It’s been some time since I did any serious hopper fishing. But when my old pal Peter Syka agreed to meet me mid-July across the border, where I happen to know a few small drainages with an abundance of this iconic summertime fare, I figured I had better dig through my fly boxes and make sure I was prepared with patterns I’d still have confidence in since the last time I launched my hopes into the always rambunctious house of hopper delights.
If you’ve been at this long enough, you probably recognize two iterations of hopper patterns: those tied with feather and hair, and those tied out of foam and rubber. There’s some crossover, of course; nothing in fly tying or fly design is, or should be, absolute. If you feel you can’t keep your deer-hair headed hopper afloat, by all means try lacing on a slab of foam, or a pair of water wings, to keep that puppy riding high and dry, merrily down the stream. In Montana, in fact, guides like to tie their so-called hoppers with so much polypropylene yarn, as the wing, that when heavily dressed with floatant the fly can stay atop the surface even with a BBsized tungsten bead for the head of the Perdigon suspended somewhere below.
I call those hoppers bobbers. And though every guide will tell you that sometimes this jumbo greased fuzz ball will draw a strike, I can say the same for every indicator, fluffy or solid, that I’ve ever seen employed – a great way, no doubt, to help novice nymphers keep their cast drifting just so, but not exactly my idea of a pattern I want when I’m after those trout I know are lurking along the edges of the current, waiting for big, gnarly bugs to fall clumsily to the surface of the stream.
We can do better than bobbers. After all, unless you go at your fly fishing the way bean counters manage education, health care, or the production of the food we eat, you probably seek insight now and then, however faint, into the sublime. The only time I rose a bull trout to a dry fly, a beast of a fish on a river I wouldn’t share the name of at gunpoint, it was to an oversized Dave’s (Whitlock) Hopper, a traditional “realistic” feather-and-hair pattern, the kind that will stop floating, or start looking like a hunk of shredded ginger root, after a half-dozen good fish. Would a Fat Albert have sparked the same explosive rise? We’ll never know – and there’s a chance I’ll never find out, knowing which of the two patterns I’ll certainly reach for when I know I’ve got grasshoppers in the air around me.
LOW-RIDING DRY FLIES
To be clear: I have nothing against foam flies, hoppers or otherwise. If I thought it was relevant to readers here, I would offer, at a later date, a pattern for an adult dragonfly, tied entirely from foam and rubber legs, that I learned from guides on Chile’s Lago Yelcho. It’s not just its floating capacity that makes foam a terrific material for flies. But it can also work against you.
In what I think of as the best of hopper scenarios, in slow currents where the trout slide under the fly and carefully inspect it before sipping it through the surface, rather than attacking as if teenagers after a bag of Takis, I want my hopper bodies low in the water – the same as I want the bodies of my big adult salmonfly patterns or, for that matter, most any dry fly. Trout take a low-riding dry fly with deliberate confidence – the best take, in my book, the sport has to offer. On the other hand, I see too many high-floating foam flies draw vigorous rises from trout that fail to result in hookups. “He missed it!” shouts the angler – while I’m inclined to discount such claims, having come to believe that trout don’t miss but, instead, refuse the fly at the last crucial instant.
The challenge many anglers find in fishing low-riding dry flies, of course, is that such flies can be difficult to see. The problem, I feel, is overstated – and like most issues in fly fishing, it can be more or less eliminated by learning to cast where you’re aiming. If you see your fly land on the water, or at least your leader – or even just the tip of your fly line – you should have a good idea where the fly is, even if it floats so low you have trouble picking up its exact location. Following a reasonably direct cast, some part of your terminal system will give you enough indication to keep track of the general vicinity of your fly. Should you spot a rise, don’t hesitate to lift the rod tip, a subtle gesture that asks the question, as Dave Hughes has often written, “Is anybody there?”
Learn not to worry so much about spotting the fly. That doesn’t mean, however, losing touch with it. Find the part of your leader you can see, lift any slack out of the line behind it, and then let your gaze reach out toward the end of the tippet. I say all of this while sporting eyesight that, from all I can tell, grows a little bit worse every year now. The professionals say I’m still pretty lucky, for an old guy, but they’re not fooling me. I know what I’ve lost – at least in terms of eyesight.
But the good news is, it doesn’t really matter when a good trout parts the water and inhales an all but hidden hopper. If you see that, the last thing you need to worry about is what you didn’t see.
“In slow currents where the trout slide under the fly and carefully inspect it before sipping it through the surface, I want my hopper bodies low in the water.”
