Overview

The Fast Water Drake exists because most green drake patterns were designed for the wrong river. On the Deschutes the green drakes come off in the fastest water available, in rapids that would not look out of place on a raft trip, and the classic dressings built for slower eastern and spring-creek hatches simply drown in it. A fly that sinks on the second cast is not a green drake pattern on that water, whatever it looks like in the box.

This one was worked out over more than a decade of fishing that hatch. The brief was narrow and unglamorous: float genuinely well in broken water, still read as a green drake rather than a foam attractor, and do it without inflating the fly into something too big or too gaudy to be taken. It hits all three, which is why it holds up in heavy pocket water, plunge pools and rapid tailouts where a conventional drake would already be under. The Green Wing gives a visible post you can actually track through moving water. Tied here in size 10.Read More +