Here’s how it works. Come late June through early July, about the same time the juvenile salmonids are heading downstream, a window opens onto an annual drama seen only by those who find themselves on the river during the earliest or latest hour of light. You run your boat to your favorite bass shoal, the same reach of basalt gravels where, weeks ago, the big females dug their nests and, later, the puckish males, ranging hither and yon, defended them. Suddenly, the river comes alive. In all directions, the water fills with the dimpling rises of tiny fish, peamouths and pikeminnows, prickling the surface so that it seems, absurdly, the dusky skies have turned to rain. As eyes adjust, you begin to see the fish themselves, infinite numbers popcorning into view, as many as not lifting entirely free of the water, where they hover, momentarily, as if clowns, midair, above a landscape paved in old jokes.
Minnows, gnats, midges. You can imagine entire constellations of bugs exploding at the surface as one, yet another attempt to overwhelm the terrible odds stacked in the emptiness that surrounds them. The minnows — and probably, here and there, clusters of salmon smolts, as well — feast in numbers so vast they seem capable of aerating the river itself, the tiny fish hurling themselves at the abundant, but minute feed — a kind of reckless chemistry that makes light of any meaning ascribed to life.
Then something new bursts onto the stage. Or maybe it’s more of the same. There . . . and there . . . and over there . . . big fish lunge at the surface, revealing themselves as startling echoes of displaced water vibrating amid the feed. In your boat, profanities are voiced, rods unleashed. And even in the dawn or descending light, you can see the poppers winging like bats beneath the unlit sky, back and forth and back and forth until someone lets one fly.
There is perhaps no keener moment of anticipation in angling than the instant a popper touches down. Time expands; the world grows still. It’s generally best to wait a beat, do nothing until feeding resumes. But on the first cast? Pop, pop, goes the popper — and pop, pop once more.
Like dry flies and waking steelhead patterns, poppers are viewed by many modern anglers as relics of a distant past, some imagined far-gone era when fish, apparently, were so plentiful and dumb that you could catch them on anything. I hold a host of theories, mostly unfounded, why the surface of a river or lake or sea is often the last place anglers now their flies, but I think the most important reason is that many fly anglers today think of fishing as a numbers game — that the more fish you catch, the better the fishing and, by extension, the better angler you are.
Nothing to me seems farther from the truth. I like to catch fish as much as the next guy, but the best days are nearly always about a fish or two, and more times than not, what makes certain fish memorable is the interesting ways we go about fooling them.
That’s kind of the point. Take those bass, the big fish that show up in low light amid the shoals of feeding minnows. Smallmouths, these bass have naturalized to such an extent that in many streams they’re common, and my neighborhood river offers up opportunities where 50-fish days won’t get you more than a shrug of a shoulder and a so-what roll of the eyes.
So why does any local smallmouth angler bother waking up in the black of night or fishing right up to dark at the end of a long summer day?
In fact, you don’t — not unless it still means something to you to see a popper the size of a warbler get blasted by a bait-busting bass.
Joe Warren knows as much as anyone about the smallmouth bass fishery. His new DVD, Smallmouth Fly Tactics, tells you what you need to know if you haven’t yet started enjoying this often underexploited fishery. For decades now, smallmouths have been naturalizing in rivers and lakes throughout the West, and as fly anglers grew more and more accustomed to fishing for nonsalmonid species, they soon recognized that you could do a lot worse in life than spend time each year casting for these aggressive game fish. Smallmouths may lack the glamour of steelhead or the elegant surroundings of native trout, but you can find them in neighborhood waters practically wherever you live, which may well prove the difference between getting out and wetting a line or not going fishing at all.
A tech at a federal fisheries research lab, Joe approaches fly fishing with the kind of pragmatism you often see in anglers who fish both commercially and for sport. When I met him, we shared the same publisher; Joe was promoting his book about fly tying with glass beads. Now, nearly 20 years later, when Joe stops by The Tyers’ Roost, he immediately points to his number-one go-to bass fly, his Glass Bead Bugger, a fly with nearly as many species to its credit as the Clouser Minnow and certainly with no fewer characteristics that make it fish as much like a jig as it does a fly.
Joe makes no such distinctions when creating at his vise what he eventually attaches to the end of his line. Depth, he believes, is the most important aspect of fly fishing, and if you’re not presenting your fly at the depth the fish are holding, you’re wasting time. Along with the attributes of dense shooting heads, Joe discovered a long while ago that nothing sinks quite like a hook strung with glass beads. He has glass bead patterns for nearly any traditional fly you can think of and lots of bead patterns that reflect ideas all his own. No doubt Joe Warren is a rare breed of genuine innovator tying flies today, so unlike the rest of us, who recycle old ideas into patterns we devise for problems and circumstances we find in our own particular waters.
Still, if Joe Warren has built his reputation on flies that get deep, why invite him to The Roost to show-off his lineup of poppers?
