atropinna. In this fish’s mouth and my hand to the right, the sparse clump tail and lightly dubbed rat spine fur looks pathetic but has caught me more trout in this lake than any other tying over the past 25 years – thousands of them. Better still, with or without this spawning-orientated orange bead or a yellow smelting one, it’s broken so many blank spells over the same period, that logically, I should never take it off my tippet when fishing on or near the surface at dawn. It’s also caught enough
