Category: Wet Flies

The Hawthorn- a 530 Year Old Imitation


First written about in Dame Juliana Berners’ “A Treatise of Fishing with an Angle” in 1496, the Hawthorn is a medieval wet fly tied to imitate the Bibio Marci, also called a Hawthorn or St. Mark’s Fly.

  • Hook: #12-14 Wet Fly
  • Thread: Black
  • Body: Black Ostrich Herl
  • Wing: Light Starling Wing Slips
  • Hackle: Black Rooster

Now if you think matching the hatch is a relatively new concept in fly fishing, think about this. Dame Juliana Berners wrote “A Treatise on Fishing with an Angle” in 1496. Widely considered the first manual on fly fishing ever written– a full 150 years before Isaac Walton’s “Complete Angler.” Keep in mind that Berners was said to have been prioress of the St Mary of Sopwell, a nunnery near St. Albans in Hertfordshire. So she wasn’t writing this so people like us would be talking about her 500 years later. This was a practical guide.

She saw trout keying on a specific insect and said, “This is what you can use to catch them.” One of those insects was was the hawthorn or St. Mark’s fly as it typically emerges in April and May roughly corresponding to St. Mark’s Day on April 25th.

There are several variations of this fly out there. It can be tied as a dry or a wet fly– or a semi-dry which is somewhere in between. Ray Bergman’s version from his 1938 “Trout” is a pure wet fly. The one I’m tying here and going to fish next week in the Shenandoah National Park is from Mike Dawes’ “The Flytiers Manual” is pretty much a semi-dry.

Even though North American fly fishermen are not likely trying to match a hawthorn hatch, this 530 year old pattern is still relevant to us. This fly looks like a lot of bugs, that a lot of fish still like to eat.

Tying The Usual – Fran Betters’ Signature Pattern


The 18th pattern in Mike Valla’s “Tying the Founding Flies,” the Usual was created by Fran Betters from upstate New York for fishing in the Adirondacks, and in particular the Ausable River.

  • Hook: #12-22 dry fly
  • Thread: Fluorescent Orange
  • Tail: Snowshoe Hare’s foot fur
  • Wing: Snowshoe Hare’s foot fur
  • Body: Snowshoe Hare’s foot underfur

Mike Valla’s “Tying the Founding Flies,” 2015, is available on Amazon at: https://amzn.to/354oSir

Fran Betters came up with this pattern probably sometime in the 1940s. He tied this as an experimental pattern, a one material fly made out of snowshoe hare’s foot fur. He said he had half a dozen of them in his shop and nobody was buying them– until a guy named Bill Phillips came in and bought them all.

Philips said they did really well for him and anytime anybody asked him what he was fishing, he just said, “Oh, the usual.” So Betters originally called the fly the “Philips Usual,” but over time it got shortened to what we know it as today, simply The Usual.

Now, I love a pattern like this as it’s pretty easy to tie and so shaggy looking that if you mess it up, you can just say, “I meant to do that.” Now, Valla says this can be tied from a 12 to a 22. I don’t know anybody that could tie this little shaggy thing on a 22. The one in the following video is tied on a size 12, but I did tie a handful of 14s for my spring brook trout box.