Shanafelt’s 3-Mile PMD

Producer: Charlie's Fly Box

“At this point in my life as an angler and fly tier, I feel pretty confident fishing most hatches. I have a solid set of go-to flies to cover all the major emerging insects—at least on my local streams, where I fish most often. And, at the risk of sounding cocky, I feel like I can walk up to any river and stand a pretty good chance of putting a whooping on them. Except when PMDs are hatching.

I have a love-hate relationship with these damn bugs.

Pale Morning Duns are those pretty, light yellow mayflies that hatch dependably on most Western rivers throughout the summer. They make for great fishing, from nymphs and emergers to adults and, finally, spinners. The catch with PMDs—compared to most other mayflies—is that rather than hatching at the surface like respectable insects, PMDs often emerge as winged adults under the water; then the fully mature bugs swim to the surface, pop through, and fly off.

It doesn’t always work out quite the way they’d hoped. In this variable emergence, many PMDs become trapped in their nymphal shucks at various stages of undress. The lucky ones break completely free and pop to the surface to dry their wings before flitting off to bankside vegetation. The ones that aren’t so lucky get hung up in the stage of half nymph, half adult, floundering around at the surface and struggling to free themselves.

It is this “unfortunate” stage that trout often key on, and it can be the most exciting—or frustrating—fishing of the year.

My own PMD box has at least a dozen different crippled, damp, emerger, and dry patterns in it, all of which have worked at one time or another. But none of them works all the time.

I must be some sort of masochist, but I have to admit I especially enjoy this particular hatch-matching exercise because it can be so hard to dial in. Picking out a specific rising fish and trying to ascertain exactly what it’s eating is technical dry-fly fishing at the highest level, and I can spend an hour working a single fish. Sometimes, coming away empty-handed is the best thing that can happen to a serious fly tier.

Enter Pete Shanafelt, a 42-year-old lifelong guide who lives on the Bighorn River in southeast Montana. Pete has guided all over the Rocky Mountain West, and like me, he’s fished many challenging PMD hatches. Trying to come up with a fly pattern to match PMDs that are trapped in their shucks and hang up in or just under the surface is something of a holy grail among the devoted. And Pete has a pretty good skeleton key for exactly this situation with his 3 Mile PMD pattern.

Shanafelt originally came up with this fly to fish subsurface, but discovered that a couple of false casts quickly dried out the CDC collar, allowing it to sit on the surface, with the loose feather tendrils rolling and lolling about. It looked like the natural insect.

My first glimpse of the 3 Mile PMD reminded me of a simple Green Drake imitation I’ve fished for years, with a similarly wrapped CDC collar. I knew Shanafelt’s fly would produce the same sort of built-in action and movement—and that he was clearly a great fly tier and a man of good taste.”

Shanafelt’s 3-Mile PMD
Tail: Ringneck pheasant tail fibers
Shuck: Olive brown Z-Lon
Rib: Fine copper wire
Abdomen: Ringneck pheasant tail fibers
Thorax: Shrimp pink ice dub
Wing: White or light dun poly yarn
Collar: Light dun CDC