Now my streamer boxes were full of Buggers and Muddlers and Clouser Deep Minnows and, most recently, Jack Gartside’s elegant Soft Hackles. Suggestive, fishy, flashy, wiggly. Streamers for all occasions and all species. Nothing wrong with any of them. Each of them, in fact, featured something quite special: the Bugger’s marabou tail, the Muddler’s water-pushing spun-deer-hair head, the Clouser’s jigging action, the Soft Hackle’s undulating palmered marabou that never seems to get tangled in the bend of the hook …
Before I understood what was happening on that February afternoon, I had an Idea. Combine the best elements of the best flies. Mix and mingle those excellent bloodlines. It would be a mongrel. It would surely be the Perfect Streamer.
It has proved to be just that.
The Mongrel Bugger takes the marabou tail and chenille body from the Woolly Bugger. It substitutes Gartside’s palmered marabou for the Bugger’s wound hackle, and adds the Muddler’s spun and clipped deer hair head and the Clouser’s dumbbell eyes.
It’s not a pattern, exactly. I think of it as a design, or a concept. In various bourbon-sipping bird-watching day-dreaming fly-tying sessions I have substituted spun wool (it sinks better) or Cactus Chenille (more flash) for the deer hair head. Eliminate the tail and chenille body and wind the marabou over the bare shank for a sparse, ethereal look in the water. Bead-chain eyes make a fly that casts easier and sinks slower. Combine different colors of marabou and palmer two feathers together for interesting mottled effects—purple and black, yellow and lime, olive and tan, orange and brown, red and white. Each might suggest a real species of fish prey: sculpin, crawfish, shiner, leech, juvenile trout.
Or maybe not. Who knows what fish think?
The Mongrel Bugger, in its various colors and sizes, has become my streamer of choice for all occasions. It took my first two (and thus far, my only) tarpons. Landlocked salmon and Chinooks. Largemouths and smallmouths. Bluefish and stripers. Pickerel and pike. Crappies and perch. Dozens and dozens of big predatory trout.
My only complaint is that whenever I tie on a Mongrel, I generally catch more fish than the people I’m fishing with, and I end up giving away handfuls of them. That’s why I’m hereby going public.
Pour yourself a few fingers of Rebel Yell, gaze out your window, think fishy thoughts, and breed some Mongrels of your own.
Here’s how:
1. Tie dumbbell or bead-chain eyes just behind the eye of a long-shank streamer hook. Secure with a drop of Superglue.
2. Wind back to the bend. Tie in a sprig of marabou so that it extends back about the length of the hook shank.
3. Add a few strands of Flashabou or Krystalflash on each side of the tail.
4. At the base of the tail, tie in a length of chenille, a length of gold or copper ribbing, and one or two marabou plumes by their tips.
5. Wind the thread forward to about 3/8 inch behind the lead eyes, then wind the chenille to that point and tie off.
6. Palmer the marabou forward (if you use two feathers, wind them both at the same time). Keep stroking the marabou as you wind it. The closer together you make the turns, the bulkier the fly will be. Tie off and clip the marabou butts where you tied off the chenille.
7. Counterwind the wire through the palmered marabou and tie off behind the eyes.
8. Spin one or two bunches of deer hair between the marabou and the lead eyes. Don’t make the deer hair head too dense.
9. Whip-finish in front of the lead eyes.
10. Remove the fly from the vise and trim the deer hair into a bullet-shaped head, leaving a few hairs unclipped to merge with the palmered marabou.
11. Add a drop of head cement.
12. Take another sip of Rebel Yell.
13. Make another Mongrel, but don’t do it exactly the same way. Remember: No two mongrels can be identical.
Bloodsuckers
When I took up fly fishing in earnest, I quickly settled on the black Woolly Bugger as my all-round fly of choice. I learned that I could cast a Bugger into any stream or pond and catch whatever lived there, and even now, after I’ve allowed it all to become far more complicated, fly fishing can still be that simple.
