At the Vise: Blowfly Humpy

I’ve always called them “attractor patterns.” Dave Hughes, on the other hand, in his monumental reference book, Trout Flies, refers to them as “searching dries,” a phrase with its own quiet resonance, suggestive of something on the end of your line with its own private volition, looking for fish the same way a pointer scurries through brush trying to find quail.

The idea, of course, is a fly you cast into swift or textured water when nothing specific has suggested a pattern that looks anything like the insects on which trout normally feed. You know the standards: Wulffs, Humpys, Trudes, the Bucktail Caddis. An Adams, no doubt, also fits the bill — a pattern that looks buggy enough to fish anywhere without attempting to home in on the exactitudes of any specific hatch.

In fact, there are many trout anglers who f ill their boxes with nothing but these old standards, varying them only by size and color, believing, rightfully so, that the most important element in all fly fishing, even fishing for trout, is presenting the fly correctly — that is, in a manner that looks real, or real enough that a trout has no reason not to eat it.

What’s interesting to me about these so-called attractor patterns or searching dries is that we fish them believing they don’t look like anything real. The Royal Wulff — or Royal Coachman, or Royal or Coachman Trude — we all agree, approximates nothing in the natural world, and yet countless anglers have experienced the efficacy of these Christmas-tree-colored patterns in their trouting careers. Dave Hughes’s favored Beetle Bug would also fit in this category of blatantly unnatural flies. Although these patterns catch lots of fish, the shared opinion is that they work because their bold, bright bodies induce or shock or startle a trout into striking in the same way, say, a shiny Super Duper or small Mepps Spinner can work for spin fishers. I’m not sure I entirely agree. A concept that isn’t discussed much is that trout have to see the fly in the first place.

In swift or broken water, that might be the most important element of all, or at least as important as a natural drift. The bright, contrasting colors of the Royal family of flies, especially when offset against the light-reflecting or UV-rich properties of peacock herl, might well offer trout a target that would go unnoticed in a “natural” or more realistic pattern. If you don’t believe me, try tying and fishing a Royal Adams, a Royal Stimulator, or the more conventional Royal Humpy.

Humpys, of course, open up a range of new questions as to how or why an attractor pattern or searching dry works. Before offering my own dubious opinions, we should review Hughes’s own criteria for successful examples of the genre: “flotation, visibility to the angler, and bugginess in the eyes of the trout.” (Hughes, you should note, says nothing about my notion of visibility to the trout.) Humpys float, that’s for sure, and although all but the Royal Humpy lack the white wing that makes many standard attractor patterns or searching dries visible to the angler, a Humpy’s high-profile ride atop the water is often enough to keep it easily in view.

But what about bugginess? What, in fact, does a Humpy look like? A big fan of Humpys in all colors and sizes, I contend they meet Hughes’s bugginess criterion by way of the wide, oblong body that sits tight or flush to the surface, the way terrestrials would appear to a trout. I still think a lime green Humpy is the best pattern going when young or immature grasshoppers are around, while a yellow Humpy often works for the larger hopper stages. But the real efficacy of Humpys in general may well be the way in which they suggest, from a trout’s point of view, any sort of beetle that drops into the water, a food source often overlooked by anglers keyed into what comes out of river or stream, not what falls into it from above. But does it really matter why a Humpy works so well? And can anyone claim with any certainty why a trout eats one attractor pattern or searching dry and not another? I do know this: My Humpys get eaten because they’re knotted so often to the end of my tippet, the one reason, we can all agree, why any fly works.


Which brings me to the Blowfly Humpy.

I fell for the pattern after I plucked it out of my host’s box in one of those places where the trout all seem to look up, waiting for a big morsel of nutrition to come their way. It looked like it would float plenty well, and if nothing else, I suspected I could see it on the water, despite the fact that at that moment the wind was blowing 25 to 30 knots, gusting to 40.

That same afternoon, I moved two big trout with the Blowfly. Neither fish ate. The first one came to it unseen, exploding in a riff le as though someone had detonated a small improvised device. The second trout appeared under the fly, let it pass, then turned suddenly, headed downstream, pivoted, and rose, ever so slowly, until the fly all but touched its nose. The final refusal did nothing to discourage me — an attitude of optimism that proved auspicious in the days that followed.

