We’ll get to flies in a moment. First, some background.
The idea of a design spiral comes from the boat designer and boat builder Paul Gartside. Gartside, from Canada via England, refers to the idea as the practice of looking back at his older boats and applying their characteristics to the new design on his drafting board. (Yes, drafting board, not a computer screen.) Over time, as Gartside creates designs for similar types of boats, say, cutters or pulling boats, he’s able to plug in existing numbers as a starting point for a new design, rather than calculating those numbers from scratch. Based on the known performance of previous hulls, he can adjust the characteristics of the new design to achieve the aims he’s after.
It’s a fairly simple idea: use past work to inform the new. On a broader scale, Gartside’s design spiral includes a respect for and understanding of traditional boats from his childhood in Cornwall, plus the Northwest work boats and pleasure boats designed by the prolific Bill Garden, whom Gartside worked for early in his career. Now, more than thirty years later, Gartside remains loyal to what might best be described as a timeless aesthetic; many of his boats still look as if they should be leaving the quay at Falmouth and making for the English Channel.
I bring up this notion of the design spiral as a way of introducing this column’s featured fly, the Design Spiral Double. Each year, I produce a fresh batch of waking Muddlers, a type of fly I’ve written about often and one I turn to frequently during the early reach of every steelhead season. Some waking Muddlers I tie new; others I recycle, refurbishing them to whatever new standard I’ve come up with in response to books and articles I’ve read, new or rediscovered materials, and what’s worked for me or hasn’t worked in the past.
But this year, determined more than ever to explore every aspect I can about the almost magical efficacy of waking steelhead flies, I’ve added something new to the arsenal — Muddlers tied on double hooks.
Doubles?
I don’t want to start any arguments. But if we’re going to talk about doubles, flies tied on hooks that look like two hooks aligned side by side, one canted approximately forty-five degrees to the other, strong opinions both for and against will inevitably arise. The discussion includes, but is in no way limited to the question of a fly’s fish-hooking abilities, its capacity to stay hooked while fighting a fish, whether one fly is more harmful to a fish than the other, how a fly rides in the water, and the relative dangers of singles and doubles to anglers themselves.
My default answer to any of this is to know the regulations wherever you fish. “Single” means just that. But doubles can be barbless — or have their barbs smashed down — and on some rivers, especially where gear fishing is allowed, your doubles, barbless or otherwise, are just as legal as fishing two flies at once.
Still, a discussion about doubles leaves legal turf quickly and can land you in an argument faster than your opinions about politics, technology, or how to educate the youth of America today. It can be almost as bad as talking about dogs on trout streams. No matter that doubles are a long-held tradition throughout the British Isles, where the ethics of fly fishing are most deeply rooted, and in Atlantic salmon camps on both sides of the pond. My buddy Jeff Cottrell, who gave me my first doubles, began tying them while guiding for sea-run browns in Tierra del Fuego on the Rio Grande. This was back when most of the double-handed rods seen on the river were owned by the Brits, who could never stop joking, it seems, about the Yanks and their silly little one-handers.
I guess they were right about that, too. Because say what you might about doubles, nothing else swings on a tight line quite like them, and their work as waking flies is unique. I won’t go so far as to contend that a double is better than a single. My point is simply that if you wish to explore the full range of waking presentations for steelhead, and maybe even tight-line downstream presentations of any kind, you would be smart to check out how doubles do the job in lies not necessarily suited for your light-wire or traditionally dressed singles.
That’s your design spiral. Take a look at the past, both what’s come before you and what you’ve done yourself during your own career. I think most fly tyers do this, to some degree, intuitively. Most of us are inveterate tinkers, searching incessantly for ways to improve patterns, even ones we feel work as well as they possibly can in the specific situations for which we tie them. Those of us who believe it’s almost never the fly that catches the fish still feel it’s worth doing everything we can to nudge the odds our way.
And maybe more so in steelheading than any other sort of fly fishing. Outside of egg patterns and stonefly nymphs, little about steelhead flies points to any actual life form — or at least our perception of life in the natural world. Nearly all steelhead flies are part of a design spiral, approximations of patterns that have worked in the past, coupled with our own ideas of features we hope will improve the fly.
Hence, the Design Spiral Double, my latest in a long line of Muddlers. To review: I came to steelheading in the wake of Bill McMillan’s seminal work, Dry Line Steelhead, which advocated the use of floating lines and surface patterns at a time when most steelheading was done with sinking lines (and one-handed rods) in the belief that “steelhead are uninclined to move from river depths.” Like McMillan, I caught my first steelhead on the surface using a traditional Muddler Minnow, and I soon started tying McMillan’s Steelhead Caddis, a pared-down, sparsely dressed Muddler that McMillan relied on, in various colors, from May through October and sometimes even during warm spells in the winter. I learned the basics of a variety of surface presentations with the Steelhead Caddis. But it wasn’t until I created my own waking Muddler, replacing the dubbed body of the Steelhead Caddis with floss and tinsel and eliminating entirely the mottled turkey wing, that I began to consider that there might be truth to McMillan’s claim (one made by Roderick Haig-Brown, as well) that given water temperatures common in the late summer and fall, surface methods will move more steelhead per hour of casting time than any other single level of presentation.