Until Bob Lamm took me float-tubing on Henry’s Lake in Idaho, however, it didn’t occur to me to wonder what my Woolly Bugger might be actually imitating, if anything. “Leeches, in this case,” Bob said as he dropped a handful of small brown Buggers into my palm. “These trout gobble leeches. The trick is to fish the fly so it acts like a leech.”
I knew all about leeches. When I was a kid, we called them “bloodsuckers.” Skeeter Cronin and I discovered bloodsuckers in our no-name neighborhood pond one summer afternoon nearly fifty years ago. The crappies and yellow perch had been biting so well that day that we’d run out of worms, so we shucked off our sneakers, rolled up our pantlegs, and tried to hand-capture some crayfish. After a half hour of frustration, we waded ashore to reconsider our bait problem.
That’s when Skeeter pointed at my legs, crossed his eyes, grabbed his throat, stuck out his tongue, and made retching noises.
“What?” I said.
“Bloodsuckers,” he gagged.
Both of us, in fact, had half a dozen black slimy leeches stuck on each leg. We yelled “Gross!” and danced around shaking our legs trying to kick them off. They were, of course, firmly attached, and when we calmed down and began to yank them off, Skeeter had an inspiration. He half-filled our empty worm can with pond water, plucked a fat leech from his ankle, and dropped it in. We watched it gyrate and squirm, then looked at each other.
In unison we whispered, “Bait!”
There are more than three hundred species of annelid worms— leeches—of which about fifty live in North American freshwater ponds and streams. They range in size from 1 to 3 inches or so, and they come in shades of black, olive, brown, orange, and maroon. Some are spotted, striped, or mottled. They are commonly called “ribbon leeches” because of their flattened bodies and their undulating swimming motion. A powerful sucker at the tail end holds them fast to their prey while they plunge the sharp proboscis at their other end into the flesh of fish, turtles, aquatic mammals, wading birds, and bare-legged boys.
Bloodsuckers are ugly, repellent creatures, especially when you discover a colony of them sucking on your legs. But fish find them irresistible. Actually, if you aren’t queasy about gathering and handling them, a leech makes a terrific bait. Skeeter and I caught a lot of crappies and perch on live leeches, and we later figured out that trout and bass devoured them.
For us, though, leeches were always a last-resort bait. Handling them grossed us out, and we never could devise a faster or easier way to catch them than by standing thigh-deep in the pond until a dozen or so latched onto our bare legs.
A properly fished leech fly will catch as many fish as a live bloodsucker. Leeches move in a painfully slow, monotonous, undulating motion. The right retrieve is so slow that the fly barely moves. Point the rod tip directly at the fly, give it a 2-inch tug, and pause for the count of three. That tug straightens the marabou tail, while the pause allows the body to sink while the tail trails upward. This perfectly imitates a swimming leech.
Bob Lamm and I used slow-sinking lines that day on Henry’s Lake, and we found the proper depth by casting and then counting as the line sank before beginning the retrieve. After some trial and error, I began to catch big brookies and cuttbow hybrids when I started that slow tug-pause retrieve after counting to twelve-one-thousand.
Large trout do not slash at leeches. They simply suck them in, usually when the fly is falling during the pause between tugs. I missed a lot of strikes until I learned to point the rod directly at the fly. When I focused hard on the line where it entered the water, I was usually able to detect the twitch or hesitation that meant a fish had inhaled my fly. I set the hook by pulling straight back on the line without lifting the rod. That way, if I failed to hook him, my fly remained down there where he could see it and try again.
The most productive
part of a lake for fishing leech imitations is over sunken weed beds in anywhere from 6 to 20 feet of water. Leeches are most active at night and during the low-light hours— from first light to a couple hours after sunrise, and from sunset into darkness—and that’s the fastest time for this kind of fishing. Any black, brown, orange, or olive Woolly Bugger will do the job, depending on the color of the resident leeches. You’ll catch more fish if you “match the hatch.” You can experiment with a variety of colors and sizes until the fish tell you what they’re eating. Or you can wade in the water and see what gloms onto your legs.
The best leech imitations are tapered from a narrow forward end to a wider marabou tail, with a slim, fuzzy body. They should be tied on bent hooks and weighted toward the rear. You can improve any leech fly by squaring off its tail to emulate the flat ribbon shape of the rear end of a leech.
