A River Never Sleeps

There's an old saying meant to keep the fashion-challenged from mixing colors that clash: Blue and green should never be seen.

Imagine a blue shirt with green pants, and you get the drift.

Kelsey's Hope, a coho fly pattern that evolved on Nick Didlick's vice over the past several seasons, may break all the rules of fashion - but it sure catches fish.

The pattern mixes blue and green bucktail streaked with a few strands of Mylar, tied in a thin profile over a silver tinsel body that's wrapped with monofilament, as protection from sharp teeth.

Dolly Varden and bull trout love this simple pattern, but they are relatively easy fish to fool.

Over several years we've tested it on the more challenging coho, running into the Fraser River, and it has consistantly out produced our other patterns.

Fished on a downward cast with a slow, strip retrieve, it will draw surprisingly aggressive takes from coho.

Maybe they don't like the color clash. Maybe it reminds them of anchovies or herring, or flying squid. Whatever it is, they will pursue the fly and take it solidly - often when other patterns are failing to draw a strike.

One day, fishing a rising tide on a tributary on the lower Fraser, we took half-a-dozen coho in almost as many casts, while three fly fishermen above us and three others below went without strikes.

In that instance, it was clear a fresh school of coho was moving up with the tide. But they were passing the flies both below and above us, and were striking only our offerings.

Comparisons in the field are always hard to make, because there are so many factors in play. It may be that the other fly fishermen weren't fishing at the right depth. Perhaps they were retrieving too fast, or too slow.

What we can say is that given a choice of flies presented by eight anglers, in a 100 yard stretch of water, the coho zeroed in on the blue and green patterns, disregarding everything else that was offered.

Sometimes when we get into a fresh run of fish holding in a run we'll try other flies - but we often find that Kelsey's Hope is the one that draws the most strikes - and often it is the only pattern that will work.

Fishing on the Pitt River last fall, we found a deep slot where a school of coho had come to rest. We knew they were there because they were rolling steadily, at the tailout, at the head of the run, and in the main pool.

We fished through it for 20 minutes without a take. Then we switched to Kelsey's Hope, and the first search through the pool brought a strike. For the next two hours, until darkness fell and we sensed the bears were about the prowl, we steadily took coho from the pool.

Often the success of a fly is directly related to the level of confidence you fish it with. After experiences like that - when other patterns draw a blank and then a pattern switch brings a series of strikes - it's easy to see why Kelsey's Hope has earned a top place in our fly box.