Parachute PMX

A bushy, leggy dry with a white post you can find in broken light at forty feet. It is not pretending to be one insect. It is pretending to be something worth eating.

What it is

The PMX is Doug Swisher’s Madam X with a parachute post, and it has become one of the standard searching dries on Australian trout streams for a plain reason: you can see it. Broken alpine water throws up glare that swallows a low-riding dry, and a white post on a big, hackled body sits above it. For stream trout, start with a PMX in sizes 10 and 12 beside the usual mayfly dries, and a Snowy Mountains destination guide reaches for the Madam X shape when the yellow-winged locusts are about and the flows are turbulent. It is a summer and autumn fly first, a hopper-season fly, and the buoyant top fly of a dry-dropper rig for the rest of the year.

Anatomy

From the bend forward: a tail of natural deer or elk hair, tied in as a bunch. A body of yellow, tan or orange floss or dubbing, ribbed with the butts of the tail hair pulled forward and tied down to form a bullet head, which gives the fly its stout front end. A white post of calf hair or polypropylene yarn set upright at the head. A parachute hackle, grizzly or brown, wound around the post so the barbs lie flat on the water. Two pairs of white rubber legs, tied in at the head and splayed to the sides.

Key features

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The legs. Rubber legs twitch on the film in any breeze and on any drift with a little movement in it. They are the reason a fish that has ignored three neat mayfly patterns will come up to this one.

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The bullet head. The pulled-forward hair gives the front of the fly a hopper’s blocky profile and keeps it floating after a dozen fish.

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The post. White above a buggy body, visible at range in glare and dusk light. The parachute hackle keeps the body flush, so from below the fish sees legs, hackle footprint and a fat body, not a fly standing on tiptoe.

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It floats a dropper. A size 10 will hold up a tungsten nymph in fast water without sinking, which is most of what it does on a cold day.

Typical materials

Part

Typical material

Hook

Dry-fly hook, 2X long, size 8 to 12

Thread

6/0 or 140 denier, yellow or tan

Tail and head

Natural deer or elk body hair, pulled forward to form the bullet head

Body

Yellow, tan or orange floss or dubbing

Post

White calf body hair or polypropylene yarn

Hackle

Grizzly or brown rooster, parachute

Legs

White or barred round rubber, two pairs

Fishing it

Fish it where the water is broken and the light is bad. Pocket water on an alpine creek, the heavy runs of a snowmelt river in early summer, a tussock bank where the hoppers are getting blown in. Drop it hard; a fly this size can land with a plop and the fish will take that as a grasshopper arriving, not a warning. Give it a twitch at the end of the drift before you pick up. Fish that have followed it down the run will often take on the movement.

On a cold morning, or any day the fish are not looking up, hang a Pheasant Tail or Hare’s Ear under it on forty to sixty centimetres of tippet and fish it as a dry-dropper. The PMX is the indicator; the nymph is the fly. When the post dips or stops, lift.

Swap to a Stimulator when the fish want a slimmer, lower profile, and to a proper Hopper when they are eating the real thing and refusing the caricature. On a flat, clear tableland pool with fish sipping mayflies, leave it in the box.