After experimenting with a variety of patterns and materials, I’ve concluded that my all-marabou design in suitable colors and sizes is both the easiest to tie and the best fish-fooler.
A live leech suspended under a bobber is still a deadly way to catch almost any species of freshwater fish. But a properly fished imitation works equally well—and unless you enjoy picking bloodsuckers off your bare legs, it’s considerably more pleasant.
Here’s how to tie an easy leech imitation:
1. Clamp a long-shank streamer hook in the vise at its middle and carefully bend it so that its front half curves upward. From the side, the hook should look like a wide V.
2. Wrap the rear half of the hook with four or five turns of lead wire.
3. Select a full marabou feather (black, brown, olive, purple, orange, red—whatever matches the leeches where you’re fishing) and tie it onto the rear of the hook, forming a tail about the length of the hook shank. Do not trim the rest of the plume. For a mottled or striped effect, tie in two marabou feathers of complementary or contrasting colors (black-and-purple and orange-and-brown, for example), treating them as if each were a single feather.
4. Tie in light gold or copper wire at the base of the tail. It will add a bit of flash and weight, create a more slender, segmented look, and secure the wound marabou.
5. Twist the remaining marabou feather around the tying thread into a “rope” and wind it forward around the hook. Tie it off and cut off the remaining marabou.
6. Counter-wind the body with the wire. Tie it off and cut off the extra wire.
7. Build a small, tapered head with the thread and whip-finish.
8. Square off the end of the tail with scissors, leaving it somewhat shorter than the fly’s body. If you dampen the tail between your fingers, it’s easier to work with.
9. Pick some fibers out of the marabou body with a dubbing needle to give it a shaggy appearance, then trim with scissors to taper it from its narrow, pointed head toward the wider tail end.
10. Finish with head cement.
11. Fish with confidence.
Clumped Hackles
My annual Paradise Valley pilgrimage is about a month away. Time to check my supply of Pale Morning Duns, Sulphurs, and Olives.
Over the years I have accumulated hundreds of flies to imitate these dependable spring-creek hatches. Helpful anglers have given me flies. I’ve salvaged other people’s flies from streamside willows. I’ve saved the busted-off flies I’ve found in the lips of fish I’ve caught. I’ve even bought a few flies. And, of course, I’ve tied like mad before every trip.
When I open my boxes, pluck out the contents one at a time, and hold them up to the light, I realize I have a good collection of flies that I don’t—and never will—use. That’s why I still have them.
I don’t use them because they don’t work very well.
I’ve busted off the flies I actually use in trout mouths or streamside willows. Others have been chewed beyond usefulness. I’ve given quite a few away, too.
So as usual, in spite of my impressive collection, I’ve got to tie a new batch of flies, ones that I’ll actually use.
Trout that grow up in insect factories such as the Paradise Valley spring creeks and many other fabled dry-fly rivers like the Bighorn, the Henry’s Fork, and the Missouri, eat bugs all their lives. The fun of fishing these rivers is the challenge of hooking a big trout on a size-18 or -20 dry fly tied to a 6X tippet.
There are times, of course, when the fish key on nymphs or emergers. Sometimes terrestrials do the trick. I deal with those situations as I find them.
But the best part comes when they’re surface-feeding selectively on mayflies.
On slick, slow-moving, gin-clear water, trout have plenty of time to make their choices. By the time they get to be 16 or 17 inches long, they’ve seen a million natural insects—and hundreds of fakes, too. They don’t eat any old thing. To catch them, hard experience has taught me that I have to make precise, drag-free presentations with long, skinny tippets.
I’ve also got to show them flies that look good to eat.
There’s no such thing as a never-fail pattern or design, of course, any more than there’s a fly that no trout will ever try to eat. But on the spring creeks—and anywhere else that big trout sip small mayflies off smooth, slow-moving water—the imitations I have the most faith in are all tied with clumped, or bunched-up, hackles. They feature widespread tails, slender bodies of the right color that ride right on the surface film, wings located a little less than halfway back from the eye of the hook, and well-shaped thoraxes.
