Ed's Giant Winged Ant (weighted)

The date: August 19, 1994. The time: 5:00 p.m.
I walked out of our front door, right into a thick hatch of flying ants, size #16. Boy, do those little critters bite! I watched, in amazement, as they crawled and flew up from their nests in the lawn, millions of small holes that I never saw before, each a tunnel of escape.
At first I thought that the hatch was local to our grounds but no, the air was thickening with these little winged insects as far as I could see. The buzzing of their beating wings produced an eerie, droning sound.
I jumped into the truck and drove through the neighborhood and some of the side streets. Flying ants were everywhere!
The hatch lasted about forty minutes. Suddenly everything was back to normal. Clear and still, no buzzing, no eerie droning.
I called my daughter the next day. She had witnessed a big hatch of ants at exactly the same time. She lives in Middlebury! That’s forty miles away! A call to St. Johnsbury also confirmed the event. That town is across the state! What was the extent of this rare occurrence? Never did find out, but the important thing to we fly-fishers is that a guy fishing imitation ant patterns on the New Haven River, during the hatch, caught and released more trout in those forty minutes than he did in any one day for the entire season!
Through the years that followed I faithfully tied and fished black ants, red ants, and cinnamon ants on 16’s and 18’s with limited success. Finally, in desperation I tied a very large, weighted and winged ant pattern, one that seemed ridiculously huge but one that served my appetite for the absurd. I imagined it to be the “King” or to be politically/socially correct, the “Queen” of all ants.
We have all heard the saying, “I’d rather be lucky than good.” This applies to my big ant in spades. The fly has proven itself worthy of anyone’s fly box. It produces consistently and often is taken by large trout.
I cast it three quarters upstream and mend the line so that the fly drifts freely near the bottom the same way that you would fish a weighted nymph. Try it…you’ll like it.