For this small stream, I use just five patterns. After the hard work of hiking into these wild and beautiful places; after creeping on your hands and knees into a suitable casting position and, if you’re lucky, have avoided spooking every fish in the pool/run,  it’s nice to be able to just relax a little and to be able to choose a fly from a simple collection and just know it will work. The micro-environs of our small free-stoners don’t usually have the volume of hatches that the main stems do, neither do they have the same fishing pressure. 

Because of which, the fish are wild and hungry, and in the faster running riffley water a large, bushy dry fly will usually be met with a confident and quite violent rise. In the interests of simplicity, my selection of flies are also easy to tie, another bonus if, like me, you can’t be bothered with over-complicating something that’s going to get wet, bitten to shreds, or lost in the trees.