At the Vise: Liquid Wrench

Anyone who glances at this column with any frequency knows that I’m the last angler in the world to jump on somebody’s bandwagon. Much of the pleasure I get from fly fishing comes from discovering things on my own. I don’t necessarily want to clobber twenty fish if it means standing next to a guide and casting to the spot he’s pointing at with the fly, his own, he tied to my tippet.

Still, I’m not so foolish as to believe I can figure it all out by myself. Fly fishing, boat building, writing — all of the serious studies I’ve undertaken in my life — have been supplemented by discoveries made by others. So much of what these pursuits ask of us are simply elements of craft, not earthshaking epiphanies, and if we pay attention to the practice of others, along with the historical context from which new ideas arise, we have a good chance of developing competencies that give our own talents the opportunity to develop and maybe even shine.

I preface this piece with these lofty comments in part because I’ve come around to the notion, passé to many readers, that there may in fact be good reasons to retool a bit and explore the possibilities of constructing flies with jig hooks and slotted beads. It’s hard for me to concede the point. But there you have it. Whether that means I’ve embraced the devil or slipped off my rocker remains to be seen. It’s been a slow concession. And I still can’t claim I’m a fan of either the flies or the techniques used to fish them. Life would be sweeter and a whole lot simpler if I could do all of my fishing with a floating line, preferably double-tapered, and flies that hook fish on the surface — or perhaps down to a level equal to the bottom of a glass of a moderate dollop of scotch.

But what do you do when the fish aren’t there?

I had some insights into this question when I bummed around last fall in Mag Bay with Jeffrey Feczko, a young, talented guide who, from what I could tell, stops at nothing. I know some gear guys in López Mateos who like to fish for giant groupers, 80-to-100-pound fish, sport I admire, but that, with a fly rod, I consider equivalent to trying to reach space with a paper airplane. Jeff, however, refused to acknowledge my trepidation. One day while we were tying flies at Bob and Diana Hoyt’s Whale’s Tale Inn, Jeff concocted a grouper fly that we could have used to dust off, in a dozen strokes, the hotel’s long, polished concrete bar.

“Quarter ounce of lead,” said Jeff. “Slide it onto your 80-pound shock tippet and let ’er drop to the bottom.”

He wiggled the fly, suggestive somehow of an unplucked fryer dunked in a vat of Rit dye.

“Might do it,” I agreed.

On a more rational note, I’ve fooled around with your typical epoxy-andtungsten-bead Euro-style nymphs the past couple of years, impressed with design elements that provide mechanical advantages in short-line, high-stick nymphing. A weighted bead and drop of epoxy, free from drag created by hair and feather, sinks as well as a pinch of split shot, and you might as well have this weight represent something a trout might eat — or simply enhance the weight with patterns and colors to stimulate a fish’s natural curiosity.

Early this season, however, I noted, with some chagrin, I confess, that I was having more success with my Euro-style nymphs tied on jig hooks — just as we’ve been told they should be tied all along. Better still, I found that I was losing fewer flies to the bottom of the river, either because I was fishing with fewer split shot or because of the attitude of the fly, riding with the hook point in such a way that it was less inclined to snag.

I should also mention I’ve taken to pinching my split shot to a tag end of a Blood Knot I tie between my point and dropper fly. With this arrangement, the split shot, pinched above a single Overhand Knot, is more likely to pull free of the tag end of the knot in the leader, thus saving on lost flies and time taken to rerig.

Gradually, I began reaching more and more for beadhead patterns tied on jig hooks — at least for one of the pair of flies I nearly always employ when nymphing. Then something else happened that increased my understanding and appreciation of patterns employing jig hooks: I was talking to Dave Hughes about lake fishing, and I asked about Balanced Leeches.

No doubt readers here have at least read about the Balanced Leech, if not also embraced the idea in their own stillwater fishing. I know this magazine has published articles on this style of fly. Again, what you have with the Balanced Leech, tied on a jig hook with a cantilevered bead, is essentially a mechanical configuration that aids with the attitude of the fly, an element of presentation I’ve been harping on for the past many years. When you tie your first Balanced Leech (I’ll add my two cents on the process in a future column), it’s so obvious how and why it can improve certain stillwater presentations that you’ll feel silly, if you’re like me, for having resisted buying a few specialty jig hooks and taking the time to add that cantilevered bead before tying your favorite leech pattern. It’s not necessarily the answer, Hughes pointed out — something I don’t believe, anyway, actually exists in fishing. But it’s certainly one answer worth trying the next time the question of how to fool fish in still waters arises.