A GOOD ALTERNATIVE
The concession here, no doubt, to any dubious desire to track the fly, following its every tilt and quiver in its route downstream, is the hard-to-miss white wingpost around which we wrap the parachute-style hackle that allows the body of the fly to settle down into the surface film. I’m sure you could use any bright color – yellow or pink, say – that you might find more readily visible, and that calf body hair is sometimes dyed. My eyes, however, seem almost always able to quickly pick out a spot of white, whether the wings on a Royal Wulff or Blowfly Humpy, or a pinch of white fur on the back of a dark foam beetle.
The only other aspect of the fly worth discussion here is the source you choose for the hopper’s wing. A section from one of two different turkey feathers, the wings or the tail, can be used. For years, having never seen a turkey in the wild, I wasn’t quite sure which feathers I was using; I seem to remember, in fact, that I failed to understand, reading catalogs, the difference between barred turkey quills – wing feathers – and turkey tail feathers (sometimes called mottled, sometimes barred, as well.) Did it ever matter? I don’t think so. Whichever you choose, before tying with it, treat the entire feather with Krylon Workable Fixatif or other artist’s fixative, allowing it to dry so that the feather fibers become stiff, capable of withstanding the handling while you tie and, eventually, the mouths of eager trout. And if you or a friend happen to shoot a turkey next season, just grab all of the wing and tail feathers you can and you’ll find yourself with a lifetime supply of hopper wing material, plus enough for more Muddler Minnows than you can possibly go through despite the day ahead when all you can do is swing flies blindly downstream and wait for a tug – not necessarily a bad day, considering the alternative.
Materials
Hook: TMC 5212, 1X fine, 2X long, or similar, size 8-12
Thread: 6/0 Tan
Wingpost: White calf body hair
Body: Yellowish-gold polypropylene yarn
Wing: Turkey tail or wing section
Legs: Yellow dyed grizzly hackle stems, knotted
Hackle: Grizzly, parachute
(Note: The Better Hopper is a very slight variation on the Ed Schroeder dressing for a Parachute Hopper as found in Dave Hughes’s invaluable reference, Trout Flies.)
Tying Instructions
Step One: Secure the hook in the vise and cover the shank with a layer of thread. Envision the hook shank divided into two halves, then halve the forward half and stop your thread wraps there, one-fourth the length of the hook shank behind the hook eye. Clip a tuft of calf body hair from the hide. Clean away the fuzzy underfur then align the tips in a hair stacker. Measure the tips approximately half the length of the hook shank. Tie them in, tips forward, one quarter the hook shank length back from the hook eye. Wrap thread in front of the hair bundle, propping it up to begin creating your wingpost. Then wrap the thread around the base of the post, working your way up a short distance and then back down to the base.
Step Two: Clip the butts of the wingpost hair. Tie in the body yarn behind the butts. If you think hopper color matters, choose your yarn accordingly. (Let me mention here that I think a big Green Humpy makes an excellent imitation of small young grasshoppers.) Wrap thread over the yarn to the hook bend, forming an even underbody. Then return the thread to the base of the wingpost, wrap the yarn forward, and tie it off at the wingpost base – but do not clip off the excess yarn.
Step Three: Whether you choose a section from a turkey wing or turkey tail feather, make sure you’ve treated it with the artist’s fixative. A wing fashioned from a tail feather is shown here. Cut a section of the feather about one hook gap wide. I like to use the outside ends of the quills, which are softer the farther you are from the stem. Measure the feather section the length of the hook shank; round the thicker end after folding the section lengthwise. Tie in the wing just behind the wing post. Err on too much length and you can still clip it to suit your sense of proportions.
Step Four: For legs use two grizzly hackle feathers that have been dyed yellow. Flare the fibers so that they are perpendicular to the stem, then cut the fibers short, leaving about a sixteenth of an inch protruding from both sides of the stem. Tie an overhand knot in each stem and pull the knot tight until the stem is bent at about a 90-degree angle, the so-called knee of a hopper leg. Now tie in a leg on each side of the body, positioning each leg so that the knee lies somewhere between the bend of the hook and the tip of the wing, the lower portion of the leg angled just so – a job that can easily frustrate perfectionists. As McGuane famously noted, on confessing to his own troubles with hopper legs: “Mine look like dogs pissing on a fire hydrant.”
Step Five: Select a long hackle feather with fibers 1½-2 times the hook gap. Clean away the webby fibers at the base of the stem and then tie it in behind the wingpost, dull side down. Wind the hackle counterclockwise around the wingpost; the first turn should be the highest, then five or six turns as you work your way down the post. Tie off the the hackle in front of the wingpost, trying not to capture any fibers above the last turn with your thread.
Step Six: Clip the excess hackle feather. Now lift the hackle fibers in front of the wingpost out of the way and wind the body yarn to the hook eye. Tie off the yarn and clip the excess. Create a tidy thread head and whip finish. Saturate the thread with lacquer or your favorite head cement. Add a drop or two, as well, to the base of the wingpost, allowing it to soak into the hackle wraps.
