Lee Wulff’s hair-wing version of the Royal Coachman, tied for fast water where a delicate quill-wing dry would drown. It is the searching dry of the fly-fishing world: the fly you knot on when the water is quick and clear, nothing is hatching that you can name, and you want to cover the pockets and the bends with something you can follow. NSW DPIRD’s Snowy Mountains guide puts it in a starter dry-fly selection for stream trout, and that is its standing everywhere trout live in Australia, from the New England tablelands to Tasmania’s Western Lakes and the Victorian alps.

From the bend forward: a tail of stiff moose body hair or elk, the length of the shank, which props the rear of the fly on the water. A body in three parts, the Royal signature: a band of peacock herl, a band of red floss or silk, another band of peacock herl. Two upright, divided wings of white calf tail or calf body hair, set a third of the way back from the eye. A dense collar of brown hackle wound behind and in front of the wings, its barbs a little longer than the hook gap. A small thread head.

Below Tantangara Dam on the Murrumbidgee a large Royal Wulff is the recommended lead fly, fished for about ten minutes in bright daylight before a switch to a dark parachute Adams if nothing rises. It is a go-to for fussy Monaro risers, a size ten worked across the upper Snowy River’s riffles for eager half-pound trout, the fly that finally pulled a big Snowy Mountains brown up to porpoise on a difficult windy cast, and a taker of wild backcountry browns from half a pound to much larger. On the upper Eucumbene near Kiandra it was the dry in the dry-dropper that took most of the rising rainbows; on the Swampy Plains a big white-winged Wulff pulls browns up through heavy flow even when they end up taking the trailing nymph; a size twelve parachute version took a spirited brown from the Meander’s pocket water; and in the rainforest creeks around Ebor it is the start-of-session alternative to a Red Tag. On Lake Echo in warm windy weather it is one of the big buggy dries with a footprint in the chop that the fish it to cruising trout.

Fish it upstream, short, and on a leader long enough that the fly line never lands in the lane. Drop it at the head of a pocket or on the seam of a bend and let it come back to you without drag. On a creek too thin for an indicator, hang a small Pheasant Tail a foot under it and fish the dry-dropper: you have covered the fish that are looking up and the ones that are not.

When the fish rise to it and turn away, drop to a 16 or change to an Adams. A refusal on a Wulff usually means the fish saw the fly perfectly well and wanted something smaller and quieter, not that it did not see it at all.