My buddy Joe Kelly is a hunter, noted within a small circle of friends as the guy who finds animals when everyone else spends most of his or her time wandering about the woods, engaged in vigorous hiking, and little else, throughout the season. Joe doesn’t always put meat on the ground; year after year, nobody in our busy neck of the woods can claim much in the way of success. But Joe nearly always returns from a hunt with stories of encounters with animals, how he found them, what they were doing, what he saw and heard, how the animals eventually reacted to his presence, even if he didn’t get the chance to pull a trigger.
I bring up the matter of Joe Kelly’s hunting skills because he also happens to be an angler who hunts, hooks, and lands big fish. Most of the fishing we do together involves trout of one kind or another; Joe has teenage daughters, and on weeks or weekends when they’re with their mother, Joe and I often head off together, occasionally with his raft in tow, a tool that comes in handy for a guy who likes to track down big fish. Joe, in other words, is just about the ideal fishing partner, a someone who gets after it whenever he can and who’s always on the lookout, with one ear to the ground, for inside dope on the whereabouts of exceptional or at least promising sport.
One difference, however, looms large between Joe and me. While I like to catch big fish, especially trout, as much as anyone, I also like nothing better than chasing hatches, casting to rising fish or bringing fish to the surface with patterns that mimic something the trout are looking for. My fly boxes reflect this itch. Not only do I stuff my vest with a half dozen boxes of patterns aimed at different families or genera or even species of insects, I also include other separate stashes of types of flies — soft hackles, attractor dries, or, simply, Humpys.
Joe, on the other hand, carries just one box of flies — or maybe two sometimes, I’m not really sure. Let’s just say he’s nothing like the fly junkie I am. And even though I’m confident he’s got all of the bases covered, there’s one fly that’s nearly always on the end of his tippet. As a hunter with a penchant for big fish, Joe maintains that something big and black and wiggly will keep you in the game, especially when trout are on their lies with nothing specific in the way of insects showing. I have my own ideas about how to go about finding trout at such times, but Joe considers most of these approaches beside the point. Big trout, claims Joe, are always on the lookout for a mouthful. It’s hard to argue with success.
I call Joe’s favorite trout fly Big Jelly. It’s quick and easy to tie, and I’ve seen it in the mouths of more big trout than perhaps any other single pattern that I fish or have seen fished throughout my lifetime. It probably gets eaten as a stonefly nymph, although there’s nothing obvious about it that distinguishes it from a half dozen other common stonefly patterns you can tie or buy.
Except maybe the legs. Or not just legs, per se, but all eight appendagelike gewgaws that dangle from the f ly like so many feathers down a heron’s breast. Years ago, Joe stumbled upon a supply of this freaky rubber material. Each strand is so thin you need a small, sharp needle and a pair of reading glasses to separate a single strand from the remaining material. The stuff reminds me of the strip of rubber that goes inside the narrow rim of a high-end racing bike, except it’s made out of those separate pieces that can be pulled apart, one fibery strip at a time.
Does it matter? Can you substitute, instead, the usual thicker rubberleg material sold by your local fly shop or online dealer? I’m the last guy to worry about changes made to any pattern, and I’ll readily swap out one material for another so that I don’t have to search out something rare or hard to come by just so I can replicate the original, but in this case, I tend to think Joe may be onto something. His Big Jelly makes the legs on, say, a Girdle Bug or a Pat’s Stone look like they’re made out of toothpicks. If the movement you get from a rubberlegged fly is important in the first place, the legs on Big Jelly are akin to giving your fly the moves on the dance floor of Michael Jackson rather than those of Shaq O’Neal.
Still, I hesitate to make claims about any specific material, especially one you may not be able to find readily. (Joe got his legging material at our local fly shop. I don’t know what he’s going to do if he eventually runs out.) Because the truth is, the biggest reason Big Jelly ends up pinned to mouths of so many good trout is that Joe Kelly knows how to hunt fish with his favorite fly.
