Fly fishing for me is primarily a solitary activity or one enjoyed with one or two friends. Not surprisingly, this has driven me away from many of the state’s popular waters, where crowds are often a fact of life. As a result, I spend a quite a bit of time throwing flies into waters most fly fishers ignore or avoid. A lot of these places are written off because they are full of snags. During the first few trips to these fly-fishing noman’s-lands, I went through flies at an alarming rate. This forced me to develop flies that catch fewer snags and more fish.
What has evolved is more of a fly platform than a fly pattern. The design process is ongoing, but I figure it is at a stage where I can share it with others. If nothing else, I’m hoping this column will motivate more fly tyers to turn their attention to developing new types of snagfree flies. I’m not a particularly talented tyer and am pretty sure others will come up with better solutions. Quite apart from opening up a lot of new water to fly fishers, this could help reduce the pressure on some of our more heavily pounded rivers and creeks.
Soft Tubes
Boulder-filled riffles, downed trees, and masses of writhing kelp all offer prime lies for cold-water, warm-water, and saltwater species. These are places where the biggest fish are often found. The obvious drawback to fishing these spots is that you can expect to lose flies, sometimes a lot of flies. Conventional mono or wire weed guards will help reduce your losses, but that comes at a price — you’ll likely miss a lot of soft bites.
After a particularly difficult day throwing flies at largemouth bass in dense cover, I decided the conventional mono weed guard setup needed a rethink. I had loads of grabs, but that’s all. I’d strike, but each time, the fly made it back to the boat sans fish. Meanwhile, friends working the same water with plastic worms were nailing almost every fish. It seemed obvious I should look more closely at their worm rigs. It didn’t take too long to realize their setup involved two key elements: a specially shaped hook and mounting the worm so the hook point was just a gnat’s whisker below its surface.
After several weeks of experimenting with a bunch of different materials, I finally hit upon a setup that worked. The solution involved the bass angler’s worm hook and a supple, 2-millimeter-thick silicone tubing called Pepperell Pony Bead Lacing (available at craft stores and on-line). The design was relatively simple. One end of the tubing was tied onto the shank of the hook just behind the eye. A
scissor split at the other end of the tubing allowed the hook point to be slipped into the tube, shielding it from snags. I tied materials on the section of tubing that covered the hook shank. When a fish clamps down on the fly, the hook point pops out through the slit. I called them Fearless Flies and wrote about them in the November/December 2015 issue of this fine magazine.
Off The Hook
While tying up some Fearless Octopus Flies for a rockfish trip, it occurred to me the tubing didn’t have to be permanently mounted to the hook. By leaving a short section of bare tubing ahead of the whipped thread head, the fly could be speared onto a debarbed worm hook in much the same way a bass angler mounts a plastic worm. By separating the fly from the hook, I had created a modular fly system. All you needed to do to change a fly was to slide one soft-tube fly off the hook and replace it with another.
To mount the tube onto the hook, just insert the point into the bare tubing, push it down about one quarter inch (the exact amount depends on the shank length behind the eye), then spear it out through the side of the tube. Once the point exits the hole, simply slide the tubing up the hook shank, snug it up to the eye and slip the point into the slit you’ve cut. The exit point has to be oriented 180 degrees to the slit for the fly to work properly. I find it’s a lot easier to rig the fly if you mark the exit spot with a Sharpie pen.
The soft-tube design began as a way to make large flies for largemouths, stripers, and rockfish, but it also works well on smaller patterns for trout, smallmouths, and panfish. A size 4 worm hook is a great chassis for small streamers and for stonefly and dragonfly nymphs. A size 2 or 1 will easily handle two-to-three-inch-long sculpin or crayfish imitations. Of course, both these hook sizes work well with a Woolly Bugger. For anyone looking to hammer flies at heavily wooded banks or to swing streamers very tight to downed trees and undercuts, soft tubes and worm hooks have the potential to open up a lot of very challenging water.
Quick Conversions
The beauty of the modular fly design is that it takes just seconds to convert a soft tube into a floating, neutral-buoyancy, or fast-sinking fly. Worm hooks have a “chin” located under the eye of the hook, which was designed to lock plastic worms in place. This chin also happens to be a great place to hold a piece of foam or a drilled bead. All you do is slip the foam or bead over the hook point, run it up to the chin, and secure it in place with a half-inch section of silicone tube. The friction of the tube on the shank will usually hold the bead in place. If it slips, just add more tubing. You can even add a slip-on bass rattle under the chin, which can work wonders with crayfish, crab, and shrimp patterns.
