We’re going to have to get past the fact, right here at the start, that this column was triggered by the problem of 50-fish days. Nothing repels a reader more quickly than a writer who dwells on his own remarkable success: our gut feeling is that the fishing must just have been easy; anybody could load up. Besides, don’t you have something better to do? I recall reading a story a guy from a local river asked me to critique, a piece in which he described, in passionate detail, how he caught one steelhead after another with a fly he touted, naturally, as the latest and greatest. And the truth is, for two seasons running, I had seen this same guy absolutely hammer fish. There was a rock; he knew exactly where to stand; he had just the right amount of sink tip on his line, and he could make that cast all day long, swimming his clever little pattern right where the steelhead lay.
In 20 years of serious steelheading, I’ve never seen anybody hook and land so many fish. Not even close. And when the guy wasn’t there, I jumped right into his spot, mimicking his every move, right down to the fly he had shown me — and catching nothing more than if had I swung a lawn chair downstream.
The guy’s story? As a teacher, I’ve often failed to uphold my fundamental pedagogical tenet: Do no harm. Then again, you’re asked for help.
“It’s pretty good,” I said, glancing away as the river behind us sighed. “But you probably don’t need to use the word whammo so many times.”
I get it. If I’m going to write about problems with f lies holding up under the assault of 50, or 30, or even 5 fish, I need to be careful. And if I tell you this problem occurs while hooking all sorts of groovy fish from remote beaches where footprints other than my own rarely mar the pristine sand, I should expect a fair number of readers to quit the page as surely as if I began writing about politics, religion, or my most recent bout with skin cancer. Yet everyone out there, I suspect, has experienced the same felicitous problem — when the fishing heats up to the point that flies are singed into thin shadows of themselves. It happens. And though most of us would gladly accept a box full of trashed flies now and then for a shot of wide-open sport, others in the crowd might view these same ruined flies as a prodigal waste of time, money, or resources. Can’t we do any better than that?
If nothing else, maybe we can agree on this: Who wants to stop and replace a winning fly when the fish are going bonkers?
Let’s begin with the Brooklyn Bridge. If you recall anything from the hundreds of hours you’ve spent watching Ken Burns’s public television documentaries, you remember that the cables holding up this massive testimony to humankind’s technological ingenuity are in fact surprisingly thin pieces of steel wire spun together to create cables of fabulous strength. Of course, the principle of this steel rope was nothing new; sailors and shipbuilders had been relying on fibers spun together for as long as somebody needed to stay connected to an object with a tool longer than a stick. Today, what’s remarkable is how many items rely on this same Brooklyn Bridge technology — how many things we use that are made of thin fibers spun together to make material that’s both flexible and strong.
Woven straps, belts, your backpack or luggage, maybe all of your sporting attire and a good deal of the camping gear that goes with it — most anything, as well, that you tie a knot in or use to secure things to your car or boat or pet — nearly all share the Brooklyn Bridge technology in which a bunch of fine fibers, by themselves thin and relatively weak, become tough, durable products capable of withstanding much more wear and tear than the individual fibers of feathers and hair on which fly tyers historically rely.
You can see where I’m going with this. But don’t get me wrong: I’m a huge fan of natural materials, whether it’s genuine wood (not plywood) for boats, wool sweaters, hog bristle varnish brushes, or oiled leather for wherever two hard surfaces meet and rub. Also, it’s not my intent here to sing the virtues of synthetic fly-tying materials for tying “better” flies; if I anticipate seeing a big roosterfish, I’ll have feather and hair on the hook every time. I will argue, however, that synthetic materials hold up better to toothy fish. What’s more, because these synthetic fibers are found virtually everywhere, you’re never far from something you can use to create a pretty fair saltwater minnow or other baitfish fly.
How about the webbing from an old beach chair? I got the idea from a longtimer in Baja who made billfish jigs by lashing a strip of webbing to a hook and then combing out the individual fibers. Cool colors; tough as nails. I’m particularly proud of my own Paracord Minnow, an olive-over-white baitfish pattern tied from the soft, crinkly fibers I discovered by using an awl and an eyebrow brush and carefully teasing apart both the inner and outer material, which has the quiet colors and subtle contrasts that I look for in most of my saltwater flies.
And there’s good stuff in almost every tie-down strap you can find. I’ve combed out fibers that, I’m sorry, rival anything that shops and wholesale suppliers have to offer, material you can use as wings, dubbing, tails, or a twisted-floss segmented body that will make your Salmon Flies the hit of the next Pteronarcys party.
This notion that we’re surrounded by man-made products composed of fibers we can use for flies is nothing new. For many of us, an acceptance of synthetic material on our tying benches began with Antron. That’s what you needed to tie Gary LaFontaine’s Sparkle Pupa, a fly that formalized the more impressionistic effect most of us had learned to obtain with our traditional soft hackles. I will confess I never thought much about my use of Antron, whether or not it violated some sort of aesthetic or even moral principle, until Tom McGuane mentioned in an essay some flies made out of “carpet fibers,” a statement that had nearly the same effect on me as when he described, in passing, a guy showing up at a high-end camp with his rods carried in “sewage pipe” — the same stuff, I suspected, I had used for years for my own rod tubes.
Still, carpet fiber or not, Antron also worked well when used as wing (actually the overwing) material for LaFontaine’s Diving Caddis, a fly I began to use at all depths and on all occasions when caddisflies were anywhere near the river. Then it showed up as a trailing shuck on my emerging mayflies, as a wing for spent spinners, and occasionally, twisted tight, as an intriguing ribbing material for the segmented abdomens of both nymphs and big dries.
