I’ve never fished a Beetle Bug. Last year, though, while fleshing out a box of large dry flies for big North
Country rainbows, I tied up a dozen Beetle Bugs, sizes 10 to 14. At the same time, I was also rereading Dave Hughes’s monumental Trout Flies, trying to bring some order to my trouting fly boxes, which seemed to be multiplying like boxelder beetles in both my vest and my travel bags. Hughes offers a lot of sensible advice on how to go about establishing strategies for organizing trout flies, and his ideas about searching flies can go a long way in helping you maintain a lineup of flies you can take to trout waters anywhere and feel confident you’ll be in the game.
His favorite searching dryfly, his readers may recall, is the Beetle Bug. Inspired by Hughes’s clear thinking and pragmatic approach to this business of trout flies, I cleared a space in my box of big Humpies, Muddlers, Trudes, hopper and cranefly imitations, and the like, and I proudly filled it, one by one, with a neat and tidy row of Beetle Bugs.
I remember opening that box and removing a green Humpy, size 10 — my favorite searching dry fly. There was a large fish nudging the surface next to a tangle of slender roots flexing in current that was eating away the bank beneath me. That fish and a few others needed nothing more in the way of coaxing than was offered by the big Humpy. Now that I think about it, I also pulled a couple of different hopper patterns out of my box of searching dries during the course of the day, flies that I swung waking across the current as though fishing for steelhead, a presentation that initiated several spectacular rises and even a few heart-jolting takes. Yet for some reason, I never tied on and fished one of my spanking new Beetle Bugs. Or maybe I did — and I just don’t remember it. What I do know is that when I got home, I couldn’t find that box of flies.
For many of us, the searching dry fly is what turned us into fly anglers. It certainly wasn’t a weighted nymph dangling beneath a strike-indicating bobber. The visual delight of a trout, whatever size,
suddenly breaking the surface and snatching the fly became a visceral longing and anticipation that nothing else in life could quite equal. The high-floating dry, often fished in swift, foam-flecked waters, offered a point of focus that eliminated all of the other worries and distractions that otherwise shadowed our days. Finally, there was an answer to the troubling question of the purpose or point of our brief moment here amid the storms whirling all around us.
Hughes characterizes the searching dry fly as “bold in three aspects: flotation, visibility to the angler, and bugginess in the eyes of the trout.” Everyone has his or her own biases in the formula. Rubber floats like a cork — but, really, how buggy can you make it look? Subtle wing colors or materials look more like the real thing — but how do you see the fly in ruffled water or at the end of a cast over 25 feet? Trout will nearly always prefer a fly that settles into the surface film, rather than standing up on its hackle tips like a cocklebur on the leg of your Levis — but after a dozen casts, or a single fish, can you keep your low-riding bug from penetrating the surface and sinking completely out of sight? You favor what you think matters most. The white wing of a Royal Wulff stands out like a spotlight as it rides merrily down the stream. The hollow hair of a Humpy seems capable of returning the fly to the surface like a bath toy, despite repeated dunkings. And nothing looks buggier than an Adams — even if it never floats as long or as well as you wish it did, or it seems to disappear on the water the moment the sun drops behind the treetops or the lip of the ridgeline or canyon wall.
In Trout Flies, Hughes describes how he came to the Beetle Bug through a sequence of changes or accommodations that speak to what this column argues, one issue after the next. The most effective flies in our boxes, goes the thesis, will nearly always be regional or personal iterations of traditional, more widely fished forms. Like many anglers of his era, Hughes’s first go-to searching fly was the standard Royal Coachman. (On early trips to the west side of the “Sierras,” as we called them, I remember my father claiming the Royal Coachman his favorite, as well.) The problem with the Royal Coachman was that it never floated well for long, and its duck-quill wing was quickly trashed by trout.
Then Hughes’s father came upon a Coachman-like pattern that was easier to tie and equally effective, although it still didn’t hold up well to grabby little trout. This new pattern, explains Hughes, was the earliest Beetle Bug, tied by Audrey Joy, “the famous northwest tier” who worked in the 1950s for Meier and Frank, the big-deal Portland department store. Can anyone even imagine such a job today? With its all-red floss body, the original Beetle Bug eliminated the fussy peacock herl segmenting of the Royal Coachman. Hughes’s father found he could tie six Beetle Bugs in the same time it took to tie four Royal Coachmen, a significant improvement for a father tying for his three sons as well as for himself.
But as Hughes began to investigate patterns from the fly-fishing literature, he discovered the Royal Wulff. Finally, here was a pattern that embraced the visibility and trout-attracting elements of the Royal Coachman while floating far better than the original because of its moose-hair tail and calf-tail wing. These same two elements of the fly also made it surpassingly more durable. The Royal Wulff became Hughes’s standard searching dryfly.
That changed, writes Hughes, in the 1970s. Bob Borden of Hareline Dubbin had learned of Hughes’s earlier interest in the Beetle Bug; he sent Hughes prototypes he had tied “based on the Audrey Joy original.” Immediately, Hughes could see that Borden’s Beetle Bug would be easier to tie. When he tried fishing it, he also found it caught fish so well that he soon moved it into the leadoff slot of his searching dryfly lineup, displacing his Royal Wulffs.
