The Hopper is not one dressing but a job: a floating imitation of a grasshopper, big enough to be worth a trout’s trip to the surface and buoyant enough to carry a nymph beneath it. Wherever grass meets trout water in the warm months, from the tablelands of New South Wales and the Victorian high country to Tasmania’s Central Plateau lakes and the south-west rivers of Western Australia, the hoppers come up in summer and the fish move to the edges to meet them. The pattern follows the insect around the country.

Older dressings used deer hair and turkey quill. Most Australian boxes now carry foam hoppers: lighter, harder to sink, quicker to tie, and better at surviving a dozen fish.

Read from the bend of the hook forward. A body of closed-cell foam, tan, yellow or olive, segmented with thread so it reads as an abdomen, extending a little past the bend. A wing of elk hair or a folded strip of foam or synthetic fibre laid flat over the back. Legs of knotted pheasant-tail fibres or rubber, trailing back and out from the thorax, which give the fly its kick on the water. A head of foam folded back over itself, often with a small bright sighter of orange or white foam on top so the angler can find it in the glare. A sparse underwing of crystal flash on some ties for the flash a real hopper’s wings give as it struggles.

The magazine record is a map of where the hopper matters. On the Tumut big foam hoppers are a mainstay through most of the season on the boat’s heavier tippet, and a hopper fished tight to the rock-lined banks can be eaten within seconds of landing. On the upper Bundara it is deadly in summer, and takes trout from Middle Creek’s small streams on hot grasshopper-heavy afternoons; on the Barrington foam hoppers tight to the bankside vegetation draw out fish that are otherwise inactive in high summer. A simple foam hopper takes large numbers of trout from the small Snowy Mountains alpine creeks in late-season dry-fly conditions, a CDC-winged hopper took Thredbo browns once the sun hit the water, deer-hair and foam hoppers are carried mostly for the Mitta Mitta’s tributaries, and on Rocky Valley Reservoir English hoppers fish as part of a dry-fly team in the warmer months. Even on a lake a foam hopper given a strip in the waves took a rainbow at Lake Meston.

Fish it where the real ones land: within a rod length of the grass, not out in the middle. Let it hit the water with a plop. Then leave it. A hopper drifts dead, or kicks once, and a twitch every few seconds is more than a real one manages.

Size it to the grasshoppers you see, and go a size smaller than feels right on clear, low water. A size 12 covers most afternoons; a 10 when the big ones are about; a 14 when the fish are refusing. On Monaro-fed tributaries, a hopper worked tight to the bank can keep paying well into autumn, long after the first cold nights; the same approach is useful on tableland or high-country streams once the grass has dried off.

In the afternoon, when the wind is up and the hoppers are blowing onto the water, it fishes alone. In the morning, before they are moving, hang a small tungsten Pheasant Tail under it and fish the dry-dropper until the day warms up.