The late Charlie Brooks of West Yellowstone, Montana was a very close friend and the finest trout nymph fisherman I’ve ever know. Once when we were exchanging nymphs back and forth by mail from Virginia to Montana I apologized that I had only smallmouth bass upon which to test my nymphs. In Brooks next letter he gave me a good chewing out for belittling my smallmouth bass. He wrote “Those smallmouths are some of the smartest fish we have. The only fish which I put on their level is a large old brown trout.”
With this in mind I started considering the main natural nymphs which the smallmouth feed upon. As a youngster we used to see great numbers of hellgrammites to use as live bait. These were very thick in the riffles and we could hatch dozens of them in 15 minutes. As an adult fly fisherman I was very disappointed with the poor success of the existing hellgrammite flies we had. By going to the riffles and catching many natural hellgrammites I quickly discovered the reason for the existing rigid straight body flies failures. By dropping the real hellgrammites into the river one by one I quickly saw that they each swam downstream with a pronounced undulating action. By using ostrich hurl for the extended body on our new hellgrammites we were able to produce a fly action which duplicated the true swimming action of the natural hellgrammites and the bass took them quickly. Today the Murray’s Heavy Hellgrammite is the most productive bass nymph we have.
That fall I took a dozen to Montana and gave them to Brooks. He was very excited about them and asked if it would be okay to take some of them to Ennis for the fellows to try on the large trout on the lower Madison. This was several years before the
Woolly Buggers came out and the guides at Ennis caught many large trout on them.
Fortunately at Brooks suggestion we were able to design a fly which is very successful for both bass and large trout.
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