High and Dry

I re-learned a valuable lesson while fishing with a friend last Monday on the Owyhee - that is, the value of a very large dry fly fished with a dropper.  And while I did have one fish actually take the large dry fly that was suggestive of a large skwala stonefly that will occasionally hatch in the springtime in my part of the universe, I did quite a bit of business with a very small, unweighted mayfly nymph that I suspended underneath the big dry, which acts as an indicator.  This is definitely a preferred setup for fly fishing, and as usual I spend the winter and early spring forgetting it's advantages, simply because any dry fly that can realistically be fished in winter is just too small to drop another fly beneath.

Here's one of my favorite big dry's for use as a general stonefly/hopper, but particularly as a "hooked indicator".  It's called a Parachute Madam-X, or PMX.