To get this quick-conversion flexibility, you’ll want to use worm hooks with a rounded hook bend, such as Gamakatsu’s Offset Worm EWG or their G Lock. The sharp-angled bend on some other worm hooks can stop drilled beads from sliding along the shank.
Of course, you don’t have to use soft tubes with worm hooks. By simply running tippet through the tube, they become a conventionally mounted tube fly. This setup provides most of the advantages of regular tube flies tied on rigid plastic tubes. And unlike hard plastic tubes, the silicone tube eliminates the need for a soft junction tube to hold the hook in place. Simply align the fly and pull the knot into the silicone tubing.
Tying Soft Tubes
You might think you need a fancy vise and special materials to make these flies. Nope. All you need is a regular vise and a de-eyed long-shank size 1 or 1/0 hook or a paperclip. In fact, any type of wire that is slightly thicker than the 1 millimeter inside diameter of the tubing will do. The wire should provide some resistance so that the tube doesn’t spin when you tie on materials. If all else fails, you can secure the tube by pinching it with the fingers of your nondominant hand or by clamping it in place with hackle pliers or a small alligator clip.
Once you have found the right hook or wire, just clamp it in the jaws of your vise, slip on some tube, and start tying.
The key to a durable soft-tube fly is light thread tension. The thread should slightly compress the tubing, which, being elastic, will respond by trying to decompress. These two opposing forces, combined with the textured surface of the tube, ensures that every wrap stays tight. You’ll know you used too much tension if the tube refuses to come off the wire with a slight push or pull. Obviously, soft tubing doesn’t work well with materials that require a lot of thread tension, such as flaring deer hair.
Once you are comfortable with the thread tension, wrap your materials in the same way you would a regular fly. Once all the materials are tied in, apply a couple of drops of superglue at the front and back end of the thread wraps to lock them in place. Don’t saturate the materials themselves with superglue. You want the fly to remain flexible so that the hook point gets exposed when a fish bites down. If you have some fabric paint (I use Scribbles), apply that to the base thread layer prior to adding materials. This approach provides a robust, yet very flexible fly without the need for superglue.
While developing the soft-tube design, I had a nagging feeling someone had done something similar. A quick Internet search didn’t yield much. Then, as I was moving a bookcase, I noticed an old paperback copy of Lee Wulff on Flies (Stackpole 1985). That was when I remembered that Lee had dedicated a section of the book to flies tied on flexible tubing. It felt good knowing I wasn’t the only one who had gone soft.
Rota Heads
The modular fly concept took an unexpected and somewhat serendipitous turn last year. I love most forms of fly fishing, but have a really bad addiction to fishing top-water patterns. If you have seen a largemouth explode on a frog imitation, a big brown engulf a deer hair mouse, or a gang of striped bass chase down a pencil popper, you will know why top-water fishing is so addictive. If I see so much as a swirl on top, I start to shake. Soft-tube flies can easily be converted into poppers. In a foam cylinder three-eighths to one-half inch wide, just make a hole in the center with a fat needle (yarn darners are great) and slip it on the tippet with the same needle. As you retrieve the fly, water pressure forces the foam down to the fly, where it does its thing. When the soft tube is mounted on a worm hook, you’ll be able to slide the popper over the top of weeds and timber. This makes it possible to drop the fly into places no one would dare throw a conventionally tied J-hook top-water pattern.
If you aren’t fishing in fly-stealing waters, just slip the foam head and soft tube onto the tippet and tie on a shortshank hook. These hooks will hold fish much better than the long-shank hook used with conventional poppers. They can also make hook removal quicker and easier.
The soft-tube setup works fine with most poppers, but where it really shines is with big poppers. When you combine a half-inch-wide foam cylinder with a six-inch soft-tube streamer, you get a long, supple, yet very lightweight popper. This allows you to cast flies up to a foot long without needing gaff-sized hooks, a 12-weight rod, and rippling, steroid-enhanced arm muscles. I was fishing long soft-tube poppers in the surf in the spring of 2018 when, for some unknown reason, I started to have trouble getting stripers to take the fly. I wasn’t alone. Hardware guys heaving big pencil poppers were also having difficulties connecting with the fish. Stripers of all sizes would charge up to the lure or fly, but getting them to take was another matter. The success rate was perhaps 1 in 10, which often meant going a day or two without a top-water take. This wasn’t particularly good for my blood pressure.
