A warm night and a smarm of mayflies

The photo with this post is a blurry mess — not an attempt at abstract photography, I assure you — because it’s a screenshot from a cell phone video of a swarm of mayflies over the Youghiogheny River in western Maryland. (You can see the swarm on my YouTube channel.)

These flies were a mixture of green drakes and what fly anglers call sulfurs, or Ephemerella invaria and Ephemerella dorothea. These insects begin life in the bottom of the river then, in time, emerge at the surface and, unless consumed by a rising trout, they manage to fly and mate and spin and die. Theirs is not a long life out of the water.

You’ve probably heard the expression “match the hatch.” Such is the challenge of fly fishing — to match with the feather-and-fur flies in your vest the natural hatch occurring on the river before you. You want to deceive the trout with an imitation of the mayfly that has just emerged, and it’s important to be as exact as possible in size, color and shape.

It doesn’t always work. And in a hatch like the big, wild one that occurred the other night, it’s hard to get a trout’s attention with your cheap imitations of the perfect, natural mayflies. You’re competing with a massive smorgasbord of real trout food.

A friend prevailed, however. He managed to attract the attention of this brown trout, then released him back to the water to finish his feasting.

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