Fly Fishing Tips · Fly Guide · Fly of the Month · How To · Midge · Midge Cluster · Winter Fly Fishing · Jan 04, 2023

Midge Clusters: Fishing Tiny Dry Flies to Winter Trout

An assortment of small dry flies scattered across a wet, droplet-covered surface | Jackson Hole Fly Company

There is a stretch of January afternoon, usually somewhere between noon and three, when a winter river stops looking dead. The air over a slow tailout fills with specks. A few rings appear along the foam line — not splashes, just dimples, like someone flicked water with a fingertip.

You tie on a size 22 midge, make a decent cast, and nothing happens. Again. And again. The fish keeps rising four feet from your fly, eating something you can't see.

What it's probably eating is a clump. Midges hatch and mate in absurd numbers, and the adults tangle together in the surface film in rafts of five, ten, twenty insects. A trout that won't spend energy rising for one insect the size of a comma will absolutely come up for a mouthful of them. That's the whole case for the midge cluster, and it's the most underused fly in a winter box.

A Few Terms, Up Front

Midge fishing has its own vocabulary, and most of what follows depends on it.

Midge cluster – A dry fly tied to imitate several adult midges tangled together rather than a single insect. Bigger, more visible, and often more attractive than the real thing one at a time.
Chironomid – The family most of what we call midges belongs to. You'll see the word on fly bins and in hatch charts; it means the same thing.
Surface film – The skin of the water. Adult midges sit in it rather than on it, which is why a fly riding high can look wrong.
Rafting – What adult midges do when they mate: clumping together on the surface and drifting as a mass. The behavior your cluster is imitating.
Dimple rise – A small, quiet ring with no splash and often no visible fish. The signature of a trout eating something tiny at or just under the film.
Spent – An insect that has finished its business and lies flat and helpless in the film. Easy food, and the posture most cluster patterns imitate.
Dead drift – A fly traveling at exactly the speed of the current, with no pull from the line. On a size 20 dry it's not optional.
Hackle – The feather wound around a dry fly's body. On a cluster, palmered hackle is what suggests a mess of legs and wings.
Desiccant – Drying powder for a waterlogged dry fly. For flies this small it works where liquid floatant doesn't.

Why Trout Eat the Clump

Cold water makes a trout an accountant. Its metabolism has slowed, it has less energy to spend, and every rise to the surface costs something — so it only makes the trip when the math works. A single adult midge in size 22 is a few calories for a full trip up through the column and back. A raft of fifteen of them, drifting as one unit, is a meal.

That's why a cluster will get eaten on days when a perfectly tied single gets ignored. You aren't fooling the fish with a better imitation. You're making a better offer.

Two more things fall out of this, and both matter on the water:

A cluster can be bigger than the naturals and still work. A size 16 Renegade next to size 22 insects isn't a mismatch if the fish are eating clumps — it's the right size for what they're actually taking.
You can see it. This sounds like a minor convenience and it is not. The single biggest reason anglers fail at winter midge fishing is that they lose track of the fly and never know whether it got eaten. A fly you can follow is a fly you can fish.

📌 Pro Tip: Look at the water, not the air. Clouds of midges flying around mean adults are out, but the fish are eating what's stuck on the surface. Crouch down and look across the film with the light behind the rafts — if you can see clumps drifting, tie on a cluster and stop guessing.

Reading a Winter Midge Rise

Before you pick a fly, spend two minutes watching one fish. Winter rises look similar from a distance and mean different things up close, and the difference decides whether you fish a dry at all.

A quiet dimple, no fish visible – The trout is taking emergers and pupae suspended just under the film. Its back may break the surface but its mouth never does. A dry fly will get refused here; this is a job for a pattern hanging an inch or two down.
A ring with a nose in it – You see the tip of the head, maybe the mouth. The fish is taking adults off the top, and it is the fish you came for.
A slow, rolling bulge – The trout is intercepting insects rising through the last foot of water. Also a subsurface fish, usually the most frustrating of the three to figure out.
Repeated rises in the same spot – The best news on the river. A trout holding station and feeding on a rhythm will give you five or six chances, which is what fishing tiny flies requires.

Three winter midge rise forms — the dimple, the nose and the bulge — shown above and below the surface film | Jackson Hole Fly Company

Watch where the rises are, too. Midge rafts collect wherever the current slows and folds: the inside of a bend, the seam beside a foam line, the flat water of a tailout, the eddy behind a rock. That's where the food piles up, and it's where winter trout will be sitting — not out in the fast water.

