Still looking for a "Big Dance"!

I am still looking for a big dance! For those of you that don't know what a big dance is, allow me to give an explanation. A big dance is a combination of many ingredients all coming together at once. First, there must be at least three varieties of Mayflys duns floating on the surface struggling to take flight. Next there must be numerous Caddis dancing across the water. Then, mix in thousands of Mayfly spinners hovering above head mating, bobbing up and down, laying eggs and finally dropping to the water surface. The most important ingredient requires participation from each and every trout within casting distance, even the big lunkers that almost never feed on the surface. Some gently and rhythmically rise to sip spent Mayflys from the surface film as they float through thier feeding lane. While other less modest trout make big showy splashes often shooting completely out of the water to take emergers, duns or an unfortunate Caddis who has unknowingly skated by his final resting place. The final ingredient, the cover of darkness seems to happen without notice, almost as if one minute the sun is shining down and the next it is pitch black. The big dance is truly one of those spectacular events that cannot be summed up with words and must be experienced first hand to fully appreciate the level of excitement it can bring about.
My first year of fly fishing there seemed to be a big dance every time I went out. I could litterally do no wrong that first year. It was simply a matter of showing up at the stream around seven o'clock and catching trout until my arm hurt. I knew nothing about Caddis flys, nothing about the intricate anatomy of the various mayflys and even less about the life cycle of each. The insuing result was the start of an addiction with fly fishing. I began reading everything I could find on the subject of entomology as well as asking a hundred questions each time I met a more experienced fly fisherman, which was litterally everyone. Around the middle of June that first year I was suddenly hit with the realization that there is a small window of opportunity for the big dance. At this point I still believed that it happened every night but just in the month of May and the beginning of June. I could live with that, mostly because I am an avid bass fisherman and bass season was now in full swing. Time to hang the fly rod up until next year. The next year and the years that followed have been a rather rude awakening for me. I quickly learned that the big dance is not something that happens every night. I now know that there are several factors or ingredients that go into the making of a big dance and that predicting when one will occur can be very difficult or impossible. I learned that a dance can be going on a mile down stream while there is virtually no activity on the section I am fishing. Probably the hardest lesson that I have learned is that nymphing is the most productive method of fly fishing. It's not that I dislike nymphing and I have found that I enjoy it more each time I do it. I just don't believe that I will ever experience the level of excitement catching a trout on a nymph as on a dry fly. I will often walk the banks of the stream for an hour searching for a single rising trout knowingly passing up hundreds of trout feeding subsurface. And lets not forget about wets! For some reason I had overlooked the excitement and the productivity of fishing wets for years. Finally, lets talk about tandems. Tandems rigs allow you to utilize all three methods at once, often greatly increasing your odds of landing trout. I will often fish tandems with a dry at the front, a wet in the middle and a nymph at the end. Most of my catches have been on either the wet or nymph with the dry simply functioning as an indicator but there are those rare times that the trout will rise for the dry.
The bottom line is that my fondness for nymphing and fishing tandoms will more than likely continue to grow over the years and in time my dry fly expectations will diminish but I am certain of one thing, I will always be looking to the horizon for the next big dance!