An interesting life and fishing experience shared by Edward Truter:
Midnight Blitz, what are we missing (by day and night)?
So on my recent stay at the Tourette Fishing – try fight it in Africa operation on the Bokong River in Lesotho, fighter pilot, Pierre Swartz, and I did some night fishing. My mission was to prospect for big browns. Long story less long, in the dark of night (and amid the sounds and reflected ripples of feeding fish), swinging waked mice and Dahlbergs I kept getting hit but couldn’t hook up. After changing to an articulated Muddler, I eventually hooked a fish only to discover it was a smallmouth yellow. Another yellow followed on the next cast and bottom line it became impractical to fish for trout as the hordes of f *&^%$ yellowfish (!!!) wouldn’t leave my flies alone – at darkmoon midnight. We gave up. Before giving up though, shining our headlights about, we noted the high numbers of caddis and moths over the water. This really got me thinking that moths may be a lot more important than we know because firstly the chowdown is happening late at night when most folks are dossing (sleeping), and secondly, by morning, all them moths have already been chowed down, so the evidence is gone.
This thinking was further built upon by extremely aggressive hits by trout and yellows on very large, yarn and foam, orange indicators in the Bokong, and low and behold, the existence locally of a very common, big, orange moth. In subsequent pers. comm. with Robert Scott ,he remarked finding these moths by the riverside in the mornings and lobbing them into the river where the yellows went at them like grandma at a Wimpy breakfast.
So here’s my answer to all of this (for mostly daytime fishing): a mofo orange DDD and an orange moth, sliding indicator fly I’m calling ‘Die Vleisbom’ (both on no.4 Gama S10 hook). The sliding indicator fly is rigged by passing the leader through the eye of the hook and then through some very thin silicon tubing (bait anglers use the stuff), which is slid over the hook bend to lock the fly in place relative to the distance required to the next fly. If the indicator fly is sliding too easily on it being eaten and the strike, wrap the leader around the foam body once before inserting the hook into the tube. See the pics. The pic of the little yellow was taken at the gong of midnight precisely. Excuse the dirty fingernails, it’s all part of my daytime fishing camouflage.