I rarely write about stillwater fly patterns in this column. My attention rests on flies I use, and the truth
is, I’ve never been much of a lake angler, even if lakes promise some of the biggest trout we might encounter in any given year. Because I don’t fish much in lakes or reservoirs, I’m not very good at it. I look at all of that quiet water, and nothing tells me, immediately, that the fish are here or there or somewhere else. I’m quickly befuddled, often confused, more likely than not at a loss what to do next. Beyond the obvious signs of fish feeding on the surface, I struggle to conjure up images from below the two-dimensional plane, unable to grasp narratives into which I might insert my fly.
It can be humiliating. For two years straight, for example, my buddy Jeff Cottrell and I had access to a string of high-desert, spring-fed impoundments that a rancher had stocked with trout and largemouth bass in hopes of creating the sort of pay-to-play fishery that was proving, regionally, as lucrative as renting rangeland for wind generators. Jeff, a fly-shop owner, was there to suss out the ponds so that he knew what he was selling when he booked clients through his shop at two or three hundred dollars a day. I got to tag along because, well, that’s just what writers do.
We did catch fish — even a few trophy rainbows. But mostly I remember wandering around the ponds, often dangling inside a float tube, wondering why we couldn’t figure out some way to stimulate steady action. Fish have to feed. Yet even the bass, which hung out near small patches of shoreline weeds, sometimes sending up showers of tiny baitfish as you headed that way, eluded us more often than not. Time and again, we left the ponds frustrated, yet all the more determined to tie up a batch of winning flies.
It never happened; we finally just sort of quit on the place. It still bugs me that we didn’t do better. The ranch owner, too, eventually lost interest, giving up on the idea that he could start raking in the big bucks, like some of his neighbors, without so much as lifting a finger.
The problem, as I see it now, was that neither Jeff nor I, nor the rancher, was all that interested in the process: we just wanted to stick some big fish, and the guy just wanted the money. I never could get excited about the fishing — dragging a fly behind a float tube; casting and retrieving; anything, especially, to do with chironomids. The rancher, meanwhile, had no real interest in the fish or the fishing, his attention directed, instead, toward cattle weight, heavy equipment, and the pick-up scene at the local tavern.
Things felt like they were leaning differently last year when I found myself getting towed in circles by another heavy rainbow out where the roads fade and finally fizzle into sky. My friends the doctor and his wife, the two best trout fishers I know, had finally convinced me to rattle my way out to a small impoundment where, for reasons I can’t explain, the trout are plump, plentiful, and sassy. And not particularly hard to fool.
The doctor had told me it’s a scud game. Nice, chunky ones, too, so that anything tan or green on about a size 10 hook gets you in the game and keeps you there. To be frank, there was nothing about this fishing that challenged the intellect. Once you slipped into your floating device and figured out where the trout were, it was a touchy-feely thing, waiting for the fly to sink and then inching it back your way, ready for the line to straighten.
Still, when it worked, which it did more often than not, you had a heavy fish somewhere down there on the end of your line, a few of which felt as good as small tuna sounding toward oblivion, without the anguish such fish can eventually spark as the fight drags on into the later rounds. No, this was pretty much just straightforward fun — at least until I began to sense that nothing else was bound to happen unless I tried to change up tactics, as well.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not greedy. Well, okay, when it comes to fish, maybe a little. But at this stage of my life, I do have a tendency to grow inattentive, or at least a wee bit complacent, in the face of expected results. Let’s find out, instead, what happens when we try this.
From my limited bag of stillwater tricks, however, I don’t have a lot to reach for. My longtime favorite is a little olive bugger, a pattern that, tied sparsely, does a fair job representing the often-present damselfly nymphs flitting about any weed beds. More important, the little olive bugger offers an excellent imitation of SEAT — something else appealing to trout – a “hatch” I find as significant as any other when I go looking for our favorite coldwater species.
But the slender profile I give my little lake buggers fails to cover another option — that is, the BM, or Big Mac. This is a fly you turn to when you give up trying to finesse the opposition. Sometimes it works to just throw ’em, instead, a Big Mac. I was reminded of this option on that remote rainbow reservoir when, coming ashore for a midmorning break, I spotted, near a stand of cattails, the husk of a dragonfly nymph. Hmm. If you’ve ever poked around in ponds or kept a small aquarium filled with stillwater critters, you’ve no doubt seen the impressive dimensions reached by many dragonfly nymphs, a size commensurate with the damage they’ll do on any other swimming or bottom-crawling neighbors, especially in the confines of a private observation tank.
That’s your Big Mac. You can go to town trying to create an exact imitation of a dragonfly nymph, or you can take another tack and just make sure you have something big and gnarly that might not only suggest these bodacious nymphs, but perhaps also crayfish, leeches, tadpoles, salamanders, or a host of different forage fish. That is, something else appealing to trout — only in this case, something even bigger.
