass will start working in among the mayflies too and I figure I have a better shot at them with a big fly, but the big fly kind of exacerbates the problem of the bream getting the hook in their mouth. The articulated abdomen, tied out of moose mane, maybe helps me catch the bream but not miss out on the bass. A plus I think is the articulated abdomen doesn’t always line up. It may hook left or right, which is actually what you see on most of the cripples.