If every rise you can find is a dimple with no nose, that's useful information and not a bad day. It means the fish are feeding below the film, and our guide to late-fall midge fishing covers the three subsurface presentations that solve it.

Fishing a midge cluster pattern on a winter river | Jackson Hole Fly Company

Four Cluster Patterns That Work

Cluster fishing doesn't need a deep box. Four patterns across a range of sizes and visibility will cover every midge day you'll fish, and the honest truth is that most anglers do most of their damage with the first one. What you want is a spread — one that disappears into the film, one you can actually see at thirty feet, and something in between.

When to Expect Them: Midges hatch year-round, but cluster fishing peaks from late November through March, strongest on calm, overcast afternoons between late morning and mid-afternoon.


Griffith's Gnat	Berger's Badger Gnat	Renegade	Double Renegade

Griffith's Gnat (16–22): The original and still the one to tie on first. Peacock herl body, grizzly hackle palmered the length of the hook — that's the whole fly, and the effect is a scruffy dark mass that reads as a tangle of insects rather than any one of them. It sits low, which is exactly right: real rafted midges are in the film, not perched on it.

How to Fish It: Dead drift, on 6X or 7X, to a fish you've already watched rise at least twice. Trim the hackle flat on the bottom if you want it riding even lower.
Where It Shines: Flat tailouts and slow seams on technical water, where fish have seen everything and a low-riding fly is the only thing that doesn't look fake.
📌 Pro Tip: Carry it in 16 as well as 20. Anglers reflexively fish the small ones and the 16 is often what gets eaten, because it looks like more food for the same trip.

Berger's Badger Gnat (16–20): A slightly bulkier, higher-contrast take on the same idea. The badger hackle gives it a light-and-dark mottling that breaks up its outline on the water, and it carries a touch more float than a Griffith's — which buys you something real when the surface is broken or you need to see the fly past twenty feet.

How to Fish It: The same dead drift, but it earns its place on windier afternoons and slightly riffled water where a Griffith's vanishes.
Where It Shines: Choppy film, late light, and any day you've been squinting for an hour and want the fly back.
📌 Pro Tip: Fish it as the visible half of a two-fly rig with a smaller Griffith's on eight inches of 7X behind it. You watch the Badger; the fish eats whichever it prefers.

Renegade (14–18): An old attractor that happens to be a superb cluster fly — brown hackle at the back, white hackle at the front, peacock between. The white front end is the point: it makes a fly this small genuinely trackable, and the two-tone body suggests a clump of insects at different stages rather than one tidy bug.

How to Fish It: Dead drift first. If nothing happens on three good drifts, try a slow hand-twist retrieve of a few inches — rafted midges do move, and a little life occasionally triggers a fish that's been ignoring everything.
Where It Shines: Slightly off-color or wind-ruffled water, and on bigger, faster rivers where visibility beats delicacy.
📌 Pro Tip: This is the one to hand a beginner or anyone fishing midges for the first time. The white wing solves the problem that makes people give up on winter dry-fly fishing.

Double Renegade (12–16): The Renegade's idea, doubled: two hackle pairs, more body, more float. At first glance it looks far too big for a midge day, and then a nineteen-inch brown eats it. A big raft of insects is a big target, and this is the fly for the days when that's what the fish are keyed on.

How to Fish It: Fish it as a cluster in its own right in slower water, or use it as a suspender with a tiny midge pupa on 12–18" of 6X below — it will hold a small beadhead without sinking.
Where It Shines: Warmer winter afternoons, bigger water, and heavy hatches where the rafts are genuinely large.
📌 Pro Tip: When fish are rising steadily and refusing everything small, go the other direction and show them this. Winter anglers almost always guess downward, which means a bigger fly is the presentation those fish haven't seen.

📌 Pro Tip: Buy these in two sizes rather than four patterns in one size. Winter midge fishing is far more often a size problem than a pattern problem — the same Griffith's Gnat in 16 and 20 will solve more refusals than adding a fifth fly to the box.

How to Fish a Cluster

Cluster fishing is flat-water, close-range, one-fish-at-a-time work. The casting is easy. Everything else is discipline.