The answer is pretty simple: Sometimes the best “depth” for smallmouth bass is right on the surface, and when that happens, there’s no better place for your fly to be. And, anyway, let’s face it: it doesn’t get any better than that.
I’m a little surprised, however, when Joe shows me his smallmouth bass poppers. Made from wine corks? The idea makes perfect sense, of course, and there’s a utilitarian aspect to this kind of lure making that’s reflected in Joe’s own fishing. Still, all the years I’ve known him, I’ve always thought of Joe as a sober family man. I know he likes his beer; he has the build to show it. But someone’s got to be drinking more than the local suds for all those wine cork poppers to be in Joe’s bass box.
Yet who am I to question anybody about his habits? And the more we talk, each of us enjoying a couple of pints of local ales, the more I realize that this whole popper thing is out at the edges of Joe Warren’s usual bass-fishing game plan. It’s a crazy call, really, in waters where, during banker’s hours, you can rack up those 50-fish days. It’s the type of fishing, in fact, that makes no sense at all — a kind of debauchery, which sort of explains, in a funny way, where anybody’s head must be, casting poppers made out of wine corks on the river at the edge of night.
Materials
Hook: Mustad 79580, size 2
Hook eye (for larger poppers): front half of 45-millimeter double Waddington shank
Thread: Danville 6/0
Body: Wine cork, shaped and painted
Eyes: Flat adhesive eyes
Legs: Medium round rubber
Tag: Marabou blood plumes
Tail: Saddle hackle
Rump collar: Marabou
Tying Instructions
Poppers are not so much “tied” as they are assembled. Between each step — especially the early steps, during which the popper body is created — there’s a waiting period. It’s more efficient, therefore, to build a bunch of poppers — anywhere from six to a dozen — at a time.
Step 1: To form the body, take a hacksaw blade or Japanese razor saw and cut the wine cork to approximate length. Use a large drill bit to hollow out the forward end of the cork. Now drill a small hole lengthwise through the center of the cork. Run a long, slender bolt through the hole, tighten a washer and nut to hold the cork securely, and then hold the bolt in the chuck of an electric drill. Clamp the drill to a work bench; use another clamp to pull the trigger. With the cork spinning, you can now shape it as though it were on a lathe. Begin shaping with a coarse wood rasp, then change to strips of sandpaper from a belt sander or sandpaper affixed to a block.
Step 2: Fill the drilled hole with a wooden dowel or a matchstick covered in epoxy or waterproof wood glue. Flatten one side of the popper body with a sanding block.
Step 3: To hold the hook, cut a lengthwise slot down the center of the flattened side. If your body isn’t too long, you can set a hook in the slot and epoxy it in place. For longer poppers, cut a Waddington shank in half and epoxy the appropriate portion in place to create the forward eye of the popper hook. For the Mustad hook itself, you can either cut out room in the cork to bury the eye or clip off the eye before epoxying the shank of the hook into the slot. While you are into the epoxy, “fair” what’s now the bottom of the popper, as well as any divots, tears, or other imperfections in the cork. (The verb “to fair” is a traditional boatbuilding term used to describe the process of creating a smooth, even, continuous, or fair curve. Sight along the length of a boat’s gunwale, the rail or bottom of surfboard, or a bent fly rod, and the curve should be fair.)
Step 4: Give your popper body a final sanding with 220-grit paper. Mask off the exposed hook and hook eye. Seal the body with your favorite white spray paint, adding coats as necessary to get uniform coverage.
Step 5: Detail the body with model airplane paint, fingernail polish, or whatever other durable detail paint you can find. For eyes, I use the inexpensive paper adhesive sort. You may find that the detail paint causes the white base coat to blister or wrinkle or otherwise misbehave. Don’t sweat it; your clear top coat will smooth it all out. For the final coats, use either clear nail polish or epoxy. Let the bodies dry overnight.
Step 6: For legs, drill a pair of small holes crossways through the popper body. Slip a length of fine copper wire through a hole. Create a loop in the wire. Feed the end of the rubberleg material through the wire loop and pull loop and leg material both through the hole in the body. Clip the rubberleg material so that you now have a pair of legs running through the body. Repeat the operation for the other hole. Secure the legs with clear nail polish or crazy glue or some similar material dripped into the holes through the body.
Step 7: Finally, get out your bobbin and tying materials. Secure the bend of the popper hook in your vise. Start your thread directly behind the rump of the popper body. Clip the even tips of the blood plumes at the top of a marabou feather and secure them near the middle of the exposed hook shank.
Step 8: Tie in two or three saddle hackles along each side of the hook shank. Position the feathers so they curve out away from the hook shank.
Step 9: In front of the secured stems of the saddle hackle, tie in a single marabou feather by its delicate tip. With the thread now directly behind the rump of the popper body, make two or three turns of the marabou feather as if winding any hackle feather. Stroke the feathers away from the rump and secure the stem of the feather with thread wraps. Clip the excess feather. Secure the thread with a whip finish or a bunch of Half Hitches taken around the entire popper portion and legs of the fly.
