Deep into steelhead season, it’s easy to grow fidgety. Among those of us who practice faithfully, who hasn’t buckled beneath the temptation to abandon whole hog what’s worked in the past, to discard the very flies and even techniques we’ve relied on in the past? It’s a grim moment when we unfold our treasured leather wallets and every fly inside looks as tantalizing as a beach ball. Yech. You might as well have flung open your closet, anticipating a hot date, and found yourself staring into a tangle of paisley shirts rimmed with scimitar collars, jumpsuits jeweled with studded lapels, and bell-bottom slacks sporting hems inside which you could hide a pair of spirited Yorkies.
I would like to advise you to resist: in steelheading, more than in any other type of fly fishing, your fly is the last thing that matters. I know the thesis is heretical; that doesn’t make it any less true. Still, avid steelhead anglers will often find themselves in need of some sort of elixir, a new pattern that promises fresh results in the face of futility and frustration, protracted failures that threaten to sap one’s will simply to suit up and cast a line. We are fueled by hope, nourished by new rhymes. By all counts, successful steelheaders keep their flies in the water, the only place they’ve ever worked, believing in what can seem, at times, nothing short of a miracle — a religiosity that returns, again and again, to the idolatry paid the new fly.
Action and Attitude
I came to this one by way of doubles. After years admiring some sparsely dressed double-hooked flies tied and given to me by Jeff Cottrell, who had seen such patterns used to great effect by British anglers fishing for sea-run brown trout in Tierra del Fuego, I finally knotted one to a leader and immediately hooked and landed a small steelhead. I went home and tinkered with Cottrell’s patterns, eventually settling on a design of my own, the Design Spiral Double (California Fly Fisher, November/December 2016), a fly that incorporates materials and design elements from other patterns that have proven successful for me on the handful of steelhead rivers I frequent throughout the year. Did I catch more steelhead with this pattern? More than I’ve caught in other years? Don’t be silly. But I fished the fly often enough, and so when fish were caught, it was often the catcher, if not necessarily the cause.
What intrigued me most about the fly, however, was that pair of canted hooks on which it swam so seductively at the end of my line. What’s up with that? I wondered. Why is it, in fact, that the Brits and Scots and Irish remain so enamored with doubles, while stateside, you can hardly find hooks on which to tie such flies, much less anglers who fish doubles — or who have any sense at all of the hooks’ place and purpose in the long history of the sport.
I bought some books, tied some more flies, caught some more steelhead. As an old surfer and practicing boat builder, I began to recognize how significant it was to have a fly swimming in current with two hooks — aligned symmetrically, along a fore-and-aft center line — instead of just one. For decades now, we’ve heard the claim that the most important concern in fly design is size and profile, with color a distant, yet still important consideration. What you don’t hear much about, however, is action and attitude — the two attributes that go so far in distinguishing those flies we know as doubles.
Action is a pretty simple concept to get your mind around. Wet flies, fished downstream, come alive in the current. Tension on the line causes either the materials out of which the fly is tied to flex and bend and sway, as if laundry in the wind, or the entire fly itself responds, which is the real point of those big keel-like quill wings on so many traditional patterns. Action, in other words, generally refers to a fly fished under tension. In the case of steelheading, that means a fly fished on the swing. Much attention, of course, has been paid to getting more and more action out of our steelhead patterns, a trajectory that reaches its most sublime orbits in the realm of modern Spey flies and an all but ungodly outer limit with the octopuslike Intruders. What these patterns share, of course, is their focus on soft or pliant or willowy materials. That creates one kind of action.
But if you want a very different kind of change of action in an object moving through the current, whether water or wind, drop two fins or keels off the hull and watch what happens then. We’re not just talking about wiggles and squirms, twists and shivers and shakes. Now you have an aerodynamically designed creature that swims, not one merely dangling from the end of your line. If I’m overstating my case, it’s not by much. Watch a Brit with a two-hander hang a fly tied on a double down into the current of an Atlantic salmon run. If the fly’s swimming, it’s fishing. If it’s fishing — well, you know what can happen next.
Along with action, we have attitude, a second often overlooked aspect of fly design. Attitude has nothing to do with any anthropomorphic or metaphorical behavior of your fly. Instead, attitude is the position of the fly in the water; it’s the reason that a properly designed nymph, such as a Hare’s Ear, rides in the water column the same way as the naturals rising from the bottom on their way to emergence. In the case of a steelhead fly, attitude pertains to whether the fly stays upright — or at least the way it was designed to ride in the current — throughout the course of its swing. Many modern flies are designed to eliminate this problem by offering up a profile with no top or bottom nor even sides. That’s pretty much your Woolly Bugger, your Egg-Sucking Leech, or again, your Intruder. Flies meant to imitate salmon eggs are tied “in the round,” as well. I don’t think there’s one thing wrong with that. But if your fly is supposed to mimic something that’s alive, and that live critter has a front and back, a top and bottom, a head and tail or the like, you probably want it to behave like the real thing behaves, which means it doesn’t swim with its belly pointed toward shore nor practices spontaneous capsize drills wherever the current quickens.
Along with the swimming action imparted on swinging flies, patterns tied on double hooks stand the best chance of maintaining the upright attitude they hold while secured in your vise.
Does it really matter?
Sheesh…do I have to answer that again?
