Quill Gordon (Epeorus pleuralis)

Mayfly, hatching March–April, active in water between 42 and 52°F, and imitated at #12–14. Recorded from the Virginia mountains, where 796 Virginia rivers on this site carry a page.

#12–14Hook size
42–52°FWater, active
Mar–AprPeak months
4Life stages fished

Subbasins with trout water where it is on record: 29 of Virginia's 53.

See Virginia's trout water on the live map → Every reach coloured by water temperature — the water these hatches come off.

What it is

Mayfly · Epeorus pleuralis · nymph → emerger → dun → spinner

A medium mayfly, dark slate-grey wings over a bronze-and-cream barred body, with two tails. The nymph is a flat clinger with a single large gill plate on each side, built to hold station on the face of a rock in heavy current.

The first mayfly of the southern Appalachian year, off in the middle of a cold afternoon. The dun emerges on the bottom and rides up already winged, which is why a wet fly swung through the run often beats the dry.

When it hatches

Peak is March–April. The pale months either side are the shoulder — the app widens a peak by one month in each direction and recommends the bug there, and no further: that widening is bounded so that a bug peaking in May is never offered in August.

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peak shoulder not recommended

Water conditions

The band is a water temperature, not an air temperature, and it is the range in which this insect is worth fishing — for a mayfly that is the emergence window; for a scud or a midge it is simply the range trout will still eat one in.

42°F 52°F

Active from 42°F to 52°F. On this map that is cold water. Breaks at 58, 64 and 70°F.

Stages

What the insect is doing, and what that means for what you tie on.

Stage	What it is
nymph	Flattened and hard to dislodge, living on the top of cobble in fast water all winter. A dark hare's ear bounced through pocket water is fishing this stage from January onward.
emerger	Unusual and worth knowing: the dun splits its shuck on the bottom and rises to the surface already winged. This is why a wet fly or a soft hackle swung through the run outfishes the dry during the first half of the hatch.
dun	On the water in the middle of a cold afternoon, often in weather nobody would choose to fish in. It rides a long way because it is too cold to fly, which is the whole opportunity.
spinner	Falls in the evening and is rarely fished — the air is usually too cold by then for a good fall, and the afternoon dun is the event.

Matching flies

4 patterns in this book imitate the Quill Gordon, across its stages. Which one to tie on follows the stage the water temperature says it is in — the app makes that call on a live reading; this page lists the whole set.

Where to find it right now

The rivers with a page here that sit in this insect's regions, with a USGS gauge reporting water temperature. This list is re-ranked against the reading each gauge is sending now and today's date, so it is live — the fallback below it, if the readings do not arrive, is each river's measured July mean.

Regional presence

Regions, not collection records. This insect is recorded from the coarse regions below; nobody has surveyed which named river it has been caught on, and this page will not pretend otherwise.

the Virginia mountains VA
the North Carolina mountains NC

Rivers in these regions with a page here

Related hatches

Same family, or overlapping this one's calendar on the same water.

Open the trout map →Every trout stream near you, coloured by today's water temperature.