As you settle into your winter tying season, you might want to consider doing yourself the favor of acquiring a new book on f lies and fly fishing. Rather than spending the off-season rehashing what you’ve done in the past, tediously working your way through a list of this many of these and that many of those, you could invest some of this time exploring the ideas offered up by someone else, examining possibilities difficult to stumble upon within the closed circuitry of your own habitual notions. And instead of staring into a screen, watching somebody dictate exactly how something should be done, reading a book involves a more collaborative effort, with ideas presented for your consideration so that you might imagine or devise new ideas of your own, which I’m pretty sure is how genuine education, rather than indoctrination, has always worked in the past.
Phil Rowley’s new Orvis Guide to Stillwater Trout Fishing, for example, though it might not claim a spot on your bedside nightstand, could prove useful somewhere near your tying bench. I hadn’t heard of Rowley or of his book until Dave Hughes mentioned it while recounting a lake trip he had taken recently with a couple of his friends. Despite its being a somewhat pedestrian venue, with cabins along the shore and multiple camping areas popular with anglers intent on killing their limits, Hughes claimed he had done “real well.”
“In fact as soon as we got there,” Hughes explained, “I told the other guys that I’d been reading Rowley and they didn’t have a chance. Turns out I was right.” If you know Hughes or you’ve seen or heard him talk, you know that this is the moment he often reveals a look of attempted innocence that doesn’t quite hide how much he still enjoys catching more fish than his friends.
Rowley, anyway, can go a long way in helping you sort out what you might not yet have surmised while tootling about, dragging a fly, in your float tube, U-boat, or pontoonish craft. I like it a lot that he considers flies the least important aspect to successful lake or other stillwater trout angling. His advice instead, when not catching fish, is to think about D and R — depth and retrieve — before changing P, your fly pattern.
DRP means that Rowley believes presentation is your key to success, more important than the fly on the end of your line. I trust readers here have heard that before. “Presentation,” writes Rowley, “always trumps pattern,” a belief he holds so strongly that he claims if he’s fishing a pattern he has confidence in for the conditions, and he believes he’s presenting his fly at the correct depth and retrieve speed, chances are he’ll change location before changing flies.
Still, fly patterns themselves — or at least the style of a fly — can be a critical aspect in a presentationist’s cast. A Muddler, tied correctly, will wake on the swing; a Klinkhammer-style cripple drifts with its abdomen suspended beneath the surface, as though the emerging mayfly is trapped, unable to breach the film. The same reasoning points to the development of what Rowley refers to as “balanced flies,” that is, weighted stillwater patterns that are constructed in such a way that their attitude in the water suggests the preponderance of trout food sources that move or are suspended horizontally, rather than vertically, as they go about their everyday lives.
Does the attitude of the fly matter to the fish? Rowley claims he once performed a controlled experiment: he and a friend fished two exact same leech patterns, except one was tied as a balanced f ly, and both f lies were fished at the exact same depth below indicators just five feet apart. The outcome? The trout preferred the balanced leech “ten to one,” states Rowley, convincing him that balanced flies are superior, so much so that he now says “a balanced fly such as a leech is perhaps my top choice when I am prospecting any lake.” That’s a pretty strong recommendation.
Besides making the decision that there is in fact good reason to tie them, probably the hardest thing about getting started with balanced flies is gathering the few odds and ends these patterns call for. The key to the fly is what Rowley calls the “chassis,” that is, a 60-degree or 90-degree jig hook, a tungsten bead, and an extension such as a sewing pin, sequin pin, or escutcheon pin. I like the 90-degree hook best; it’s easier to tie material past an eye post set perpendicular to the hook shank. I also like that you can get a 100 of these hooks from Mustad for about half the price of 60-degree jig hooks from other manufacturers.
Bead size can be a puzzle, even though some companies, such as Wapsi, give suggestions for what size bead goes with what size hook. Here’s Rowley’s pairing for Daiichi 4640 and 4647 jig hooks:
Size 6 hook, 5/32” (3.8 mm) bead
Size 8 and 10 hooks, 1/8” (3.5 mm) bead
Size 12 and 14 hooks, 7/64” (3.0 mm) bead
The bead rides not on the hook itself, but at the forward end of a pin lashed to the hook shank. Rowley suggests positioning the head of the pin so that the bead ends up ahead of the hook eye about a distance equal to two bead widths. You want some different options with pins for creating the extension so that, with luck, you don’t have to snip the pins to length. If you do, beware: no matter how careful you are, you can easily end up slicing your tying thread when you pass the burr at the clipped end of the pin. The size of the pin must also jibe with the size of the bead: too small, and the bead slides over and off the head; too big, and, the bead won’t slide onto the pin in the first place.