One other bit of insight came my way this season, prompting me to consider more broadly the use of jig hooks and slotted beads in my fishing and why I’ve tied up a bunch of variations on the Liquid Wrench, a pattern I’m eager to show steelhead and even salmon in the months ahead. While covering the usual random terrain, Hughes and I both decided we wanted to do some shad fishing this year. I had an old plastic box of flies labeled Shad-tastic; Dave brought a box of newly tied traditional shad patterns, the kind you could have bought, back in the day, from Grant King’s fly shop in Guerneville.

We didn’t catch squat.

I decided to bear down. The f lies I had used a decade ago, the last time I gave my attention to shad, were little more than a bit of flash and chenille behind a small orange or red conehead. I could see that the gear guys, with their jigs and light spinning rods, were getting down deeper in the current and catching a lot more fish. I went to a fishing supply store, not a fly shop, and bought a couple of packets of 1/16-ounce round chartreuse shad darts, which aren’t true shad darts at all, just as small ball of lead poured around the neck of a 90-degree jig hook, a hook just a shade different from those used for your typical Czech or Euro-style nymph.

I caught a bunch of shad swinging my prepackaged jigs, enhanced with some tailing flash and other sparkly body material. I’ll share a pattern next spring. I used a 12-foot 6-inch two-hander and fairly dense tip in front of a medium-length Skagit head — the same set up I expect to use when chucking the Liquid Wrench far out into current and seeing what it might find.

Does the jig hook matter? No doubt it changes some aspect of the behavior of a fly. I’m fully aware, of course, that many anglers are enamored of patterns of this sort when employing a bobber or indicator or similar type of float. A jig dangling on a tight line below a floating device is an old, proven method, even if in the past, it was the domain of sport nobody considered fly fishing.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll see the point in trying that sometime, too.

Materials

Hook: Daiichi 4660 90-degree jig hook, or similar, size 4

Bead: Gold 3/16-inch (4.6 millimeter) slotted tungsten bead

Thread: Hot pink Danville 140 denier Waxed Flymaster Plus

Tail: Pearl blue Mirage Flashabou

Abdomen: UV hot orange Ice Dub, or similar

Thorax: Hot pink fluorescent Ice Dub, or similar

Hackle: Hot pink small schlappen

Tying Instructions

Step 1: Slip the bead onto the hook so that the hole side, not the slot, ends up at the eye of the hook. Fiddling with hook and slotted bead sizes can be a pain. You want the bead to settle down against the hook eye, but you don’t want it to cover the eye. There’s nothing worse than tying a beautiful fly and then realizing you’ll never be able to use it because you can’t get your tippet material through the eye. When you do find combinations of hook and bead that work, it’s probably a good idea to make a note of it. Hooks and beads vary by brand or manufacturer.

STEP 1
STEP 1

Step 2: Start the thread behind the bead at the level leg of the 90-degree bend in the hook. Create an even layer of thread wraps back to about the middle of the hook shank. Fold a single strand of Flashabou around the thread, secure the Flashabou to the top of the hook shank, then continue with a layer of even thread wraps to a point directly above the hook point. The Flashabou should still be lying flat atop the hook shank, creating the tail. You can cut the tail to length now — about three or four times the length of the hook shank — or wait and cut it after you finish tying the fly so that the length seems just right, or as boatbuilders say, eye sweet.

STEP 2
STEP 2

Step 3: Create a dubbing loop. Fill it with a healthy portion of orange Ice Dub. Slowly spin your dubbing tool while at the same time teasing dubbing fibers out of the loop and back toward the bend of the hook. Now wind the scraggly dubbing material, secured in the twisted loop, forward along the hook shank, continuing to pull fibers rearward as the loop wraps advance just short of the 90-degree bend in the hook. At this point, secure the dubbing loop with thread wraps and cut the excess.

STEP 3
STEP 3

Step 4: Wind the thread back over the forward portion of the orange Ice Dub about an eighth of an inch. Create another dubbing loop, shorter than the first, again fill it with dubbing material, in this case pink, and spin the material into the legs of the loop while teasing out fibers rearward. Now wrap the pink dubbing loop forward, directly over the forward portion of orange dubbing while at the same time teasing pink fibers toward the aft end of the fly. Wrap the pink material just short of the bead, secure with the thread, and clip the excess.

STEP 4
STEP 4

Step 5: Before tying in the hackle, take a moment to blend the two overlapping dubbing materials, either with a comb or a dubbing brush. The body should end up transitioning smoothly from pink to orange as it goes from the bead to the aft bend. Now tie in by the tip a single feather of small pink schlappen or saddle hackle directly behind the bead. Carefully clip the excess tip material. Then take two or three turns of hackle, folding the fibers rearward as you wind the feather forward. Catch the stem with the thread and secure it with tight wraps. Clip the excess hackle and tidy it up, if necessary, with more thread wraps. Whip finish behind the bead and saturate the exposed thread wraps with lacquer or your favorite head cement.

STEP 5
STEP 5
Add a comment

Leave a Reply