The conventional thinking is that the Blowfly you fish with for trout represents the blowfly that infests dead animals, similar to other “filth flies” such as the bottle fly and common house fly. I’ll refrain from a discussion about whether the Blowfly Humpy works well as a searching dry because it represents these common pests or if, on the other hand, it simply suggests something a trout might like to eat. I will remind the reader, however, as mentioned earlier, that all Humpys could well look like beetles to trout, pointing out, as well, that the Blowfly Humpy shares many of the qualities of the small beetle patterns I fished last year in spring creeks where I never saw any beetles, but the trout acted recklessly whenever I managed to drop one of these flies appropriately on the water.

So it goes with attractor patterns or searching dries: the best ones may work because they don’t look like anything specific, suggesting, instead, a broad range of possible food items a trout is happy to eat. A longtime observer of steelhead eating surface flies, flies that seem to look like nothing in the natural world, I never stray far from the idea that trout, like many wild animals, may also just be curious — that they’re hard-wired somehow to investigate the new or unusual, as long as there’s nothing about the fly that threatens them or forces them to refuse the fly when they would otherwise eat.

We’re advised, of course, against trying to get inside a trout’s head, of anthropomorphizing them in an attempt to understand their behaviors. I wouldn’t be too quick to swallow that advice whole hog. Perhaps the best part of fishing with a pattern like the Blowfly Humpy is the chance to watch the trout rise — its body language, if you will, when it decides whether or not to eat. We don’t see that when we’re fishing far below the surface with, say, a Two-Bit Hooker. Even if we can understand the behavior of trout only through the narrow lens of our own minds, it may well be in our best interest to watch what’s revealed about this complex and probably unimaginable decision-making process every chance we get. After all, the trout have been at it a lot longer than we have.

Materials

Hook: Standard dry fly, size 10 to 16

Thread: Black UNI 8/0, or similar

Wings: White calf body hair, upright and divided

Tail: Moose body hair

Body: Peacock/orange UNI-Mylar tinsel (#14), peacock side showing

Shellback: Deer body hair dyed black

Hackle: Rooster or saddle dyed black

Tying Instructions

Step 1: Mount the hook in the vise and lay down a base of thread wraps along the forward half of the shank. Clip a tuft of calf body hair from the hide. Clean and stack the hair. Measure the wing to just over the length of the hook shank. Tie in the wing hair, tips pointing forward, about one-quarter of the hook shank aft of the hook eye. Trim the excess wing butts on a slant to give a tapered underbody to the fly.

STEP 1
STEP 1

Step 2: With your fingers, tilt the wing upright. Use thread wraps as a dam ahead of the base to get the wing to stand vertically. Divide the wing in half and use X wraps or figure-eight wraps and other judicious turns of thread to create a pair of split, upright wings. Don’t worry excessively about how vertically the wings stand now. You will be able to perform final adjustments when you eventually wind your hackle behind and ahead of the wings.

STEP 2
STEP 2

Step 3: Cover the trimmed butts of the wing calf hair with an even layer of thread wraps. Clip a tuft of moose body hair, clean, and stack. Measure the tail the length of the hook shank. Tie in the tail just forward of the start of the hook bend. Wind the thread forward to the butt of the wings and trim the tail butts to create an even underbody.

STEP 3
STEP 3

Step 4: Tie in a length of Mylar with the side you eventually want to see facing away from you. Now clip a tuft of deer hair, clean away the short hairs and underfur, and stack it. Pinch the hair by the butts in your off hand and trim the butts cleanly, close to your fingers. With the hair tips pointing aft, tie in the hair near the midpoint of the hook shank. Cover the hair back to the base of the tail, then wind forward toward the wing, continuing to create an even underbody. Now cover the underbody with overlapping turns of Mylar. Tie off the Mylar ahead of the midpoint and trim the excess.

STEP 4
STEP 4

Step 5: Pull the deer hair shellback forward with a slight twist to compact it and lash it firmly at about the same point you tied in the shellback butts. Trim the excess shellback hair. You should now have some space behind the wing for the rear hackle, as well as space in front of the wing for several turns of forward hackle.

STEP 5
STEP 5

Step 6: Select a long saddle hackle feather or pair of feathers from a rooster cape with fibers about one and a half times the width of the hook gap or slightly shorter than the height of the wing. Lash the stem of the hackle or hackles aft of the wing with the tips of the feather pointing toward the back of the f ly. Advance the thread to just behind the hook eye. Wind the hackle forward, with several turns behind the wing and several more forward. Tie off behind the eye of the hook, clip the excess, and whip finish. Saturate the final thread wraps with lacquer or your favorite head cement. (For the picture of step 6, see the completed fly at the top of the post.)

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