Black Snail Fly

About the Black Snail Trout Fly

Snails are one of the most overlooked items on a stillwater trout's menu and one of the most frustrating to fish over. They graze the weed beds in their thousands, and because many of our freshwater snails are air breathers they have to come up to the surface to renew their air. There they hang inverted beneath the film, feeding on whatever is trapped in it, and wave action along a shoreline strips still more of them off the weed and leaves them drifting. When enough of them are in the film at once, trout lock on to snails and ignore everything else; a fish caught during a snail feeding spell can have a stomach holding almost nothing but shells.

In these situations the Black Snail is the answer, as it is unlike anything else in a dry fly box. Our tie is a solid, gloss black lacquered body shaped like a snail shell, and a short clear stub tipped with a bead represents its eyestalk.

The fly is pure silhouette, and silhouette is all a trout sees of a snail lying in the film above it. The hard, wet-looking shell sits low and awash rather than perched on top of the surface, which is exactly how the natural lies.

Country of origin for this trout fly: England

This trout fly is designed to be fished on Dams & Reservoirs, Still Water