Build a Long, Fine Front End

Start with a 9-foot tapered leader and add two to three feet of 6X or 7X tippet. The length isn't about stealth so much as slack — a long, limp front end lets the fly land softly and drift without the leader tugging it. In the flat water where midge rafts collect, a fly that lands hard puts the fish down for ten minutes.

Cast at the Fish, Not the Rise

This is the mistake almost everyone makes. A rise ring forms where the trout ate and then drifts downstream while you're watching it, so by the time you cast, the ring is feet below the fish. Note the rise, then aim two to three feet upstream of it. On flat water you'll often see the fish's actual position once you've watched it come up twice.

Dead Drift, and Mean It

A size 18 dry has almost no mass, which means the smallest amount of drag moves it visibly. Micro-drag you'd never notice on a size 12 hopper is the difference between eaten and inspected. Cast up and across so the fly reaches the fish before the leader does, throw a little slack into the delivery, and do not mend once the fly is in the feeding lane.

Dry It, Don't Grease It

Liquid floatant mats the fine hackle on a cluster and ruins the scruffy silhouette that makes it work. Use a desiccant powder instead: shake the fly dry, blow the dust off, and it rides like new. Between fish, a few sharp false casts do more than another dab of gel.

Count Before You Lift

Winter fish in slow water eat deliberately. The classic miss is setting at the sight of the rise, before the fly is actually in the trout's mouth. Wait until you see the fly disappear, then lift smoothly and low. On 7X, “lift” is the whole motion — a hard strike snaps the tippet or pulls the hook through a small, soft mouth.

📌 Pro Tip: Pick one fish and stay on it. Six careful drifts to a trout that's rising on a rhythm beats forty casts sprayed across a pod. Winter fish are concentrated and they spook easily — the angler who fishes one rise properly out-catches the one covering water, every time.

When You Can't See the Fly

Here's the problem nobody admits to: you tie on a size 20 Griffith's Gnat, make a good cast, and immediately have no idea where your fly is. You can't detect a take you can't see, so you fish the next hour on hope. Four fixes, in the order worth trying them.

Move so the light helps you. Glare is directional. Taking three steps along the bank to put the sun behind you, or to get the reflection of a dark bank behind your drift instead of open sky, can make an invisible fly obvious. This costs nothing and works more often than any gear change.
Watch the end of your leader instead. You don't need to see the fly, only the two inches of tippet in front of it. Track that, and treat any rise near the end of it as yours.
Run a visible fly in front. A Double Renegade or a Badger Gnat on the point with a smaller cluster eight to twelve inches behind gives you a sighter you can follow and two offerings to choose from. Watch the big one; set if anything eats within a foot of it.
Set on the rise anyway. If a fish comes up where you believe your fly is, lift. The cost of being wrong is one re-cast. The cost of not setting is never knowing.

If They Refuse It

Refusals on a midge day are information, not a verdict. Work through these before you change patterns, because four of the five are free.

Is it dragging? Check the fly against the bubbles beside it. On 7X in flat water, drag is almost always the answer and almost never what gets blamed.
Is the fly riding too high? A cluster perched on the film looks wrong. Trim the hackle flat underneath, or switch to a lower-riding Griffith's.
Are you putting it in the right place? Two to three feet upstream of where you saw the ring, in the fish's lane — not in the lane beside it.
Try a size up before a size down. Counterintuitive and usually right. If fish are eating rafts, the bigger fly is the more accurate imitation, and it's the one they haven't been shown.
Accept that they're under the film. If you've got clean drifts and the right lane and they're still dimpling past your fly, they're eating emergers, and no dry fly is going to fix that. Switch to a subsurface presentation — our late-fall midge guide covers the three that work, and the late-season nymphing guide covers the rigs.

📌 Pro Tip: Hang a tiny midge pupa twelve inches under a Double Renegade and you've covered both answers at once. The cluster floats well enough to carry it, you get a fly in the film and a fly under it, and the fish tells you which one it wanted.

Taking It to the Water

Winter dry-fly fishing has a reputation for being a long shot, and it isn't. The window is narrow and the flies are small, but the fish are up, they're eating on a rhythm, and there's nobody else on the river to compete for them.

Find slow water where the film collects. Watch one fish until you know what it's eating. Put something scruffy and dark two feet above its nose without a hint of drag, and wait to see it disappear before you lift.

A trout taken off the surface in February is worth three in July. Dress warm, go slow, and bring a Griffith's Gnat in two sizes.