Ally’s Shrimp (Variant)
How I happened to end up with Scotsman Alastair Gowans’s famous shrimp pattern, the Ally’s Shrimp, as my go-to double this season remains anyone’s guess. Like all successful steelhead patterns, this one offers the visual and even visceral appeal so necessary in order for the angler to commit to and maintain faith in a fly. It’s also fairly easy to tie, with just enough in the way of old school materials to make you feel like you’ve tapped into something timeless and true, not the latest craze pushed on us by marketeers.
I’m labeling this a “variant,” though, because I’m including options, and I don’t want to be accused by any classicists out there for tweaking the original pattern. The Alastair Gowans Ally’s Shrimp was mostly red; I’ve had as much luck with an orange variation tied by another Scotsman, Davie McPhail. A quick search online will lead you to videos of both men tying versions of the fly. Shrimp patterns make a lot of sense for fish that have spent much of their adult lives in tidewater and at sea; the great A. J. McClane said it took him years to find a good shrimp imitation before discovering the old Horner Shrimp, the Eel River classic from nearly eighty years ago. My friend the fish biologist Joe Kelly did point out to me, however, that there’s a good reason shrimp patterns in general are so much more popular in the British Isles than here in the States: in Ireland and the UK, he noted, you’re rarely fishing for anadromous fish beyond sight or scent of the sea.
Still, any pattern that brings steelhead to hand with any regularity soon finds itself getting nudged toward the top of the private and generally short lineup that most serious steelheaders employ throughout the year. I recommend you choose at least one double, Ally’s Shrimp or not, to insert into that select group. Always check the regs to make sure such flies are legal, and if they are, give one a try. Just as learning to cast a two-handed rod can keep you amused enough that your fly stays in the water, the only place it will eventually hook a fish, exploring the unique capabilities of a swinging double-hooked fly can stir your interest, curiosity, speculation — necessary ingredients for staying keen during the hunt.
Keep a double fishing, it will eventually catch a fish. I guarantee it.
Materials
Hook: Daiichi 7131 double salmon hook, size 6 to 10
Thread: Red Pearsall’s silk, or fire orange 8/0 UNI-Thread
Tag and Rib: Small silver or gold oval tinsel
Tail: Bright orange bucktail
Body: Two parts: rear half, orange or red floss; front half, black floss
Underwing: Natural gray squirrel tail
Overwing: Golden pheasant tippet, tied horizontal
Hackle/collar: Orange hen hackle
Tying Instructions
Step 1: Secure the hook in the vise. I can find the Daiichi 7131 at most places I buy tying supplies; it has nothing in the way of the elegant curves seen in many doubles sold overseas, though. Start the thread directly behind the eye of the hook. After a half dozen turns back along the hook shank, lay the tinsel along the top of the shank and continue to wind over it until the thread hangs directly over the hook points. Catch the tinsel at the Y where the hook splits and make three or four turns for the tinsel tag and secure it. Then pull the tinsel forward under the hook shank, wrap thread over it, pull the tinsel back toward the bend of the hooks, and wind your thread back along the hook shank to the front edge of the tag. Don’t trim the remaining tinsel — it will later be used for the rib of the fly.
Step 2: Use a small bunch of orange bucktail for the tail. The tail should be about twice the length of the hook. Stack the hairs, then secure the root of the tail directly in front of the tag, beginning with light wraps of thread so that the bucktail doesn’t flare. Trim the butt ends of the bucktail at an angle, then work the thread forward and back with tighter wraps, trying to maintain an even substrate for the floss body.
Step 3: Secure a length of orange floss for the rear half of the body. Advance the thread halfway up the length of the body. Wrap the aft half of the body with the orange floss, secure it with thread wraps, and clip the excess. Do the same for the forward half of the body. Proportions are always easier to get wrong on larger flies; this half-and-half body should end well back from the hook eye, leaving yourself plenty of room for the wing, the hackle, and the head.
Step 4: Rib the floss body by winding the tinsel forward in evenly spaced wraps, about two turns for each half of the body.
Step 5: There are two ways to go after the squirrel tail underwing. You can either tie in a small bunch of hairs on top of the fly and then on the underside, or you can “spin” a larger tuft of hair around the fly, much like spinning deer or elk hair around a Muddler, teasing and combing the squirrel hair as you tighten and loosen and tighten and loosen your first few wraps of thread. Either way, you want the tips of the underwing to extend no farther than the middle of the length of the tail.
Step 6: Select a single small golden pheasant tippet feather, either the natural orange or one dyed red, for the overwing. Both Gowans and McPhail have a method to get the tippet feather to lie flat or horizontally atop the fly. I find it easiest to spin the feather back and forth between thumb and forefinger, rolling the barbules into a bunch, then tying in the feather so that the tips extend to the tinsel tag. Now tap the tippet feather with your finger – and it should open up flat on top of the fly.
Step 7: Select a hackle feather with barbules that, when the feather is tied in, will extend to about the hook points. Prepare the feather by stripping off the barbules opposite the side of those that you want to extend back toward the aft end of the fly when you tie in the feather by its tip. Secure the tip of the feather. Make three or four turns of the hackle, one in front of the other, using your fingers to help the barbules lie toward the aft end of the fly. Catch the hackle stem under a few thread wraps and cut off the excess. Then create a tidy head, whip finish, and saturate the thread with lacquer or head cement. (Note: the image for step 7 is the completed fly shown on page 18.)