A little fussing at the start, how ever, is all it takes before balanced flies add only a couple of steps to any of your common stillwater patterns. The simple Balanced Peacock Bugger, or BPB, was inspired by a recent chat I had with my old friend Bruce Milhiser, the best trout fisher I know. Bruce was advising me on some scuds he ties for a lake I was planning to visit when he mentioned that his wife, Linda, another trout fisher par excellence, prefers a little peacock bugger that he also ties. Bruce, I should mention, is the kind of angler who never claims you need to do this or that to catch fish; he just informs you, if you ask, what he does. At that point, I find I can go about things my own way, or I can do what Bruce does and immediately start catching fish.
Anglers with more stillwater experience than I have might tell you, of course, that the whole point of balanced flies is that they work wonders when suspended under an indicator, a style of fishing I have little tolerance for. Fortunately, Phil Rowley argues convincingly that balanced f lies also “perform exceptionally well when presented using cast and retrieve tactics. A 4-to-6-inch strip retrieve with a prolonged pause,” he claims, “is deadly.”
I love that kind of talk. If nothing else, it can invite you to the bench as the shadow of winter makes the next trout on your line seem a long way away.
Materials
Hook: Mustad 90-degree jig hook or equivalent, size 10
Extension pin: Sequin pin, 3/4-inch or longer, cut to length
Bead: Gold 1/8-inch tungsten
Thread: Olive
Tail: Dark olive rabbit
Rib: Fine copper wire
Hackle: Dark dun hen hackle
Body: Peacock herl
Tying Instructions
Step 1: Mount the hook in the vise and start the thread. Slide the bead onto the pin. Rowley positions his beads so that the end with the wide, tapered hole envelops the pinhead. Position the pin on the hook shank so that there is approximately a two-bead gap between the bead and the hook eye.* Lash the pin to the hook shank. Rowley also advises coating these wraps with brushable superglue or some other quick-drying adhesive. I haven’t yet found that necessary.
Step 2: At the hook bend, tie in a short tail of rabbit hair cut from a Zonker strip. Clip the hair butts so that you can blend in the aft portion of the body with the bump created by the end of the pin.
Step 3: As you create a smooth underbody with thread wraps, secure a length of copper wire. Wrap the thread back to the root of the tail. Select a hackle feather with barbs about one to one and a half times the hook gap. Tie in the hackle feather by the tip, make one more pass of thread wraps over the foundation of the body, and return the thread to the root of the tail.
Step 4: Create a dubbing loop about the length of your peacock herl. Wax the legs of the loop. Insert the tips of three or four strands of peacock herl into the top of the dubbing loop, then spin your dubbing-loop tool while guiding the herl into the twisting thread. The goal is to end up with a tight, twisted peacock-herl rope. Once the rope is formed, wind it forward. For this fly, you will probably get as far as the perpendicular hook eye before reaching the end of your rope, so to speak. Tie off the end at the hook eye.
Step 5: Before you create another dubbing loop and repeat the same process you used for the aft portion of the body, bulk up the forward pin extension with thread wraps. This helps create an even profile throughout the length of the fly. Form the forward portion of the body with wraps of peacock-herl rope and tie off directly behind the bead.
Step 6: Grab the stem of the hackle feather and palmer the body of the f ly with evenly spaced wraps. Tie off the feather directly behind the bead and clip the excess.
Step 7: Counterwrap the copper wire over the stem of the hackle feather. Try not to flatten the hackle barbs under the wire. Wrap the wire to the bead, secure with tight thread wraps, then worry the wire until it breaks. Whip finish and put a drop of head cement or lacquer onto the thread wraps.
* Tying this pattern, I’ve learned to determine the approximate balance point for a given bead weight and hook length by lifting either the completed fly or its chassis using a pin through the hook’s eye. — Ed
