Does anyone fish with wet flies anymore? Besides streamers and nymphs, I mean. Time was when the wet fly was dominant in the flybox. Ray Bergman's classic volume, Trout, has many pages of color plates of wet flies, outnumbering the dries, but I hardly ever meet an angler who's using them. If I recall correctly -- and the odds are fifty-fifty here -- the first fly I ever fished was a wet, possibly a Parmachene Belle. The niceties of dry-fly fishing came a bit later.

The wet flies have history, and names to evoke it: Rich Widow, Montreal, Professor, Lord Baltimore, Beamis Stream, Cupsuptic, Dr. Breck and Dr. Burke, Jennie Lind, Lady Mills (no relation), Rangeley, Richardson, Roosevelt. And of course the aforementioned Parmachene, named for the secluded and very private water where President Dwight Eisenhower cast into the waters below Little Boy Falls to catch one of the many trout that had been dumped there in advance of the presidential rustication.

I'm thinking of wet flies because I caught a hell of a nice salmon on a wet fly last week. I'm not great on names -- I'll forget yours two nanoseconds after we're introduced -- but it was a pretty thing with a yellow body and a mallard wing, and almost as soon as it hit the water a fish hit it hard. Fifteen minutes or so later, I netted a 21-inch landlocked salmon that weighed, what, 4-5 pounds? I have a measuring stick so the length is accurate but no scale, so I guess the weight like the man at the carnival.

And this is not the first time the wet fly has proved deadly at the Dam. A summer ago a wet with a bright green body took fish on almost every cast before it was chewed to shreds.

As the days dwindle down and the leaves turn to gold (more cliches, anyone?), and the salmon and trout are fat and feisty, don't forget the wet fly. The pattern may go back to the dawn of time -- but so do the fish.