There’s one last chapter to Hughes’s Beetle Bug story, a final twist that shows again how, often, good flies evolve. Because Hughes wanted his Beetle Bugs to float better in rumpled water, and because he sometimes likes to dangle a little beadhead nymph as a dropper tied to his searching dry fly, he concocted a palmered version of Borden’s Beetle Bug. That’s his standard tie now, which he doubts catches any more trout than Bob Borden’s pattern and maybe not any more fish than a Royal Wulff will fool if you were to use it in all situations that call for a searching dry fly. Another claim this column makes, again and again, is that you catch fish on the flies you fish with. Hughes seems to agree with that notion, as well.
Finishing Hughes’s story, I was inspired to try my hand at some Beetle Bugs of my own. The arc of the narrative, as I’ve said, follows my own belief in where our best — and most interesting — flies come from. I’m also a fan of Dave Hughes. I recognize in his writing the kind of water I often fish and ways he goes about fishing it.
Of course, unlike Hughes, I can’t say I have any fly that has “gone all over the world with me” or that “I’ve yet to find a place where it won’t work.” I get around — but not like that. Still, when I tied up my dozen Beetle Bugs, I felt I had added an important pattern to my lineup of searching dries, dominated, over the years, by my much-favored Humpies. With its white wing, the Beetle Bug would be much easier to see, and with its hair wing and tail and full-bodied hackling, it would float just as well as the corklike Humpy. As for buggy — the last of the three qualities we should look for, argues Hughes, in a searching dry? Well, I’ve never thought there was anything particularly buggy about the Christmas colors of either a Royal Wulff or a Royal Coachman. But I guess what I think doesn’t really matter. It’s trout, after all, that we’re after.
So it’s worth giving the Beetle Bug a try. And while you’re out there, keep an eye out for that fly box of mine, too.
Materials
Hook: Standard dry fly, 1X fine, size 10–16
Thread: Black 8/0 or UTC 70
Wings: White calf body hair
Tail: Moose body hair
Palmer hackle: Coachman brown
Body: Fluorescent red fur
Hackle: Coachman brown
Tying Instructions
Step 1: Secure the hook in the vise and start the thread. Lay down a base of thread over the forward half of the hook shank. Finish the thread base at a point about one-quarter shank length back from the hook eye.
Step 2: Prepare the calf body hair for the wing. Start with a fairly substantial clump, which will shrink rapidly as you clean out the shorter underfur. I use a cheap makeup brush for removing the unwanted parts in a tuft of hair. Use a hair stacker to align the tips. Measure the hair so that the wing will be just about the length of the hook shank. Secure the hair where your thread is hanging. Start with a couple of soft loops, pulled either directly up or down. Then work your way toward the butt ends of the hair, tightening your wraps as much as you dare. Clip the hair butts well ahead of the bend of the hook. Now wind your thread forward. In front of the wing, build a dam of thread wraps so that the wing hairs stand up perpendicular to the hook shank. This is not a delicate fly. Don’t be afraid to use as many thread wraps as you need.
Step 3: Divide the wing into two even parts with the point of a bodkin. Lay a wrap of thread between the two halves to keep them separated. Beyond that, I wish I had a magic method to share to help you create perfectly divided and spaced and angled hair wings. I don’t. Practice improves your results. I combine two techniques, sometimes making a series of wraps around the base of each individual wing half and sometimes crisscrossing between halves with figure-eight wraps. You’ll get another chance to adjust the vertical cant of the wings when you wind your forward hackle. When you’re happy with the wings, place a drop of lacquer or head cement between the splayed halves to help hold them in place.
Step 4: Wind the thread to the bend of the hook. Clip a small tuft of moose hair from the hide. Clean away the underfur and align the hair tips in a stacker. Tie in the moose hair so that you have a tail about equal to the length of the hook shank. Wind the thread forward, continuing to cover the moose hair until you reach the butts of the wing hair. Clip the moose hair here. Use thread wraps to create an even taper from the root of the tail to the wing.
Step 5: For the palmer hackle, choose a feather with barbs slightly shorter than the hook gap. Clean off the base of the hackle stem and secure the feather at the root of the tail. Hughes ties in the hackle feather with the concave side facing him, so that the hackle barbs tilt forward when wound. I face the feather the opposite way, so that the wound hackle barbs point back.
Step 6: For the body, Hughes calls for a specific fluorescent red, Hareline Dubbin #04 (last time I looked, fluorescent red is now #06). A fan of seal fur, I tied the bodies of the flies in the photos with red seal fur from FeathersMc.com. Whatever material you choose, you won’t need much in your dubbing noodle. The shape and size of the body should already be formed by the thread wraps covering the butts of the wing and tail material. All your dubbing needs to do is cover the wraps to give the body color.
Step 7: Now wind the palmer hackle forward, spacing the wraps evenly until you reach the wing. Tie off the feather at the wing and clip the excess.
Step 8: For the forward or main hackle, choose a hackle feather with barbs slightly longer than the hook gap. Secure the feather by the butt of the stem, just aft of the wing. Wind the thread to the hook eye. Wind the hackle feather to the thread, taking this opportunity to adjust the wings, if necessary. Tie off the hackle feather and clip the excess. Form a tidy head with thread wraps, whip finish, and saturate the head with lacquer or head cement.
