Like most fly fishers, I have many mentors who have helped me as I’ve pursued the craft over some 50 years now. Some, like both of my grandfathers, physically delivered me to trout water as a kid. Others, contemporaries like my friend Kirk Deeter or our shared mentor, Charlie Meyers, the late, great outdoor writer and editor for the Denver Post, helped me hone my craft and instill in me not just the desire to go fishing but to get at the root of the passion.

And still others made small, cameo appearances along my journey — they played short, bit parts that were both memorable and impressionable. One of those men was an older lawyer in Salida, Colo. — I’m certain he must have passed on by now. And while I’m equally certain that he left a lasting impression on his family and his dear friends, I doubt he ever really knew the impact he had on me as a maturing fly fisher who also worked as a small-town journalist in the upper Arkansas River Valley.

He introduced me to the Prince Nymph.

This venerable fly pattern remains, to this day, one of the dirtiest tricks we can play on trout. Tied with a heavy non-lead (please?) core and that trickiest of tricky materials, peacock herl, even a haphazardly tied Prince (and that’s the most generous description I can give any Prince Nymph I’ve ever tied) can muster a deepwater strike when other weighted bugs just won’t.

Tied correctly, it’s a handsome fly. With its white and brown goose biot quills and its perfectly wrapped, luminescent peacock strands, it picks up any light thrown its way, and literally shines until something can’t stand it anymore and absolutely must eat it. And, looking at the calendar, I’m reminded that the Prince, while a damn good option just about any time of the year, is particularly deadly right about now.

A pre-runoff trout killer

As the lead fly in a double-nymph rig, a heavy, size 14 Prince tied with a gold brass bead and a thin rib of shiny lime-colored wire, should be a late-winter and early spring staple in any fly box. No, it’s not some newfangled Perdigon (which, by the way, is an excellent choice for the second fly in this rig), but rather one of those “old timey” flies that only guys who tie “old timey” flies fish. Tied bigger, it’s a reasonable impression of stonefly nymph — I’d wager I’ve caught more winter and spring trout on the Henry’s Fork with a size 10 Prince than all the other winter-fished nymphs I’ve tried. Combined. Tied smaller, say in a size 18 or even a 20 and allowed to swing out at the end a drift, and it becomes trout candy for the midge-eaters.

Tied really big — size 8 or even size 6, and it’s a serviceable steelhead fly. Throw on some rubber legs and you’ve got a favorite pattern of anglers that 20+ pound sea-run brown trout in far-flung places like Tierra del Fuego.

Like most attractors, its primary purpose is to look not necessarily like any one bug, but a lot like it could be any number of bugs. Not being an entomologist, you’ll have to make due with my clumsy English major explanation. But it serves its best purpose as a utilitarian fly used largely to get a rig down and get it down quickly. If it helps the trailing Perdigon slice through the current and dive deeper and faster, all the better. The point, this time of year, when western rivers start to see a bit of snowmelt (but not full runoff just yet) and eastern rivers are often swollen from early spring rains is to put two flies in the “zone” where winter-weary trout are starting to feed more regularly.

Despite its somewhat dastardly purpose, the fly has earned its royal moniker. And, if you ask those of us who use it regularly, a whispered, “thank you, your majesty” isn’t an inappropriate utterance as we remove the bug from the corner of a nice brown trout’s mouth just before letting the fish dive back to the deep water, all the wiser for the experience.

It’s nearly a century old

If you believe in somewhat sketchy source materials (and these days, who doesn’t, right?), it won’t take you long to gin up the Prince Nymph’s origin story. Oddly, the regal fly was given its name not because of its somewhat flower appearance. Rather, like a lot of flies “back in the day,” it was named for the first guy to tie it — Doug Prince. But the first iteration of this weighted bug wasn’t tied by Prince — it was crafted by brothers Don and Dick Olsen of Minnesota, and it first came off the vise around 1930 sporting brown or black ostrich herl and bearing the name the Brown Forked Tail.

Thankfully, Doug Prince altered the pattern sometime in the late 1930s or early 1940s and attached his name to it. We should also be enthusiastically thankful that Doug’s last name wasn’t “Szerbiak” or “Bellagamba” or something like that, for it’s not likely such a name would have inspired the same appeal that “Prince” does today, and has for generations of fly tiers and fly fishers. And we should all be equally grateful that Prince obviously had a bit of an ego and ditched the name “Brown Forked Tail,” right?

Fish it proud

Like a lot of “classic flies,” the Prince seems to be losing its appeal among the bro-brah crowd with cover-the-lips mustaches and social media know-how. That’s unfortunate, to be sure. For the Prince, in its purest form, is a trout slayer — a purposeful subsurface pattern that works as well today as it did when old Doug first tied in the downward-facing biot feathers and drifted it deep among the rainbows of the upper Sac (he was from Oakland, so forgive my assumption).

It remains today one of the most utilitarian fly patterns out there, and, while many might use it to simply acquire depth, others, like me, appreciate that it’s still a trout catcher when other bugs won’t do the trick. My winter and spring fly box bursts with predictable flies, from a solid handful of Griffith’s Gnats to Zebra Midges in sizes 18-22, and so on. But it also has a wide size assortment of Prince Nymphs, and, more often than not, in a nod to one of my angling mentors from all those years ago, it’s the first fly I tie to my tippet. And on a good day, it’s the last fly back in the box.

BUY PRINCE NYMPHS