Of the handful of good decisions I’ve stumbled into during my fishing career, none seems sounder than a commitment I made nearly two decades ago to tie flies after fishing trips, not right before. I’d been on the Deschutes for a few days, going through a store of Wild Hares, my own version of the well-known Gold-Ribbed Hare’s Ear, a fly I use more times than not as part of my two-fly nymphing rig. I knew I’d be headed to the Deschutes again soon. When I got home, I immediately sat down at the vise and tied a dozen more Wild Hares, loaded them into the appropriate box, and forgot about the anxiety I’d begun to feel, earlier that day, when yet another big redside took me to school, leaving my lineup of Wild Hares looking dangerously thin.
There was more going on, however, than simply replenishing depleted stocks. After time spent on the water, we all begin to view our flies — even flies of the same pattern — with sharper, more discerning eyes. Some of them, we hope, look just right; others seem — well, second-rate. At the end of a trip, you usually know exactly what you’re looking for when you open your box. Go home and tie those flies, and chances are you’ll match what you’re after in a way you never quite replicate come two or three or six months later.
That’s an awfully strong argument for tying during a fishing trip, too.
Yet there was one other aspect to this on-return-home tying session, a way of going about it that I had already flirted with, but still not committed to as part of my regular practice. This was the notion to tie those dozen Wild Hares at a single crack: size 16s, all of them the same, all tied one after the other. Up until this point in my career, I had rarely been able to tie more than a couple of flies that looked moderately alike before I felt the need to try something different. I defended the approach on the grounds of creativity. Or artistic license. God forbid that I tie flies like a robot. Even after reading A. K. Best’s Production Fly Tying, now over 25 years old and counting, I couldn’t bring myself to parse out materials for a single pattern and crank out the same fly, one after another.
It’s still not my natural inclination. Is it anyone’s? But those Wild Hares confirmed again that there is no more efficient way to fill a fly box than tying flies a dozen — or more — at a time. And nothing makes your flies look better than choosing a pattern you believe in, gathering the appropriate materials, giving yourself an hour or two of uninterrupted time, and then settling in and finding your rhythm while visions of feeding fish dimple the surface of the less engaged portions of your tying mind.
Which is how, on starting home from a summer spent on Baja California’s Magdalena Bay, I decided to tie 50 Clousers.
On my way north, I stopped in Santa Paula to visit Gary Bulla, home for a spell between stints in Baja hosting anglers hoping to test themselves against a lineup of the Sea of Cortez’s most formidable fly-rod prey. Gary and I go back a ways. Sadly, we can also go years without fishing together. This year, Gary had to cancel his annual kayak trip to Magdalena Bay when Hurricane Blanca, spinning north out of the tropics, set her sights on the Pacific coast of Baja. Though much diminished by the time she made landfall, Blanca was still the earliest tropical storm of the season anyone could remember striking the region.
For once a wee bit envious of someone else’s time in Baja, Gary asked how the fishing was in Mag Bay. Where to start? After a dinner of Baja dorado and a bottle of what I call “Jim Harrison wine,” the Côtes du Rhone so often favored by characters in the author’s stories and novels, we retreated to the den of Gary and his wife Teresa’s funky, cedar-shingled bungalow perched in a grove of towering oaks alongside Santa Paula Creek, dry this summer, like so many coastal streams from San Diego to Eureka. The creekside oaks have also fallen victim to the drought, losing limbs and dying at an alarming and even dangerous pace. I try to put into context my summer spent sailing and fishing on the largest unspoiled estuary on the North American continent. Would it succumb somehow, too, to the cascading effects of climate change?
Mag Bay fishing approaches more closely that of California inshore fisheries than it does the exotic pelagic sport found along the Sea of Cortez. Single-digit rods are the call; 10-pound fish are rare. It’s intimate sport for the same sort of angler who enjoys backbays, streams, the surf. You poke around and find fish here and there: corvinas, jacks, groupers, halibut,
bonito, bass — all of which Gary and his hosted clients often catch out of a single Mag Bay estero, although I covered countless esteros and hundreds of miles of shoreline to replicate virtually the same bag.
“So what flies d’you use?” asked Gary, pouring us each a couple of fingers of the kind of good scotch he seems always able to pull from his stash.
The list is short. Even when I got into bonefish, I didn’t feel the need to switch from the conventional baitfish pattern I generally use, a drab tan or olive back above white saddle hackle, white bucktail, and a white fox fur belly, with 3-D hologram eyes embedded in a head of clear epoxy. And once I found fish, especially in the mangrove-lined esteros, I could rarely resist tying on a Crease Fly as a popper, if only because the opportunity to watch fish crush a surface pattern still seems like the whole point of picking up a fly rod in the first place.
And when I got serious, I tied on a Clouser.
“Three flies,” said Gary, holding the bottle up to the light. We’ve been here before; with any luck, we’ll get there again. “That’s really about all you ever need.”
The reputation of the Clouser Minnow is unassailable — and impossible to overstate. In the interest of casting this column under new light, I could have easily chosen other Clouser-type patterns or swapped out materials and claimed I had invented a pattern of my own. Ever since Bob Clouser created the fly in the late 1980s and Lefty Kreh wrote about it — and named it — in an article for Fly Fisherman, tyers have been tweaking and renaming it like branded ball caps. But I fail to see the point. Clousers, especially for saltwater anglers, remain a basic ingredient in any coherent fly box, in much the same way that your Hare’s Ear Nymphs, by whatever name you call them, are essential to a box of trout flies.
