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3. Brown Drake emerger pattern

It is about that time to start getting ready for the brown drake hatch. Wondering what others find as the most effective brown drake emerger pattern? I use a wiggle nymph at times, but is time-consuming and tedious tying wiggle nymphs. Suggestions?

I had good luck with a big Quigley style emerger with Green Drakes on the Delaware one year. I used an olive marabou feather for the abdomen, dubbing for the thorax, and a big forward angled deerhair wing with a prominent stubb of the deer hair butts behind. Twitching it in the film produced action.

Louis, what is a "Quigley"? So you just use some strands of marabou for a long tail?

I thought you guys had Ephemera simulans out East? (Maybe I was remembering reading about the Green Drakes on the Delaware.)

John, a couple of pictures will be worth a couple of thousand words, I'd hope:

http://www.southeastflyfishingforum.com/flypatterns/displayimage-topn--2-26.html

http://www.uky.edu/~agrdanny/flyfish/ljdecuir/quigley.htm

Instead of peacock for the thorax I used a light greenish dubbing (Caucci's spectrumized for Eastern Green Drake)for the Green Drake emerger.

We have both Emphmera similans and Ephemera gutulatta here in the East.

Louis, thanks!

BTW, the other day I found 6 plastic containers each containing dyed rabbit fur (red, white, blue, yellow, & black) that Natasi gave me years ago. Their original dyed furs that you then mixed to make their spectrumized fur blends. It has to be around 25 years old. :)

Here is a piggie I caught last Friday night on a #10 Brown Drake Comapra-dun on the middle main stem Delaware. The main stem and the East Branch have huge emergences of simulans. Often the spinner is far more important than the duns that often hatch sporadically all day long.

Nice fish!!

The Brown Drake Compara-dun is my favorite pattern during the hatch, but I also find an emerger triggers some better action at times.

The "main stem" of the Delaware... Is that below the Junction Pool?

Nice fish, Matt.

John, that is neat about the fur. Jeff of the DRC tells me they blend up the colors when they need them, weighing the fur to get the right amounts. I don't think they use black anymore. The formulae are printed on the dubbing packs.

--Louis

I probably have a lifetime supply of their Spectrum pre-blended dubbing packs too. I use them all the time. I blend my own as well, but not too often. A lesson I learned from Natasi was check the blends wet before using. Fur blends tend to darken when wet, which is pretty obvious, but I often forget about it while tying.

I was looking at the 2008 photo gallery for the DRC, there are a lot of nice trout pics. The DR is still one of my favorite rivers. I imagine it gets a lot more pressure than it did back in the early 80's.