I know, I know: it’s a lot more fun to home in on a hatch or bait and fool fish with an irresistible imitation. Meanwhile, back in the real world, where most of us reside, it’s good to carry a stash of those all-around patterns that seem to work wherever you go fishing. Clearly, there’s no such thing, not even a Clouser Minnow, as a pattern that fools fish everywhere. But on a stillwater impoundment where rainbow trout grow fat and happy feeding on everything under the sun, you really should carry something you think qualifies as a genuine Big Mac, a fly that represents a mouthful of nutrition that just might stimulate a strike from an otherwise inattentive or even complacent old trout.
Don Freschi’s Bulldog could be that pattern. I’ve tweaked it here, because that’s what I do to most every pattern I fish, and also because I encourage readers, or anyone else who ties flies, to do the same. The Bulldog, after all, is simply a Woolly Bugger with a little of this and a little of that thrown in. Freschi’s two-tone hackling offers provocative shading; I’m also a fan of burnt orange (or rust, or the like) in many of my generic patterns, from the smallest nymph to the biggest dry. Color, of course, probably means a lot more to the angler than it does to the trout. Then again, the first thing a fly has to do is win over the angler, or else it will never end up tied to the end of your line.
Materials
Hook: Daiichi 2220 streamer hook or similar 4X-long hook, size 6
Thread: Black
Weight: .015-inch to .025-inch lead wire
Tail: Marabou dyed burnt orange
Rib: Medium copper wire
Hackle: Hareline Bugger Hackle, one grizzly dyed burnt orange and one grizzly dyed olive
Body: Holographic gold Diamond Braid
Collar: Guinea fowl dyed olive
Tying Instructions
Step 1: Mount the hook in the vise. Starting just aft of the midway point on the shank, make 20 or so wraps of lead wire. Stop well short of the hook eye. Start the thread directly behind the eye and build up a small dam of thread wraps to keep the lead wraps from crawling forward. Now secure all of the lead wraps with widely spaced turns of thread, plus another small dam of wraps at the lead’s aft end. Finish covering the hook shank until the thread is above and slightly aft of the point of the hook.
Step 2: For the tail, secure a substantial tuft of marabou fibers about in line with the point of the hook. I like those tidy pin fibers toward the tip of a marabou feather; others like the bushier fibers farther down the sides of the feather. The tail should be about the length of the hook shank. Once the tail is in place, clip the excess at a point so that you’re left with a wad of stems that will cover the hook shank behind the lead wraps, helping to create an even foundation for the body, and bind them down. Then return the thread to the tail’s tie-in point and make a couple of turns behind and under the root of the tail. This helps the floppy tail from fouling on the hook.
Step 3: Secure a length of copper wire just ahead of the root of the tail and cover the excess with thread wraps, again creating a smooth underbody. Now select two Bugger Hackle feathers with fibers about equal length. Splay the individual feather fibers, leaving only the tips lying in line with the stem. Don Freschi, the inventor of the Bulldog, sets the olive hackle feather on top of the burnt orange feather before tying in both feathers at once by their tips. The goal is to have the two feathers positioned so that they can be wound simultaneously, one against the other, after the body is formed.
Step 4: With both the copper wire and pair of hackle feathers out of the way, secure a length of Diamond Braid at the root of the tail. Advance the thread to the forward end of the lead wraps and wind the Diamond Braid forward, creating an even body that covers the lead.
Step 5: Now hold the hackle feathers, olive on top and in front of the burnt orange, and wind them forward simultaneously. Leave a small gap between each turn while at the same time stroking the feather fibers toward the aft end of the fly and also maintaining the same feather orientation, olive in front, burnt orange behind. End the hackle wraps well back from the hook eye — you want plenty of room for the collar and head. Tie off and trim the excess.
Step 6: Reinforce the palmered hackle feathers with counterwraps of the copper wire. I always dislike doing this after working so hard to get the hackle feathers to lie just right. No matter how hard I try, I always end up scrunching some of the fibers with the wire wrap, but these counterwraps are the best way of preventing your fly from unraveling if it actually ends up fooling a fish, which is what we want, rather than trying to win a beauty contest. [Steps 6 and 7 are depicted by the completed fly on the previous page.]
Step 7: Select a well-marked dyed guinea feather and tie it in by the tip directly in front of the last turn of hackle feathers. I like the guinea feather fibers to be long enough to extend just beyond the midpoint of the fly. Fold the feather along the stem, fibers pointed aft, as you make two or three turns going forward, each turn directly in front of the other. Catch the stem of the feather with the thread and secure it. Clip the excess. Now tidy up any errant fibers with thread wraps, then form a clean head, whip finish, and saturate the head with lacquer or your favorite head cement.
