Overview

Frank Sawyer tied the original Pheasant Tail Nymph on the Wiltshire Avon in the 1950s using two materials: pheasant tail fibres and fine copper wire. No thread, no dubbing. Seventy years later it is still one of the few genuinely essential nymphs, and the Natural dressing is the version that started it. The reason it has lasted is that it does not imitate one insect. The slim, tapered, reddish-brown body with a slightly swollen thorax is the shared shape of most mayfly nymphs, so a trout keys on the outline rather than the detail.

Fished small it becomes a precision tool. In size 20 it matches the blue-winged olive and baetis nymphs that make up the bulk of a tailwater trout's diet through the colder months, when the naturals are genuinely that small and a size 16 gets refused. Fish it as the trailing nymph on a two-fly rig, on a Euro leader through a pocket, or as a dropper beneath a dry during an olive hatch. It works in a hatch and it works when nothing is happening at all, which is the mark of a searching pattern rather than a match.Read More +