IllustrationWelshman's Button
DryWhen to use
A daytime and evening sedge for rivers and loughs from June to September; good hatches occur on Lough Mask as well as on Welsh and English rivers such as the Dee. Fished dead-drift or static as trout key onto hatching or egg-laying sedges.
Imitates
Adult sedge/caddis (the 'Welshman's Button' or caperer), a medium-sized brown sedge.
Team position
Single dry fly, or top dropper on an evening rise leader.
Best methods
Dressing
- Hook
- dry fly, #12
- Thread
- brown
- Body
- reddish-brown wool or dubbing, ribbed with narrow gold tinsel
- Rib
- narrow gold tinsel
- Hackle
- yellow-centred hackle with black tips in the traditional dressing (ginger or furnace substituted where unavailable); a chocolate-dun cock hackle collar in modern CDC ties
- Wing
- reddish landrail-quill wings in the traditional dressing; mallard or hen-pheasant substitutes are common today
- Head
- thread head
Traditional dressing after older fly-dressing references (reddish-brown wool body, gold rib, yellow/black hackle, landrail wing). A simpler modern CDC-and-antennae version (chocolate-brown CDC body, mallard wing, stripped-hackle antennae) is also widely tied and known as the 'chocolate drop'.
Pairs with
Retrieve & line
- Fished dry and static — floating line
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