Baeting a hook

"JR" wrote

none seems as consistently good
as comparaduns and sparkle duns, tied in a range of colors from
light yellow/olive to a dark olive/grey.



That matches my experience, hard to beat a sparkle dun ... but sometimes
they are hesitant to take one and I carry some crippled dun, knocked down
dun, emerger and un-weighted nymph patterns for "tough times"

A consistently tough time during baetis activity is spinner egg laying (
although I seem to run into this far more with the Fall hatches ??/ wonder
why?? ) When you see the spinners crawling all over your waders, often
before the real hatch that day, I've never found a real killer pattern,
..... even when pods of fish are working. Tiny wets will catch fish, but
never feel like a "solution" in the regularity with which they do so.

Having passionately hunted waterfowl over decoys and fished with "hatch
matching" flies all my adult life I've spent a lot of thought on a "theory
of deception" ... I believe the two activities have many similarities in
their efforts to visually fool the prey.

Part of that theory is brought to mind by the "upside down hook" thread.
IME the prey is nearly always looking for POSITIVE clues or triggers, not
negative ones, and worries about him "seeing the hook" aren't grounded in
real observation. In the cases, ( some do exist in both sports ) where
the prey is so well educated that it looks for negatives it's nearly
impossible to fool him since all our efforts contain hooks, leaders, anchor
lines, etc. and are really pretty poor "imitations"

I mention this because I've never felt I've located and imitated the
positive triggers during baetis underwater egg laying activity ...
identifying and successfully suggesting, such positives is what I mean by
"solution"