We had seen the mullet when we first walked up the beach as we were stalking a fringe of rolling shore break. A long sandbar extended perpendicular from shore. A confusion of chop and colliding currents, waves spasming this way and that, marked the boundary of the wide boca between two islands and what felt like beaches exposed to the open Pacific. The small school of mullet hovered in the deep hole on the windward edge of the sandbar. Current and rips had carved out what was surely a sweet spot, an invitation to a long line hauled against a heavy head, launching the fly into the mystic.
Then they were gone. Joe and I scoured the hole with casts angled into the light midmorning wind. I tried wading out onto the sandbar until I was belly deep, tangled with the crisscrossed waves. Joe thought he might have seen the sparks of a small roosterfish. When nothing more showed, we ventured farther out along the open shore, searching for the rare confluence of waves and currents — and God knows what else — that translates into prime surf-fishing water.
The tide was dead low by the time we returned to the mullet hole. Joe passed the sandbar and continued along the bend of the beach, which soon transformed into the edge of the boca, more of a tidal channel than the rough-and-tumble open shore. I hung back. I approached the hole a cast and two steps at a time, much like the rhythm of steelheading, sliding closer and closer toward the wavy contours and emerald hollows at the heart of the hole, all the while thinking, Damn, this is good water.
Then a fish was on and I was losing line. I hollered Joe’s way. I suffered the backing knot rattling through the guides, a knot I certainly hadn’t checked in a while. Then it was just between me and a heavy fish, a halibut, the affirmation, once more, that life is good, despite what so many others claim.
The telling moment saw a foot-long mullet, fresh enough to swim, disgorged from the big halibut’s toothy mouth. In the tussle for photos and weighing the beast, we watched two more full-sized mullet, in decreasing degrees of freshness, expelled, as well. With three of us in camp and a panga arriving the next morning to ferry us back to where we could get ice, we chose to kill our catch — not an easy decision, ending the life of a big predator, top dog in a deep hole in the Baja surf.
Mullet were the prey, but the challenge of flies tied to represent or suggest bait the size of a mullet makes me hesitant to offer solutions. First, you have to figure out how to construct a giant fly, a particular challenge for traditional anglers practiced in tying flies to catch trout the size, on average, of the bait they now want to imitate. Then you have to be able to cast the darn thing. Midwest muskie fly fishers deal with these issues, too. John Gierach shared some photos with me after he first got serious about muskie fishing, and I was startled to see what looked like somebody’s hairpiece dangling from the mouth of a fish held proudly for the camera.
Big flies, of course, catch big fish. The only evidence I’ve ever seen of a fly-caught halibut from the surf anywhere near the size of the recent mullet belcher was a photo supplied some 30 years ago by my father, who claimed the fish went 40 pounds. I still have the fly; it’s a crude, double-hooked concoction, as sophisticated as a bath toy. The real question is what possessed my father to try casting such a thing in the first place. For the record, my halibut bottomed out Joe’s 15-kilo handheld scale. I’ve tried to compare the two fish from photos. Sometimes I give my father’s fish the nod because of the dimensions of its outline, while at other times, mine looks heavier because of the cross-sectional thickness, its mottled green-and-brown side raised as if an enormous loaf of freshly baked bread.
I got some fresh ideas about tying big flies for the surf from Jeff deBrown, the experienced guide out of the Cape region of southern Baja. DeBrown chases, among other things, big roosterfish — another mullet lover — along the beaches near Los Barriles, the popular gringo fishing and wind-sport destination, little more than a place to launch a panga just 25 or 30 years ago. I ran into deBrown in Puerto López Mateos along Magdalena Bay. He was putting clients onto striped marlin, teasing the fish into casting range behind a dual-engine cat boat before his captain shifted into neutral, giving anglers repeated shots at what, for most of us, would be fish of a lifetime.
I had spent the afternoon tying flies at a table in the Whale’s Tale Inn, Bob and Diana Hoyt’s bar and recently opened hotel. I finished tidying up materials from my saltwater travel kit as deBrown walked in, a bundle of rods in hand. He asked to see what I’d been tying. Later that evening, seated at the bar,
I studied the contents of a yellow Pelican Storm Case — a box of deBrown’s beach flies. As is usually the case, I was struck by how much more elaborate and refined the flies in a guide’s stash are than the flies are in mine. DeBrown showed off a current shrimp pattern that would not have spent but seconds in the water of Mag Bay’s endless mangrove esteros without getting eaten. He had other flies that seemed models of efficiency and effect, fresh approaches to the problem of presenting bold baitfish profiles in the surf in ways I had never imagined.
But it was his big roosterfish flies that really grabbed my attention. He kept taking them out, one after the other, stroking back the extravagantly long fibers, aligning things just so — and then complaining, as he repositioned the fly in the box, that it was too small, that each one was a third undersize because it had been “chewed on.”