I’ve been fiddling with my waking Muddlers ever since. Some years I believe in them more than others. This year, when I arrived home after spending another summer in my beach yawl, Madrina, on Magdalena Bay, I took a morning off from end-of-season boat maintenance and pedaled my bike to a favorite run. I tied on a Green Butt Muddler, a later pattern to come out of my own Muddler design spiral. In the heart of the run, a big fish came up and ate.
A really big fish.
I’m still astonished when it happens. For some reason, I often believe that surface patterns generally move smaller, feistier steelhead — not a 35-inch wild buck that’s clearly closer to 15 pounds than 12.
Back at the tying bench, I sorted through a pile of waking Muddlers from previous seasons. Some I stripped completely down to the bare hook before retying; on others, I simply replaced the spun deer hair head and collar. After sifting through the whole lineup, I spiraled back to both my earliest and latest Muddlers and came up with a new pattern, as of yet unnamed, a pretty little thing with a red floss abdomen and a thorax of peacock herl dyed red.
The next morning, on a fresh stretch of river, none of these waking Muddlers — neither the revitalized nor the new — touched a fish. How could they refuse?
Then I turned to my doubles.
That evening, while steelhead baked in the oven, I called Jeff Cottrell. When I told him I rose a fish on a waking double, he was as delighted as if I had announced I had a new girlfriend.
“Things move the water, don’t they.”
Two states away, I could still see Jeff smiling while shaking his head.
“I couldn’t believe it,” I said. “Came out of nowhere and ate it.”
“It’s a miracle every time.”
Materials
Hook: Wilson 02 Double, Daiichi D7131, or similar, size 6 to 8
Thread: Black 8/0 Uni-Thread
Tail: Natural deer hair
Abdomen: Large gold Mylar tinsel
Rib: Extra small silver oval tinsel
Thorax: Peacock herl
Wing: Squirrel tail dyed green
Overwing (optional): Peacock Krystal Flash, or other bit of flash
Head/Collar: Sparse deer hair spun and trimmed, with a dozen or two strands left straying back.
Tying Instructions
Step 1: Install the hook in the vise. The hook shown in the photos is the Daiichi D7131, heavier than the Wilson 02. Most modern vises can be swung forward and aft as well as rotated so that your double hook is positioned appropriately, just as it will ride in the water.
Step 2: Before tying in the tail, wind the thread all the way back to the bend of the hook, then forward so that the thread hangs even with the points of the hook. Tie in a short tail of about half a dozen deer hair tips, setting the tail on top of the thread wraps that extend back to the bend of the hook so that your tail doesn’t slip down between the hook bends.
Step 3: Just forward of the root of the tail, first tie in a four-inch length of Mylar tinsel and then tie in a four-inch length of oval tinsel. Advance the thread so that it’s about one-third of the shank back from the hook eye. Wind the Mylar forward, secure it, and clip the excess. Then wind the oval tinsel rib in the opposite direction, making four to six evenly spaced wraps before securing and clipping the excess.
Step 4: Create a dubbing loop, wax the legs of it, and slip in a pair of peacock herls. Spin the loop to create a tight, dense rope of peacock herl. Wind the rope to create a pronounced peacock herl thorax.
Step 5: Clean and stack a small tuft of squirrel tail. Tie the tuft as a wing directly in front of the peacock herl thorax. The thorax will help the wing stand proud.
Step 6: For the optional overwing, tie in two to four strands of Krystal Flash on top of the wing. I’ve experimented with other materials. None of them — including the Krystal Flash — has offered conclusive evidence that it matters.
Step 7: Selecting and spinning deer hair for these and other sparsely dressed Muddlers is the skill you want to master. It’s the essence of this genre of waking fly. At times, I think the rest of the dressing is inconsequential, a thought that does nothing to keep me from trying to improve these patterns.
For all of your waking Muddlers, clean and stack a tuft of soft deer hair. Not too much — you’re not trying to tie a skater. In fact, on a slack line, this is a fly that will sink. Lay the tuft of deer hair on top of the hook; take two very loose wraps around the deer hair just back from the hook eye. Slowly tighten the thread, encouraging the deer hair to spin around the hook shank. If you don’t get an even distribution of hair around the hook, gently loosen tension on the thread and tighten again. Then make several tight wraps through the flared ends of the deer hair while working the thread forward. Finally, force back all of the butt ends of the hair and hold them back with thread wraps and your whip finish. Trim the butt ends and most of the hair that extends back along the rest of the fly to form a small, sparse Muddler head. Leave just enough stray hairs to enclose the fly. I like the stray hairs to extend anywhere from the point to the bend of the hook. Lacquer the thread wraps at the head.
