Absinthe Sally and the Chartreuse Stoneflies of Resava

Insect photo: Siphonoperla torrentium. Photograph by Hectonichus, Val Noci (Genoa), Italy, May 27, 2021. Used under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

In the summer of 1991, a few months before I left for the United States, several friends and I spent a week camping at the entrance to the Resava River canyon. We pitched our tents beside the river, watched birds, talked, and enjoyed the long summer days in the beautiful surroundings of Mount Beljanica in eastern Serbia.

I was the only angler in the group, so each afternoon I would fish near our campsite in the Resava canyon. I was greeted each time by an extraordinary hatch of tiny stoneflies.

They were an almost luminous yellow-green, closer to chartreuse than yellow. Small insects, perhaps size 16 or 18, they drifted and fluttered above the water in remarkable numbers. Their colour was unmistakable. Even after all these years, I can still picture that brilliant green against the darker landscape of the river canyon.

One thing I remember particularly well is the sheer abundance of the hatch. These were not occasional insects drifting over the water. At times, the stoneflies appeared in such numbers that it was difficult to imagine I was witnessing some exceptionally rare species. Surely, I thought, this must be one of the more established members of the local stonefly fauna. But then again, who knows? A species can be locally abundant and still have a rather limited distribution, and the taxonomy and distribution of Balkan Chloroperlidae leave room for questions.

I have always believed that the insect was Siphonoperla torrentium, known in older literature as Chloroperla torrentium. Its remarkably vivid yellow-green colour and relatively small size seem consistent with that identification. Yet I cannot be entirely certain.

Serbia is home to several members of the family Chloroperlidae, including Siphonoperla neglecta, S. transsylvanica and Chloroperla tripunctata. More recent research has added Chloroperla kosarovi and C. russevi to the Serbian fauna. Could one of these have been the insect I watched emerging over the Resava that June?

I have no specimen, photograph or field notes from that summer of 1991. I have not fished the Resava in June for decades, either. Most of my later visits were in May or August, so the opportunity to encounter that particular hatch again has never presented itself.

Perhaps one day I will return to the Resava in mid-June, armed with a small fly box containing a few chartreuse imitations. I would love to see those little stoneflies again, and perhaps finally put a name to the insect that made such an impression on a young fly fisherman more than three decades ago.

For now, the mystery remains. And perhaps that is part of its charm.

Inspired by that memory, I tied a simple fore-and-aft pattern and called it Absinthe Sally. Its design owes something to several classic patterns that have influenced my thinking:

• Renegade

• Sierra Bright Dot

• Double Badger

• Suvodolka (classic Serbian pattern by Jovan "Jovča" Petrović)

• Knotted Midge

Each has its own character, but they share the appealing simplicity and versatility of the fore-and-aft approach. Absinthe Sally is my own small addition to that tradition, inspired by a stonefly hatch I have never forgotten.

Sisevac Caddis in Orange-Brown

I dyed a few emu feathers cognac brown, which gave a warm burnt-orange shade, and used them to tie a couple of Sisevac Caddis dries [with the emu as wing/body/hackle]. Alongside my regular pattern, these warmer versions should be a closer match for the orange tones of the naturals: Stenophylax, Potamophylax, Halesus, and other caddisflies found on the Crnica.

I hope to give them a proper test there next May.

Three ginger-brown Sisevac Caddis, ready for October. Each one a little different.

Old Books and Youthful Moments

The other evening I was paging through Schwiebert’s Nymphs, admiring his hand-drawn color plates of natural insects, when the book carried me back to the Crnica, in Serbia’s Kučaj Mountains, and my early years of fly fishing.

Back then I was trying to become a better angler by reading everything I could find: books, magazines, anything that might help. Most of my catches were rainbow trout that had escaped from the local hatchery. I did catch some native browns, but the smaller rainbows were much easier targets for a young angler.

It was a beautiful spring day. The blues and greens were almost impossibly intense: a spotless sky, bright water, and tunnels of willows and hawthorns hanging over the stream. Rainbows held beneath the drooping branches on both sides of the main flow, and their eager, splashy rises were easy to spot.

On my leader was a brown Voljč-style sedge tied by Andrija Urban. My rod was rather crude for this lovely limestone stream: a dinosaur of a Silstar Composite, 8½ feet long and rated for a six-weight line. It threw a line well enough, though.

I cast the sedge just above the nearest rise, and my tippet caught on an overhanging branch. I tried to free it from a distance, afraid of spooking the fish. The fly stayed a hand’s breadth above the water, twitching in the breeze, right over the spot where I had seen several quick splashes.

And then came a small miracle.

