Sedges, often known as caddis flies to those lucky enough to live outside the British Isles, have an odd place in flyfishing lore. If you were to ask the average flyfisher what he or she thought was the most important or interesting interesting insect to trout fishers, comparatively few would mention sedges. Instead, you're likely to hear about the more glamorous and mystical mayfly, with its fleetingly ephemeral adult lifespan; or perhaps the chironomid midge, whose larvae and pupae make up such vast proportions of a trout's diet. This is not to say that we don't recognise their importance, of course - every flyfisher has a sedge pattern or two secreted about their person, and I know many people who would choose a sedge pattern above all else as their dry fly of choice if permitted only one.
Some of those patterns have become almost mythologically famous in their own right. Some are less well-known here, but have achieved legendary status in the countries where they were first conceived. Some of the insects themselves have interesting and distinctive names - the grannom, for example - and one, the great red sedge, is so grandiose that its name is often capitalised, as if it were a major historical event rather than a rather drab insect.
The truth about sedges - or caddis, or whatever - is that they are truly fascinating creatures with a life-cycle to match even the most rarified ephemerid, and an abundance that sometimes seems to rival that of the midges. The Trichoptera, to give them their proper name (it means 'hairy wing', a reflection of the fact that the adults' wings are indeed covered with filaments that appear to be hairs) are represented by an amazing variety of lifestyles, despite the fact that the adults are extraordinarily similar in form, if not size or colour. Their larvae range from active predators that spin ropes of silk and abseil elegantly in the current, pausing occasionally to sling a grapnel over a rock or build a net in which to catch prey, to slow-moving bottom-dwellers that build themselves armoured casing from stones and sand and anything else that they find. Examples of the latter have inspired artists and philosophers (and if you only read one link from this column today, make sure it's this one); and the mere utterance of names like Rhyacophila and Hydropsyche is enough to make some of the world's best and best-known fly-tiers twitch with excitement in their attempts to tie the perfect imitation.
And of course sedges are, almost literally, everywhere; from the fastest-flowing stream to the dankest pond or reservoir, they are found in abundance, supremely well adapted to more or less any kind of freshwater environment you can imagine. Sometimes, they are so abundant that it seems inconceivable that trout could ever eat anything else. One wet and memorable evening on a large river somewhere in southern New Zealand, Paul and I found ourselves deluged with adult caddis flies; as if from nowhere, they appeared in their millions, finding their way into our mouths and noses and ears and various other orifices that I had more or less forgotten I owned. They crawled under our feet in untold numbers, the ground actually hissing with the friction of their bodies; and the trout had not let this almost biblical hatch go unnoticed, slashing at our flies with glorious and abandoned savagery.
I have had almost equally surreal experiences on British reservoirs and estate lakes, on tiny brooks and urban waterways; and yet, I have a terrible secret. It is a secret which makes this evening's main activity - tying caddis imitations - spectacularly pointless, and which amazes me every time I think about it. But I must confess it anyway. With the exception of that single river in New Zealand, I have never caught a trout on a sedge pattern. Not once, not ever. My carefully-constructed CDC & elk flies have been ignored by fish all over the world; my various sedge pupa patterns have failed to yield so much as a pull, let alone yielded a fish. I have trundled lovingly-tied caddis-case imitations along the beds of rivers and streams at opposite ends of the earth, without so much as a twitch in the line or a pause of the leader. For me, the sedge is my bte noir - a dark shadow in the background of an an otherwise fairly sunny life as a flyfisherman.
This seems pretty odd, given the facts about these creatures. They can make up something between 5 and 50% of a trout's diet, perhaps even more in some places; and it's not just trout that love them, either. French barbel fishermen spend hours grubbing around on the bottom of rivers for caddis larvae, which they attach to hooks and drift down the current under a float - and they catch fish by the dozen. Most other species of freshwater fish have a vast appetite for these crunchy delicacies, too. Sluggish and easy to catch, they are an obvious and very available source of nutrition for more or less anything that swims, and so you'd think that I might occasionally nail a roach or chub or a bream on one, even if ther trout weren't co-operating.
Nope.
I am by no means sure what to do about this. It's not that I don't tie these things properly - I have a boxful of sedge patterns tied by much more talented people than I, including a couple of especially beautiful examples created by Viking Lars that seem almost too perfect to fish with, let alone allow to be destroyed by a trout. This may, at some level, be an example of cosmic interference; but then again, there are some things in life that you must just really accept as fundamental limitations, or possibly even character flaws. I thought I had more than enough of these - perhaps even all of them - but it seems that I must add another to my list. I'm going to keep tying anyway. If nothing else, I can at least remind myself that however mysterious the universe is, it can't stop me hoping.