This post was last updated on June 30th, 2021 at 06:10 pm
Hex Fly Patterns – What You Need to Know
These are extremely large mayflies that cause quite a stir during the hex hatch and spinner fall. There are a lot of ways to tie these huge mayflies. Here’s just a couple examples of great foam hexy fly patterns to use during this exciting hatch.
This old standby is tied with a compressed deer hair body and an elk hair parachute. This “dun” style fly works great during the time when the Hexagenia limbata hatch is taking place. While night fishing I would personally choose a pattern that would be more likely to float perfectly after hours of fishing. The upright parachute and small hackle simulates upright wings of the newly hatched adult mayfly.
The Spinner’s (Dead Adult Flies after Breeding)
I have never been picky about tying these foam hex fly patterns perfectly. They are so easy to lose in trees while fishing at night, I just don’t find it worth it to spend a lot of time on them. The fish don’t tend seem to mind shabby looking patterns :) As you can see, I am a fan of the poly wing material. It floats really well and is easy to attach, it seems to pull of the look of the wings perfectly.
This fly is tied with a wrapped strip of sparkly foam as the abdomen. I used silver foam and colored it with permanent markers. Yellow on the bottom and brown on the sides to simulate natural colors.On this particular fly I simply used dubbing as the body and the poly wings I tend to use on most of my spinner patterns. This was tied with rabbit fur dubbing which is not advisable because it doesn’t float very well. It was tied with limited resources on the ride up to the river a few years ago. Synthetic dubbing would be a much better choice of material. The hackle and tail is cheap grizzly saddle.This simple pattern is not tied perfectly, but they float really well and always produce trout. This is standard closed cell foam with a tail and wings made of calf or “kiptail”.