When I state I got serious and tied on a Clouser I mean this: many times this summer, as I explored Magdalena Bay in Madrina, my home-built, double-ended beach yawl, I found myself in need of fish to eat. Beans and rice and steel-cut oats can take you only so far. Usually I could just sort of pick a fish out of the catching and releasing, but now and then a couple of days passed without meat in the skillet, and I reached that point where the hunger began to feel real.
It’s a healthy feeling, I think, especially when all you have is a fly rod at hand. We may all have a tendency to forget what it is we’re really doing. You get out of practice. Twice I lost fish — fish I wanted to eat — during sloppy landings. Once I even put a bass on the stringer, dangled it over the side of Madrina, and two hours later, when I went to clean the fish, it wiggled out of my hands and swam away. Tie a Clouser on your line, however, and it’s pretty clear what you’re trying to make happen. Give yourself an outgoing tide after any one of the dozens of mangrove esteros in Mag Bay has flooded and look for a channel where the current swings tight to shore. Clousers, of course, are sort of a jig with wings; pitch it across the current and close to the bank and let it glide out of the shallows and dive into the trough about the same moment you began to strip and retrieve. Get it right, you can begin to wonder how many fish can possibly be stacked up feeding in a slot like that.
Get it wrong, you wonder how big that one was as you strip in your Clouserless line.
Do this often enough, and you promise yourself you’ll bring 50 Clousers next time you head to Mag Bay. Driving north past the Delta, I figured Madrina and enough Clousers could prove a pretty good equation elsewhere, too.
Materials
Hook: Mustad 34007, Gamakatsu SL12S, or similar, size 2
Thread: White Danville 3/0 waxed monocord, or similar
Eyes: Medium painted fluorescent chartreuse dumbbell eyes
Tail/Belly: White bucktail
Flash: Pearl Krystal Flash
Body: Dyed bucktail, chartreuse or lime green, topped with light olive bucktail
Topping: Peacock herl
How to Tie the Clouser Minnow
Step 1: Secure the hook in the usual position, point down, and start the thread about one-third of the way back from the hook eye. Create a small ball with thread wraps to help locate the dumbbell eyes in the next step.
Step 2: Set the dumbbell eyes on top of the hook shank and slide them forward until they sit tight to the ball of thread wraps. Anchor the eyes with thread wraps across the wrist of the dumbbell, forward and aft and aft and forward. Some tyers use glue or head cement to help hold their dumbbell eyes in place. I like to take wraps of thread below the eyes, but above the hook shank, as if starting the post of a parachute fly, to help tighten the cross wraps.
Step 3: Clip a tuft of hair from a bucktail — the farther from the root of the tail, the softer the material, which makes it easier to keep aligned on a hook shank without splaying. Clean out any underfur or short hairs. I like to stack my bucktail to align the tips; others don’t. Then clip the butts of hair so that the hair length is about twice the length of the hook. Hold the butts of the hair at a downward angle between the dumbbell eyes and the eye of the hook. Starting with a couple of loose thread wraps, lash the butts to the hook shank, increasing tension on the wraps as you cover the clipped hair butts. Then draw the tuft of bucktail over the wrist of the dumbbell eyes. Wind your thread aft of the dumbbell eyes by taking a turn around the tuft of hair, securing it along the top of the hook shank. Continue your thread wraps toward the start of the hook bend, being careful not to tighten your wraps to the point that the bucktail splays. Return the thread forward of the dumbbell eyes to the spot you began lashing down the bucktail.
Step 4: Spin your vise jaws or flip your fly — you are now working on the top of the fly, that is, the shank on the side of the hook point, opposite the top of the hook, because the weighted eyes cause the fly to swim with the hook point up. Just back from the hook eye, secure three or four full-length strands of Krystal Flash by folding them in half around the thread and then pulling the thread tight to the hook shank. You’ve now doubled the number of strands. Take several wraps of thread to help the strands lie in line with the axis of the fly. Clip the aft ends of the Krystal Flash to match the length of the white bucktail.
Step 5: Opposite the tie-in point above the first tuft of white bucktail, tie in an equal amount of chartreuse bucktail hair. Follow the same procedure used when tying in the white bucktail: stack it, if you like, clip the butts, hold the tuft at an angle, and then cover the butts after securing them. A few additional light wraps of thread can also help keep the hair from extending obliquely from the hook axis.
Step 6: Many Clousers end here. I like to add a small dressing of darker bucktail to what is now the top of the fly. I also add a few strands of peacock herl, knowing full well it may not last more than a fish or two.
Step 7: After you whip finish, saturate the head with lacquer or your favorite head cement. Also saturate the bucktail where it passes over the wrist of the dumbbell eyes, as well as any thread wraps aft of the eyes. Some tyers will also use epoxy or a similar product to create a more pronounced head, one that fairs into the dumbbell eyes.
Tying notes: The Clouser is a classic “guide’ fly”: just a few materials, quick to tie, and an easy pattern to customize for local fish or conditions or when you find you’ve run out of an ingredient far from the nearest fly shop. If you ever get the chance, watch a guide or professional tyer fashion a Clouser — or any other standard pattern, as far as that goes. These Real Guys all have subtle tricks and techniques they employ to make tying go faster while maintaining the quality of their flies. Watch any one of them, and you’re bound to learn something new.