That June, a school of large anchovies moved in close to the beach and, not surprisingly, brought stripers, halibut, and some white seabass with them. Most of the action was subsurface, so I fished anchovy soft tubes on an intermediate line and had a total blast. And every couple of days, typically around 9:00 a.m., stripers would start leaping clear of the water, spraying terrified anchovies in all directions. Top-water time!
These bouts of surface activity didn’t last long. On a really good day, you’d get an hour of frantic action, but most days it was over in 20 minutes. This meant you couldn’t afford to waste time fussing with tackle. My solution was to keep fishing the intermediate line and add the foam head on front of an anchovy pattern. The f ly would stay on top for about 30 feet before the line sank far enough to drag it under. One morning, following three maddening refusals, I decided to try a foam popper with a face cut at an angle of 45 degrees. I assumed the angled front would make it spray water like a Gurgler, which it did. I hoped this change in action might induce a strike. A schoolie-sized bass made a bee line for the fly and then, just as before, simply followed it. Aarrrgh! After a dozen or so long strips, the intermediate line dragged the fly under. I expected the fish to lose interest. Instead, to my complete surprise, it slammed the fly. Two casts later, another fish did exactly the same thing.
The slanted face had apparently caused the fly to do something underwater that triggered the fish to strike. I took a closer look at the end of a fishless retrieve, and what I saw surprised the heck out of me. The fly moved from side to side and even came ripping back to the top before diving down again. If you paused between strips the fly floated to the top. I had never seen a fly that moved so unpredictably. Water pressure on the angled face caused the popper to rotate erratically on the tippet, producing the crazy action. The only things I have seen that have a similar action are an Apex Hot Spot salmon lure and a largemouth bass angler’s jerkbait. I decided to name the new contraption a Rotahead, since the erratic underwater action depended on the rotating foam head.
Not surprisingly, with its jerkbaitlike action, the Rotahead also works well on largemouth and smallmouth bass, especially when fished on a fast-sinking line. My favorite approach is to cast parallel to a weed bed, rock wall, or dock, counting the line down, then rip it back with a series of pulls and pauses. You can change the depth the fly works by varying the line countdown.
Making a Rotahead
Obviously, the first thing you are going to need to make a Rotahead is some foam. The easiest approach is to buy foam cylinders from a fly-tying-materials company. Wapsi and no doubt others make foam popper cylinders that can quickly be converted into Rotaheads. If all you want is half a dozen cylinders to experiment with, this is the way to go. If you’d like to make your own, any closed-cell EVA foam sheet one-half to one inch thick will work. Interlocking exercise mats and gardeners’ kneeling pads make great Rotaheads and should be available at your local hardware store.
If you go the do-it-yourself route, you’ll need to punch or cut the cylinders out of the foam. Any thin-walled metal pipe will work. You can punch the cylinder by driving the pipe into the foam with a heavy object or drill it out by using a key-twist motion. The best setup I have found involves drilling the cylinder using sawed-off sections from a flea market spinning rod. The thin-walled graphite cuts through the foam quickly and cleanly.
Of course, the most important step in making a Rotahead is to cut the angled face. You have two options. Perhaps the quickest technique is to make gentle sawing strokes with a fresh hacksaw blade. Another option is a brand new single-edge razor blade. Try both techniques to see which works best for the particular foam you are using. The final step involves pushing a yarn needle through the center of the foam to create the hole. You can fish the foam head this way, but your tippet will eventually cut into the foam and compromise the action. Inserting and supergluing a piece of hard plastic tube, (Q-tips work well) or threading some Pony Bead Lacing with the yarn needle makes the head much more resilient and, more importantly, can be used to tune how the head rotates.
Hard plastic tubing produces the least resistance to rotation, resulting in a fly that follows a spiraling path through the water. I’ve seen this swimming behavior with injured smelt and anchovies. Pony Bead Lacing has more friction, and that friction doesn’t appear to be consistent. This results in the erratic, jerkbait-type action that triggered the stripers to attack. Finally, placing a plastic bead between the Rotahead and the fly further reduces friction, which generally makes the fly more frantic.
I should also point out that you don’t have to use foam for Rotaheads. If you want a fly to run subsurface and don’t care about top-water action, substitute with a section cut from a denser-than-water material. The only downside is the extra mass can make the fly harder to cast.
The modular combination of soft tube and worm hook was my way of addressing the snag-free fly problem, but it’s not the only way or perhaps even the best way. With a little thought and experimentation, I am sure others tyers will produce much better patterns. Aren’t you sick of the crowds, too?