The trout leaped out of the water and took my fly straight out of the air. It hooked itself, the tippet pulled free of the branch, and a few minutes later I was admiring a bright little rainbow in my hand.

None of the books I had read had a chapter on this. In all the decades of fly fishing since, I have never managed to repeat that feat.

One October in the Driftless: 2010

Photographed in October 2010 in Iowa's Driftless Area. These images have been revisited and edited in 2026, with the aim of preserving the character of the original photographs.

Twisted Caddis Larvae

Twisted, speckled wool creates a segmented body with little protrusions suggesting abdominal gills. A spiky blend of squirrel and dark olive-brown Angora goat finishes the thorax. 

Blue Dubbing

Fun tying with home-blended blue dubbing. Two Quasimodo PT nymphs, with a little color of their own.

Pilsners and Flies

Golden pilsners and a warm afternoon at the vise. All-around caddis larvae and summer spinners in colors for favorite streams, along with small streamers for landlocked salmon.

Budvar, Pilsner Urquell, and a smogarsbord of flies. A pretty chill afternoon.

From the Archives: An October Albie

October 22, 2017.

One of those late-October albie days you never quite forget.

A beautiful fish, my own-built 10-weight, and my Abel Super 9. The albie took off on a blistering run through the harbor, then wrapped my fly line around a buoy rope. For a moment, I thought I’d lose both the fish and the line.

Somehow, I worked through the mess and brought the fish to hand. A little luck, a little persistence, and one unforgettable fight.

Looking back at this photograph, I can almost feel that fish pulling again. October on the New England coast has a character all its own. Some days stay with you long after the season ends—and make you hope the next one is just around the corner.

Natural Convergences: Europe ↔ New England

The October Caddis of New England, Pycnopsyche, and the great autumn limnephilids of Europe belong to different evolutionary lineages, yet occupy remarkably similar ecological worlds.

On the Crnica in Serbia, the limestone stream enters autumn beneath the same kind of seasonal rhythm that I find in New England rivers thousands of miles away.

Different continents, different genera, different species—but the same beautiful solution to the changing season.

For a fly angler, these connections make October feel almost like Christmas. You begin to look at the river not as two places, but as one enormous natural history.

Pupae illustration: E. Schweibert, from Nymphs.

Stalled Season

I fished today on a beautiful early autumn day. I picked a protected harbor where, historically, schools of peanut bunker and visible blitzing stripers have been almost a certainty at this time of year.

We had a nor’easter last weekend, but the water was very clean. I found no bait and no fish. The place was completely deserted—dead. There was no sign of life. I saw perhaps three single cormorants, spread out over acres of ocean. Even the birds were gone.

It has been the most difficult striper season I have experienced since I started fly fishing for them in the early 1990s. It feels as though all my usual spots have been more or less dead throughout the entire summer. The hardtail season has also been disappointing for shore anglers.

October is here. I plan to make a few more trips to Rhode Island, but I have given up on the idea of saving the season in any meaningful way.

For now, it is simply a stalled season.

Ghosts of Summer

The season is changing.

A dram for the farewell to summer, with my trusty Pezon-inspired travel glass rod.

Scarabus seems to belong with the ghosts of past summers.

Sisevac — September

I returned to Sisevac on Sunday, a brief visit before leaving Serbia. This was not a fishing trip. My cousin Đorđe and I drove from Jagodina after the family wedding. Along the way, we stopped at an old soda shop and had an early-morning burek in Ćuprija.

The Crnica greeted us with its lazy autumn murmur, already carrying the quiet, nostalgic character of an early fall day. Notonecta swimmers were all over the slower sections, moving busily around. There were no obvious hatches, and I saw little trout activity. Some of the surrounding trees had already begun to turn brown, not from the cold as they would in a New England autumn, but from the prolonged drought. Others were simply becoming darker green or yellow, with that withered look. It was not the sort of day that invited much fishing.

But the low water offered something else: a different view of the river.

Sections that had been too deep, fast, or awkward to approach in May were now accessible. New pockets, seams and small runs appeared between the exposed rocks, and the reduced current made it possible to see much more clearly how the stream divided around the bed structure. Wading and casting positions that simply did not exist at higher water were now possible

Some of these newly revealed sections looked surprisingly fishable. I found myself studying the river rather than looking for rising trout—trying to understand where the current would hold fish when the water returned.

The tradeoff is obvious. There is much less water, potentially warmer conditions, and considerably less visible trout activity. Yet the low autumn flow also exposes another side of the Crnica. The river becomes almost a map of itself, revealing its structure and showing possibilities that remain hidden beneath the higher spring water.

For a short visit, that may have been the most interesting thing I brought home from Sisevac: not a fish, but a better understanding of the river.

Bamboo Love