Thanks for the response. I had never thought about it but where I was
fishing the water is crystal clear. I could spy a group of gills and would
cast into or near them. They would immediatly start swimming to the fly.
Mouth it and go (or spit out) or just turn away when they got a good look
at it, 9 times out of 10 they would look and turn away. but with the live
crickets...BOOM.....no hesitation. MIKE

"Flying Squirrel" wrote in message
...
----- Original Message -----
From:
Newsgroups: rec.outdoors.fishing.fly
Sent: Thursday, June 03, 2004 2:37 PM
Subject: Cricket Pattern??


I was fishing this past weekend for bluegill. My wife was useing her
Ultralight set up and live brown crickets. She was catching them with
almost everycast. Me...fishing a few feet from her with my flyrod was
catching just a few. I tried every pattern I had that resembled a
cricket
or something similiar. The fish would always go to the live cricket. I
tried different presentation techniques. Different methods of
retrievals....etc..etc.... To no avail. Is there pattern for a brown
cricket that anyone has had success with??? Thanks Mike

I've noticed (both outdoors and in a native fish aquarium) that bluegills
have two modes of attack: immediate or checking things out first. If
they're
hungry and used to eating a certain thing, they'll hit it with little or
no
hesitation. If they're feeling picky or aren't sure something's edible,
they'll slide up but stop dead several times to eyeball (and I'm sure
sniff)
it. With real crickets, everything's go at these inspections, whereas
something with hook, foam, and feathers is likely to be rejected a certain
fraction of the time.