Brassie-       

Hook: Tiemco TMC 100 Dry Fly Hook or similar

Thread:  Red 8/0 Uni-Thread

Body: Fine Copper Wire

Legs: Pheasant Tail fibre tips

Head: Red 8/0 Uni-Thread

1/ Tie in the thread at the rear of the hook. Tie in a piece of copper wire protruding out to the back of the fly. Then wrap a base of thread back along the hook shank until you reach the hook eye. This is about the easiest pattern you will ever attempt to tie.
2/ Very gently grasp the fine and delicate wire and begin winding up the hook towards the thread. Each successive wrap should bed down snugly against the previous one. This gives us a heavily segmented, aesthetically pleasing fly. When you reach the thread tie off and trim the excess wire and move onto the next step.
3/ The last of the actual steps involves tying in the 'legs' on the underside of the fly. Take a small section of fibres from a pheasant tail and tie in as shown, with tips just about touching the barb of the hook. Trim the excess at the but ends and add a turn of thread to hide the cut.
4/ Finally add a few more wraps of thread to build the head of the fly up slightly. Do a couple of half-hitches to make sure it all stays together and then cut your thread. There you have a very simple yet effective pattern for fishing many of our cold-water tailraces during the midge hatch. That is most of the year.

The Pattern

The brassie is about as unassuming a fly pattern as you are ever likely to find. If you fished a season in the Western USA you would soon get to know this pattern intimately. Everyone has a few dozen in their boxes with all sorts of variations on colour. A dubbed black head being very popular also. It is fished in most tailwaters with great success and seeks to imitate a midge larva free drifting in the water column prior to emergence. These cold water rivers provide the ideal habitat, and the Goulburn with its cold flows and in places mud and weed bottom is ideal for midge.

So we fish this critter fairly regularly. Often clients don't want to fish something so small but this quickly changes when it catches a fish or two. As midge are the most prevalent insect in the Goulburn you should always be ready to fish this hatch and more importantly be capable of interpreting when it is actually happening. Two times of note are in September-November and April until the close of the season. During these low flow periods the Goulburn experiences brilliant hatches of midge and some big fish will selectively rise to them. At this time of year you should not venture out onto the G without some brassies.

We have found that they are best fished in tandem with a small dry fly pattern that also fits in with the midge hatch. The Goulburn Griffiths or Griffiths Gnat are two examples of must-have dry flies If you are serious about catching fish at this time of year tie some up or purchase some. If not keep presenting parachute duns and caddis to these fish and be prepared to fail. Larger fish get that way not because they are smart but because they aggressively feed when the hatch is at its peak, concentrating on the insect that is appearing in the greatest numbers. As such it is next to impossible to tempt a fish rising to midges with a fly that is too large. Flies must be kept down in the 18-22 size range.

Midge larva are mostly found near the stream bottom and that is why I don't see this pattern as a strict imitator. It works better for us near to the surface suggesting that it is more a generalist pattern capable of loosely imitating a larva/pupa and possibly other sub-aquatic insects. However in the right hands it is deadly fished near the streambed and this is how most of our american clients insist on fishing it. You may think that a fly that small would never get down to the bottom, but the combination of wire body and no bulk allow it to reach the bottom very quickly.

We mostly fish the brassie no more than a foot below the dry and often only 3-6 inches. There it sits suspended below the dry drifting in the bubble line. Takes are ever so subtle and the dry will just dip under. You should lift but not strike. We often use very fine tippets in the 6X-7X class and these are easily broken with an enthusiastic strike. We often hook larger fish when this hatch is on. Roger, a regular visitor and syndicate member at GVFFC hooked and released a 5lb brown during the midge hatches last spring.

If you would like a demonstration of how to tie this fly or its dry cousin the Goulburn Griffiths, just ask next time you are in the shop. But as you can see it is pretty simple.

~Antony