Tying for salt water, both the surf and, later, bluewater panga fishing, I was easily seduced by all manner of synthetic materials. Over the course of my career, as attention to saltwater fly fishing grew dramatically, the range of materials for tying saltwater patterns kept pace, to the point that one faced a bewildering choice of things sparkly and bright, in colors often associated with certain recreational antics in the 1960s.
What many saltwater anglers soon discovered, however, was that in some situations (casting to those big roosterfish, especially), flash is a drawback; often synthetics end up looking wrong in the water — too bright, the wrong color, sometimes just weird. Like others, I returned in large part to traditional hair and feathers, not for aesthetic reasons, but only because it seemed empirically to reduce the number of painful occasions that a big, heart-stopping fish suddenly veered off, refusing the fly. But the downside to natural materials, their limited durability, has grown more and more apparent to me as I’ve found better and better fishing along the Baja coast. Some of this, I believe, is what happens to hair when you dye it; it loses much of what can make it nice to touch, becoming brittle as straw. And really, if you wanted your favorite bucktail streamer to last, you could probably treat it with bear fat and linseed oil and extend its life through a few dozen more fish. Sun and salt water also grind away at our flies, although the damage to your natural materials may be no worse than what happens to plastic-based synthetics.
Still, short of rusting hooks, by far the most serious damage inflicted on your saltwater flies comes from fish themselves. Each year, I have to remind myself — usually after blood has already been spilled — to use pliers on every fish, no matter how small, that I bring to the beach. Fish in the ocean nearly all eat other fish. Teeth, obviously, play a big role in the predator’s game. There may be vegans out there — I’m not sure. But most fish that chase and eat a fly have weapons in their mouths that help them grab and latch onto things trying to get away. Also, in a pinch, to defend themselves — even against do-good anglers trying to return them safely to the water.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m perfectly willing to tie one-fish flies — that is, flies I know won’t last, but have what I need to fool a single big fish. I trust I’m not alone. Nearly all flies, no matter how delicate, actually hold up better than we might imagine, and we’ve all had the experience of a tattered fly working better than when it was fresh out of the box. But believe me, I’d tie a fly out of the seed head of a dandelion if I thought it would trigger a rise from a dour steelhead.
Yet, durability becomes a factor when you’ve found a bunch of fish willing to eat, whether they’re surfperch or skipjack tuna. Or you’ve ventured off without your vise for all of the reasons that at home make perfect sense — until you find yourself faced with a depleted stash or the inside dope on a killer pattern that money can’t buy, even if you could find a local supplier. I won’t go into judgments about recycling, sustainability, and the like, other than to mention that anything we can use and reuse again and again is generally a sound option, and in the case of the All Syn Minnow, the choices for creating a fly both effective and durable are all but endless.
Maybe even too many choices. I wrote out a list of materials I might use for an all-synthetic minnow or baitfish pattern, sticking to what’s available at a couple of shops where I get tying supplies. I filled an entire sheet from an 8-1/2-by-11 notepad. Narrow-ruled. I’d be a liar — or a salesman — if I told you that one of these materials fools more fish than another. And you can bet if I claimed I’d discovered a new product that creates minnow patterns fish can’t resist, something else — new and better — would come along soon.
In the meantime, this one — whammo — ought to hold up fine.
Materials
Hook: Mustad 34007 or similar, size 2 to 2/0
Thread: Olive Ultra Thread, 70 denier
Tail: White Super Hair
Body: White Enrico Puglisi Fibers
Underwing: Olive Supreme Hair
Overwing: Olive Enrico Puglisi Fibers
Lateral line: Chartreuse Sea Hair
Belly: White Slinky Fiber
Topping: Olive Synthetic Yak Hair
Gills: Red Krystal Flash
Eyes: Yellow 1/4-inch Hologram Eyes
Head: Five-minute Z-Poxy
Tying Instructions
Step 1: Secure the hook in the vise and start the thread. For the tail, tie in a fairly sparse tuft of Super Hair that extends about twice the shank length beyond the bend of the hook.
Step 2: Clip a tuft of body fibers about twice the length of the tail. Forward of the root of the tail, tie in the body fibers so that they extend just short of the tips of the tail. Then split in half the material forward of the tie-in point, lay each half alongside the hook shank, and lash in place. At this point, you can begin shaping the fly with snips of your scissors.
Step 3: Secure a sparse tuft of Supreme Hair along the top of the fly. The underwing should reach the shortest portion of the body material
Step 4: Secure on top of the underwing a tuft of the softer Enrico Puglisi fibers. Ideally, the overwing material should be about twice the length of the underwing. Fold the material that’s forward of the tie-in point and lash it over the wing fibers already in place. This doubling over of both the body and wing materials creates an especially durable fly.
Step 5: For lateral lines, I’ve grown fond of a few strands of fairly coarse Sea Hair rather than the more typical Krystal Flash. Lash in three or four strands along each side of the fly. The effect is subtle and hard to see in the accompanying photos, but the look of the fly appears more lifelike.
Step 6: For the belly, turn the fly upside down and attach a short tuft of Slinky Fiber. The belly material should end up extending just beyond the bend of the hook and covering most of the thread wraps along the length of the hook shank.
Step 7: For the wing topping, right the fly in the vise and tie in a tuft of Synthetic Yak Hair. Is Synthetic Yak Hair more durable than the real stuff? You decide.
Step 8: For gills, again spin the fly upside down. Just forward of the tie-in point of the belly, tie in a short tuft of red Krystal Flash.
Step 9: Use your thread to form the forward taper of the fly. Whip finish and coat the thread wraps with lacquer or head cement. To finish the fly, affix eyes. I find a hot glue gun helps with this sometimes aggravating step. Finally, after you’ve tied three or so flies, mix up a batch of five-minute epoxy and coat the eyes and forward thread wraps, doing your best to form a well-shaped head.
