This pattern has enough elk hair to float the Titanic, so its really hard to sink it. I tie it on a #8 2XL dry fly hook; 6mm foam underbody; yellow nano silk thread (that stuff is almost unbreakable, fwiw) bright yellow Ice Dub for the body; and natural (i.e. unbleached) cow elk hair for the wing......tied in in 4 or 5 bunches.

Gol denStones, in my experience, don’t hatch en masse, but dribble off during the day. When they return to drop their eggs the trout/Landlocks do notice. I took a really nice Brookie yesterday on this pattern. It was a bit different.......as I had tied it as a Chubby Chernoble; but these float like a proverbial cork with that foam underbody, and black egg sack. I also fish this pattern in October on the East Outlet as t here are(usually) Goldens coming off then.

If I ever tied these commercially I‘d have to charge $8/per fly as they take a long time to tie up with several bunches of hair.......but they’re worth their weight in gold when you need to imitate these Stones.

BTW, just as an aside........I can post pics from my I-Pad, but not from my phone. No idea why that is.

Good stuff Dave, thanks. my observations match yours in that the hatches are usually sparse but fish notice. It’s a great big river fly.

Yeah, that looks like a really good pattern. I fish a lot of golden stones out west -- whether dry or nymph form, there's usually a stonefly in the mix. I fish a PMX most of the time as my go-to golden stoneish pattern, but on at least one occasion I've found that the fish really preferred a pattern that sat lower in the water. I think the pattern I've used in those cases might be a Lawson's golden stone or a variant on that? It's basically a bullet headed deer hair fly with palmered hackle, no foam, and the deer hair not very upright. It doesn't float so well and when the fish are really on it, they tear that bullet head to shreds and it falls apart. But the thing is FISHY, I mean FISHY. My personal opinion is that fish really key in on bugs that look stuck in the film, either from the top side or the bottom side. I think this "sunken fly" could be an example of a stuck in film from top side kinda thing, where the body sits low in the film, while the wing sits above. I'd probably rather have it with less wing going on, but I guess I'd have to dry it to see how it works.

The number one change in my choice of flies and content of my fly boxes over the last 15 years (during which I've transitioned to fishing mostly western freestone streams) is the transition towards stoneflies. When nymphing, there's a stonefly included 80% of the time or more, whereas 15 years ago, it was 20% or less, and I doubt I even had any stonefly dries.