Conventional mayfly patterns work fine for matching the hatches on the Black and the West Canada. I like to use no-hackle dry flies like Compara-duns and Sparkle Duns in the appropriate colors when fish are taking adults. When they're eating emergers, I usually fish soft-hackles, often upstream instead of on the swing.

John Bianco is an avid soft-hackle fisherman, but he ties his flies with the hackle tips sloping forward over the eye of the hook, rather than sloping back toward the bend. He says this makes the hackle fibers less prone to collapse back along the hook shank and gives them better action. The Leadwing Coachman is a good searching pattern on the West Canada, as it seems to be on any river that has a good Isonychia hatch.

It's worth it to try to figure out whether fish rising in the evening are taking spinners or duns and to fish accordingly. Often the best fish switch to the spinner fall at dusk. One evening during last year's West Canada Creek Ephoron hatch, a friend of mine decided the good trout he'd been casting to had begun taking spinners. He lopped the wing off his white parachute fly, thinned the hackle out by half with his nipper, and promptly caught and landed the 18-inch brown.

Two flies of Adirondack origin, the Haystack and the Usual, are effective here. The Haystack was popularized by Fran Betters at the Adirondack Sports Shop near Lake Placid, about 100 miles away. Betters invented the Usual in the 1970s when, on a lark, he made a Haystack out of snowshoe hare's foot fur. Both are excellent attractors.

Betters also invented the Ausable Wulff, which has a body of orange-dyed opossum fur, and he sells a lot of other patterns in similar shades of orange and rust. He believes minerals common in Adirondack waters tend to give flies a reddish color. There may or may not be science to support the theory, but Fran's flies work. Woolly Buggers with orange cone heads, Partridge and Orange soft hackles, orange marabou streamers, and Ausable Wulffs are effective on the Black and West Canada.