The first thing worth noting is that Joe often uses Big Jelly to catch fish on the swing, not as a dead-drifted nymph. He’ll pitch it upstream, allow it to sink a bit, and then lift all of his line off the water so that he’s tight to the fly as it sweeps downstream. It helps that Joe happens to be six-foot five. By the time he raises his rod hand overhead, with the rod tip nearly vertical, he’s got more than 15 feet of line in the air rather than lying on the surface, where currents can mess with his presentation. All of that line in the air also means that Joe is able to keep his fly from swinging hard across the current, an unnatural presentation that often prevents us from pulling fish off a far bank or from a holding lie on the other side of swifter water directly in front of us. These are all subtle manipulations. And Joe has a host of others, often employing several of them on a single cast. One of them, the Stony Creek Mend, named after a piece of water he used to fish as a kid in Michigan, involves repeated mends at the end of his swing, into which he feeds line, so that his fly reaches farther and farther downstream, often toward a logjam or overhanging branch or some other obstruction that prevents any sort of conventional cast. Eventually, the fly is off in the distance, swimming in some dark, hard-to-reach hole, those wiggly legs doing what all to entice a strike. I’ve seen that one work a time or two, I can tell you that.
My point here, however, is not to instruct the reader how to fish Joe Kelly’s favorite fly. Instead, these examples serve as evidence that the last thing Joe worries about is what he’s tied to the end of his line. He has absolute faith in Big Jelly, which leaves him free to go about hunting big fish in the many ways available to an experienced fly angler.
For Joe, like a lot of good anglers, it’s not about the fly. It probably has little to do with the fly’s legs, either. What matters most, instead, is the hunter at the other end of the line.
Materials
Hook: TMC 200R or similar, size 4 to 8
Thread: Black 8/0 or 6/0
Weight: .025-inch or .030-inch lead, about 15 wraps
Tail, legs, and antennae: Thinnest, limpest rubber you can find, black
Underbody: Black chenille or black yarn, small or medium
Body: Black rabbit fur mixed with peacock black Ice Dub
Tying Instructions
Step 1: Secure the hook in the vise. Start the thread directly behind the eye. Wind a layer of thread back to the middle of the hook shank. Cover the thread wraps with 10 to 15 wraps of lead, depending on the size of the fly and the thickness of the lead. Cover the lead wraps with wraps of thread, then build a small tapered dam at the aft end of the lead to help keep it from sliding.
Step 2: Strip off a long length of legging material; if you are tying more than one Big Jelly, strip off several pieces. Cut the lengths into 2-1/2-inch pieces. You’ll need four of these for each fly. For the tails and forward antennae, fold the pieces in half and secure with thread wraps, one piece at the aft end of the fly, the other just behind the hook eye. For legs, tie in the other two pieces on top of the lead in the thorax region, leaving space between each piece. Don’t fuss too much at this point with the length of these parts or their precise position. They can be moved when you wrap the dubbing and trimmed to length after the fly is constructed.
Step 3: To help reduce the amount of dubbing you need with this fly, Joe covers the entire abdomen with a layer of black chenille. Because I like to get a pronounced taper through the abdomen, I tie in chenille or yarn at the midpoint of the abdomen, wind it forward so that it covers the lead, then wind my thread back to the tail.
Step 4: For dubbing material, Joe mixes small doses of something brown or gray with the black rabbit fur to give texture and contrast to what would otherwise be a solid uniform color. My favorite additive is currently some chopped up peacock black Ice Dub by Hareline. A pinch will do. You’ll probably have to form three or four dubbing noodles by the time you make it all the way forward through this big fly. I try to taper the abdomen, then create a beefy thorax while positioning the legs just so.
Step 5: Create a tidy head and then whip finish under the root of the antennae. If you think it matters, you can even the length of the appendages with the judicious use of scissors. Also, if you think a more realistic fly is important, create a more pronounced thorax by pricking out dubbing fibers with your bodkin or teasing them out with a dubbing brush. Saturate your whip finish with lacquer or head cement, and you’re done.