How do you create a big fly? DeBrown mentioned “brushes.” Really? I’ve described the use of spinning blocks and dubbing brushes in an earlier column. Readers also know I’m a big fan of using dubbing loops for effects that I don’t feel you can create with other dubbing techniques. But until I saw deBrown’s big beach flies, I had never considered dubbing brushes for my own saltwater patterns.
That’s another aspect to this tale — an old dog can learn a new trick. A bigger lesson, perhaps, is the intrigue and delight of tying new flies with the limited supplies you carry while traveling. It’s not easy. You know you could do a better job if you just had this and that from your vast store of materials back home. But you don’t. Some anglers find this problem so daunting that they simply don’t attempt tying while on the road. I encourage you to reject this impulse. Very rarely is space so limited that you can’t carry some sort of small tying kit: tools, hooks, a smattering of materials specific to the type of fly you may end up tying.
The real challenge is to get over our incessant need to create flies as good as the ones we tie at home. It’s just not going to happen. Still, the constraints you face can prove the very thing that stimulates a fresh idea, a new way of using old materials, the invention of a technique you would have never tried with your arsenal of tools on your tying bench at home.
The dubbing brush for My Mullet, for example. The obvious way to create a dubbing brush is the use of some sort of block. You can find all sorts of groovy or even DIY dubbing blocks demonstrated online. But because I had never considered a dubbing brush for my saltwater flies, a dubbing block — or even a dubbing loop tool — was the last thing I had thought to include in my minimalist saltwater travel kit.
Silly me. Not next time.
Materials
Hook: Owner Aki, or similar, size 3/0 to 6/0
Thread: Salmon Danville 140 denier, or similar
Tail: Tan Slinky Fiber, or similar
Tail Topping: Olive Hareline Saltwater Yak Hair, or similar, followed by olive Enrico Puglisi Fibers, or similar
Body, aft: Silverback Slinky Fibers spun into a dubbing brush
Body, forward: Peacock Steve Farrar Flash Blend, spun into dubbing brush
Head: Thread covered in five-minute epoxy
Tying Instructions
Step 1: Secure the hook in the vise and start the thread. I can’t recommend a hook more highly than the Owner Aki — forged, sharp, a multi-edged point. I knot on a fly tied on an Owner Aki and I think, “At least that won’t fail.”
Step 2: Tie in a tail as long as the material you are working with allows. Eight or nine inches seems about right. Just forward of the bend of the hook, attach the fibers to the shank in the middle of their length. Secure firmly, then fold the tips aft and continue to secure with tight wraps. Trim the tail tips to create a somewhat tapered profile.
Step 3: Add the two-part tail topping. Start with a thin tuft of yak hair, followed by the more supple Enrico Puglisi fibers. Either one of the materials by itself would also be sufficient.
Step 4: If you haven’t already developed a taste for dubbing loops and dubbing brushes, now’s your chance. Create your loop just forward of the root of the tail. The loop itself should be four or five inches long. From the loop, hang a dubbing-loop tool or some other weighted device. Traveling without all of my tools, I secure a long hook in a pair of needle-nose pliers, held shut with a rubber band, and hang the hook from the loop. Clip fibers about an inch and a half long for your dubbing brush. Separate the legs of the loop and between them begin sliding in a sparse layer of fibers, perpendicular to the legs of the loop, starting from the bottom and working your way up. It’s easy to use too many fibers, which end up creating a bulky, hard-to-manipulate dubbing brush. Once the fibers are in place, spin the dubbing loop tool. This is where a weighted tool, even one improvised, works better than, say, just a pair of hackle pliers. As the loop spins, the legs twist, securing the fibers at a right angle to the twisted thread, creating the bottlebrush effect you’re after. Once your brush has formed, you can spend time teasing out fibers trapped in the ropelike core of the brush or simply begin winding the brush forward, stroking back the protruding fibers so that they incline toward the back of the fly. Halfway up the hook shank, secure the brush with tight thread wraps and clip the excess.
Step 5: Create another dubbing brush for the forward half of the body. Use fibers about an inch or an inch and a quarter in length. Again, when you wind the brush forward, draw the protruding fibers back so that they incline aft. Secure the final wrap of the dubbing brush just behind the hook eye and clip the excess.
Step 6: Create a bulky head with thread wraps. The purpose of the colored thread is to provide the splash of red or pink or orange that so many saltwater anglers like near the heads of their flies, something that suggests the colors seen in the gills of fish. I always fish a saltwater fly that has reddish tints near the head with more confidence, even though no fish yet has revealed to me if it really matters. After tying two or three My Mullets, mix up a small batch of five-minute epoxy and thoroughly cover the thread wraps.
