Vic Attardo

When I first scanned Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna River below Selinsgrove, I was as mad as heck. Someone, I thought, had dumped white paint, or some milky substance, on the river. The pollution covered a wide backwater, dense as a rainy day cloud.
But the closer I got to the shoreline, eventually sticking my wader feet into the slow edges, I saw this wasn’t a chemical scum at all. It was a floating carpet of formerly living things. Bugs exactly: the flimsy, feather-light carcasses of a mayfly anglers call the whitefly.

Before the enjoyable madness of matching the hatch begins, a lot of trout – and I mean a lot of trout – fall to attractor flies. Venerable patterns such as the Wooly Bugger, Wooly Worm and more diminutive look-alikes such as Pheasant Tails and Hare’s Ears hook many fish.
But even anglers who successfully use these flies realize that not every Bugger, Worm , etc., are as good as another.