As every fly fisherman knows, the fly does matter. Oh, there are those rare days when a trout will hit a lug wrench, if you can get it to float. But most of the time you have to either match the hatch with your feathered offering, or present to the fish an attractor pattern that is just irresistible.

Case in point:

Recently I was fishing some of the trout ponds in southern Aroostook County with Gifford Stevens, an accomplished angler, friend and fair golfer. We shouldn’t do it at our age but we tend to get competitive with one another — golfing or fishing. He always get the best of me on the water, but not always on the fairways. Fishing-wise, he always seems to get the advantage by his uncanny ability to pick just the right fly. This particular day, a typical mid-May one in the County — cold, windy, with a low overcast — we were trolling small streamers on a trout pond.

Flashback.

We are both fishing sinking fly lines with a small Black Ghost Marabou. Whap! Whap! Whap! Stevens is getting hits one after another. No action for me. He keeps this up. “Here we go again” I say to myself. “What is this joker doing that I am not?”

Discreetly, I study him out of the corner of my eye. “Is he pumping the rod? Or maybe running a short line just beyond the outboard’s cavitation? There has got to be a plausible explanation for this exasperating asymmetrical situation.”

As he unhooks his seventh trout, I eyeball his fly, the Black Ghost. “Gifford, my man, allow me to take a closer look at your killer fly there would you?” I ask politely.

He obliges with a smirk.

“Hmmm…same body,” say I. “Black with a silver tinsel twist. White feather with a Marabou overlap. Hold the phone! What is this? Yes, two strips of Flashabou woven in there amid the Marabou. Aha!” I exclaim with a giddy wide-eyed expression of discovery. There is always an explanation in these matters.

Pressured by me, the Fishless One, Gifford, who ties his own, agrees to loan me one of his Flashabou-enhanced streamer flys.

That does it. Suddenly there is a level playing field. My rod is bending every few minutes and I am matching Gifford, strike for strike.

Flash forward.

Just coincidence you say. Two strips of Flashabou is not going to make that much difference. I beg to differ. It was night and day.

Gifford always has an ace up his sleeve when we share a fishing boat or a stream bank. This time the ace was those two strips of Flashabou.

A slightly sexist, politically incorrect angler I know ( not Gifford) once said that an effective artificial fly is like a foxy woman: it must have style, flash and wiggle. Gifford’s hand-tied Black Ghost met all the criteria. The style was the racy, tinsel-wrapped body. The wiggle came from the fluid, silky Marabou. And, of course, the flash from the two strips of Flashabou.

Suggestion: If you fish with streamer flys, find a way to give yourself the Flashabou advantage.

The author is editor of the Northwoods Sporting Journal. He is also a Maine Guide, co-host of a weekly radio program “Maine Outdoors” heard Sundays at 7 p.m. on The Voice of Maine News-Talk Network (WVOM-FM 103.9, WQVM-FM 101.3) and former information officer for the Maine Dept. of Fish and Wildlife. His e-mail address is [email protected].. He has two books “A Maine Deer Hunter’s Logbook” and his latest, “Backtrack.”