The key elements in imitative dry flies are: how they ride on the surface, their overall size and shape, their body color, the silhouette of their wing, and, especially, the way light plays through the wings.
Besides being a good imitation, an effective slick-water dry fly should land consistently upright, float well, endure many chomps from big, toothy brown trout, hook the fish that eat it, and not twist slender leader tippets. It should also be fairly easy to tie.
Clumped-hackle flies meet all of these criteria, and they’re the ones I depend on for picky trout.
Clumping, or bunching, hackle simply involves winding a hackle feather around the shank of the hook and then shaping it with a few figure-8 turns of thread. This technique is not new, and the specific flies that I prefer are not recent inventions. My friend, the late Datus Proper, in his indispensable book What the Trout Said, traced the history of this design and, after many conversations with trout, made a strong case for its effectiveness.
The designs that I use on spring creeks are the Clumped-Hackle Spinner, the Clumped-Hackle Comparadun, the Clumped-Hackle No-Hackle Dun, and (with apologies to Datus) the Nearly Perfect Dun.
Here’s how to tie each of them:
CLUM PED-HACKLE SPINNER
1. Wind a thread base on the shank of a standard dry-fly hook, ending at the bend of the hook.
2. Tie in a tail of six or eight stiff hackle fibers. They should be a little longer than the length of the hook. Using a dubbing needle to guide the thread, spread the tail fibers by taking a couple of tight winds underneath them.
3. Bring the thread to the halfway point on the hook shank and tie in a cream or dun hackle feather. The feather should be one size larger than you’d normally use for the hook size.
4. Bring the thread forward, make four or five turns of the hackle and tie it off.
5. Divide the hackle fibers into equal bunches on each side and figure-8 around them top and bottom to form the spinner’s wings. Be careful not to make the base of the wings where they meet the body too thin. Spinner wings are wide at the base.
6. Bring the thread back to the tail, spin dubbing onto your thread, and dub the body. Make a couple of figure 8s around the wings to build up the thorax.
7. Whip-finish a small head.
According to Datus Proper (and the trout I’ve encountered have told me the same thing), hackle-fiber spinner wings have better translucency than hackle tips, hair, or any synthetic material, an especially crucial consideration in spinners. In fact, clumped hackle fibers make the b
est wings for small- and medium-sized spinners by all the criteria.
CLUMPED-HACKLE COMPARADUN
1. Tie in the tail the same as with the spinner, except make it a bit shorter.
2. Tie in a hackle feather, sized for the hook, at the halfway point of the shank, bring the thread forward, and make four or five turns of the hackle.
3. Make a couple of figure 8s around the bottom (only) of the hackle, bunching it up so that it forms a half circle over the top of the hook.
4. Dub the body and the thorax and finish the fly as you did the spinner.
The Hair-Wing Comparadun is a terrific smooth-water fly but this clumped hackle-fiber version is easier to tie, more durable, a better floater, and has superior translucency. It also makes an excellent— and visible—spinner imitation. Substitute a wisp of brown Antron shuck for the tail and you’ve got a Sparkle Dun Emerger.
CLUMPED-HACKLE NO-HACKLE DUN
• This is exactly the same fly as the Hackle-Wing Comparadun, except the hackle fibers are clumped up into a triangular, wedge-shaped wing. Looked at from straight on, the wing forms a V of about 120 degrees.
• This fly floats low in the water. The wedge shape that begins on the underside of the body forces it to ride upright, unlike hair-or quill-winged no-hackles, which tend to be top-heavy, tricky to balance, and prone to tipping. It’s also considerably easier to tie than the other no-hackles.
NEARLY PERFECT DUN
If I were a more skillful and patient tier, I’d make Perfect Duns exactly the way Datus Proper did (he gave them their tongue-in-cheek name). He was a bit fussier with the tail than I am, and he built the fly in a slightly different sequence of steps—which, I guess, made his fly, well, perfect. Datus contended that his Perfect Dun was superior to all others by all the important fish-fooling criteria, and I agree with him. My version is awfully close.
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