I’m not sure anybody needs another baitfish pattern. If you’re like most saltwater fly anglers, you learned to tie a Lefty’s Deceiver early on, and since then, you’ve been tweaking the pattern, or something quite like it, to approximate the bait you see, the flies used by others who catch fish, or to incorporate whatever other shades or materials that capture your fancy — choices that probably say more about your own temperament and sense of design than what you really need in order to catch fish that eat sardines, minnows, or other schooling munchkins you find in your neck of the sea.
How precise, really, does your imitation need to be? And does the pattern that looks so good, so realistic, so seductive to the angler necessarily translate into a fly that fools fish? Could it possibly be, in fact, that some f lies are too good — that a perfect copy of a flatiron herring means a fish will refuse it if the Monterey sardinas are around? That you want, instead, a generic pattern more like a Gold-Ribbed Hare’s Ear than you do a fly tied to represent the second week of the once-a-decade cicada hatch?
What we can be sure of is that should the fish you’re after never see your fly, if you’re unable to cast it well enough or far enough that it ends up in front of the fish you hope will strike, the pattern is pointless. I’d love to fish, say, a fly 16 or 20 inches long when big mullet are around. But I know for a fact I won’t be able to cast it any farther than I can toss an unsplit round of oak firewood, which means the fish would have to be within spitting distance for the fly to do me any good.
Or we’re trolling.
The first consideration, then, as far as I’m concerned, for all baitfish patterns is whether I think I can cast it well enough to put it where fish can find it. Good casters (I know this from watching them) can fish bigger flies; in my experience, however, it’s better to step down the size of my fly if I feel I can’t put a larger fly where I want it. All else equal, the size of the fly might matter, but if the fly’s not within range of my target, it’s probably not going to work, regardless of its appearance to me or the fish.
Another consideration for baitfish patterns, especially as they increase in size, is how to prevent them from fouling. Again, the surest solution is better casting: If you straighten your back cast and throw clean, consistent loops, the legs of which are parallel, evenly spaced throughout their length as the cast unfolds, your fly won’t foul. Meanwhile, back here on earth, where most of us struggle with wind and waves and bad habits accumulated over a lifetime of trying somehow to add just a few more feet to our heroic efforts, we’re often startled and amazed by the tangled mess we retrieve on the end of our tippets.
Some of this can be prevented by how we construct the fly, as well as the materials we choose to tie them. That said, you’d be well advised always to carry a small comb of some sort when casting baitfish patterns, especially when casting them in the surf, where often the highest demands are placed on our ability to throw long in challenging conditions. Casting from the deck of a panga, your feet well above the surface of the water, is one thing. It’s quite another thing altogether when you’re up to your belly button in waves, trying to double haul while gesticulating, like a man drowning, with your hands overhead.
So for a fly you can cast, that’s about the size of a lot of baitfish, and that resists fouling, consider Johnny King’s Kinky Muddler, a pattern that comes to me by way of my old friend Gary Bulla. I was headed north following weeks of whacking small roosterfish in Baja’s Pacific surf; Gary had just finished another season hosting anglers in La Ventana, south of La Paz, where he and his clients wrestle with more big roosters than fly fishers catch anywhere else in the world.
Those roosterfish Gary chases are not only big, but also a bit warier than the foolish inshore feeders I generally find. Gary and his panga captains see a lot more refusals than I ever have to endure. Tougher fish mean more refined patterns, although I still contend, from times I’ve fished with Bulla, that the reason he and certain other of his clients catch more or bigger roosters is that they present their casts quicker, farther, and with greater accuracy and split-second timing than those of us who fumble our way into a good fish now and then.
Still, I’m always eager to see what Gary and his clients are fishing these days. In fact, any time guides or Real Guys of any sort want to open their fly boxes for you, my advice is you take a close, hard look. There’s no better recommendation for a pattern than what anglers on the water, day after day, affix to their or their clients’ leaders. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.
That said, there’s little in the Kinky Muddler that we haven’t seen before. And if you’re anything like me, you won’t really go for the pattern until you tie a few examples for yourself, practicing the slightly different techniques for affixing materials to the hook, fooling with this and that color, fiddling with the profile you like best as you shape the head and body with your sharpest scissors. A must have baitfish pattern? I don’t think there really is such a thing. But you need a good one, and if you’ve already learned to tie a version of Lefty’s Deceiver, the Kinky Muddler is a good one to try next.
Note: You can find any number of online videos with Johnny King tying his Kinky Muddler simply by typing his name and the name of the fly into your web browser. You can also see Johnny King’s own article about creating and tying his Kinky Muddler in a 2015 online issue of Fly Fisherman magazine.
Materials
Hook: Owner Aki, size 2/0 to 4/0 or similar short-shanked saltwater hook, preferably forged
Thread: Danville Fine Monofilament
Undertail: White bucktail
Overtail: White saddle hackle steeped in coffee and tied tent style
Body: Top, mullet brown SF Blend or similar; bottom, white SF Blend or similar
Head: Body material trimmed to shape
Eyes: 3-D dome eyes
Tying Instructions
Step 1: Mount the hook in the vise and start the thread. Above the point of the hook, tie in a fairly sparse tail of white bucktail, about two or two and a half times the length of the hook shank. The trick here is to secure the bucktail without tugging too hard on the aft turns of thread, which would cause the hair to flare, rather than lie straight. Straight is what you want.
Step 2: For the tan baitfish found commonly in Baja and elsewhere, Bulla suggests soaking white saddle hackle in black coffee, the same stuff you drink in the morning. Excessive? You decide. Select three pairs of feathers, each pair from opposite sides of the hackle neck and of a similar size and length. Now tie in the feathers, one at a time, alternating side to side, positioning the feathers so that they cover the bucktail with a tent or gabled-roof effect while extending just past the aft ends of the bucktail. If you leave all of the webby junk toward the base of the feathers, rather than stripping it away beforehand, it will actually help hold the feathers at the angle you want.
Step 3: Trim the butt ends of the hackle feathers. Don’t worry about trying to make this portion of the fly neat and tidy, because it eventually will be covered with body material. Johnny King also recommends making a turn or two of thread under the root of the tail, which can help keep the feathers positioned correctly and possibly prevent them from fouling.
Step 4: For the body of the fly, use SF Blend or any of countless other synthetic materials of the sort now on the market, white for the bottom or belly of the fly, color on top. Build the body with repeated “Vs”: that is, take a fairly sparse tuft of fibers, secure it in front of the tail with one end of the fibers angled back toward the tail, then fold the forward-facing material, catch it under a thread wrap, and make it also point aft, but on the other side of the hook — as though you were creating a forward-facing arrow point. Now turn the fly upside down and repeat the same process with the belly material. (A rotary vise is clearly helpful for this step.)
Step 5: Repeat the V or arrow-point step, alternating top and bottom, until you begin to approach the hook eye. Just short of the eye, tie in a final tuft of fibers along both the top and bottom of the fly, pull all the fibers back, and hold everything in place, pointed aft, with a dam of thread wraps.
Step 6: Whip finish several times, because the mono thread has a tendency to cascade off the front of a hook eye. Now the fun part. You’ve got a mess of fibers; your goal is to trim the body into something that resembles the profile of a baitfish while also trying mold the body so it flows into the tail. My Kinky Muddlers often end up looking more like kangaroo rats than baitfish, a resemblance I trust won’t bother the roosterfish I find.
