What is your favorite dry fly?

This is a question that I ask fellow anglers when given the chance. A rough record of the responses is being kept. One of these days, when I have enough, I’ll share them with you.

What’s my favorite dry fly? You would think that, with almost 50 years of fly fishing under my belt, I would have found a favorite fly and gotten married to it. But that has not been the case.

Oh, there have been some short-term infatuations along the way with one particular artificial or another. A few years back, I had a fling with the the Parachute Adams. It worked so well. Cutthroats sipped it unrelentingly. It was love at first drift on the Slough Creek in Montana. No other fly mattered. With a good supply of the Adams in # 14 or #16 in my flybox, I never so much as looked at another fly.

As functional as the Adams may have been, it was — to be perfectly candid — colorless and drab and just not sexy. In time, the Adams lost its allure. I drifted to Blue Duns, BWOs, Tricos and, yes, even spent some intimate moments with a Royal Coachman.

For a period, if you must know, I wandered aimlessly from fly to fly. Once I even got it on with a Sexy Hexy, a wildcat artificial designed by Greenville fish biologist Tim Obrey.

This year, after a half century, I have found the fly of my dreams. I am ready to make a commitment and settle down. You’ll never guess which fly brought me to my senses enough to put my Lothario ways behind me forever.

Drum roll, please. Trumpets. Tah Tahh!

The Hornberg. The heavenly Hornberg.

I know. I know. How could a self-respecting, seasoned fly fisherman worthy of the name fall for such a dull, commonplace and predictable artificial as a Hornberg?

Actually, the Hornberg and I go way back. It was one of my first go-to flies when I discovered the joys of fly fishing back in the early 1960s. Once on a high altitude trout pond in the Colorado Rockies, my cowboy fishing partner laughed himself silly when I whipped out a Hornberg.

“Hey, Pard,” he counseled between his guffaws,” that ugly sucker will never catch a Cutt in these parts.” A half hour later, he was begging me for a Hornberg.

I explained to cowboy Sam that the Eastern fly he had come to begrudgingly respect was actually the creation of a Wisconsin game warden, Frank Hornberg, who went public with his creation in the 1920s. He was a colorful guy and proud of the fact that his utilitarian Hornberg could be fished dr,  as a caddis or stonefly imitation,  or wet, as a streamer of bait imitation.

For reasons not entirely clear, I lost interest in the Hornberg. Maybe it was the times. For years, mesmerized by the flashy new creations of LaFontaine and other modern tyers, I paid little attention to the Hornbergs, especially after a comment from Maine Sportsman editor and angler Ken Allen.

“Hornbergs should be banned,” he observed. “In my book, their use is unethical and unsportsmenlike. You might as well attach some garden hackle to your fly.”

This spring, for no apparent reason, I began to think about my early fondness for the hornberg. En route to two different fishing trips, I stopped at Two Rivers Canoe in East Millinocket and picked up a few of Barry Davis’s “trout hornbergs” in size #14.

Smaller than the conventional hornberg, these diminutive imitations have a bugginess and simplicity that made my heart thump. On the water, these small hornbergs were killer flies for trout, and they even seduced those highly discriminating salmon on the Big Eddy at the West Branch of the Penobscot! In fast-flowing water like the West Branch, a well-gunked Hornberg gives you a drift like no other.

So I’m really in love this time, for better or worse. It’s me and the Hornberg from here on.

V. Paul Reynolds is editor of the Northwoods Sporting Journal. He is also a Maine Guide, co-host of a weekly radio program “Maine Outdoors” heard Sundays at 7 p.m. on The Voice of Maine News-Talk Network (WVOM-FM 103.9, WQVM-FM 101.3) and former information officer for the Maine Dept. of Fish and Wildlife. His e-mail address is [email protected] and his new book is “A Maine Deer Hunter’s Logbook.”