Don’t blame me. I didn’t make up the name. Funnier still, in Chile, where guides and anglers alike love this big articulated streamer, nobody I met had any real sense of the double entendre, a juvenile play on Freudian foolery best left out of the discussion altogether.
Of course, I got a few strange looks when, in my tortured Spanish, I tried my best to explain.
The truth, shared by Kelly Galloup, creator of the pattern, is that the fly is a knockoff of Russ Maddin’s Circus Peanut, an early entry into the now popular field of big articulated streamers designed to move big trout, especially browns. In Chile, they call the biggest, gnarliest streamers, those that can stretch from the tip of your fingers all the way down to your wrist, gatos, or cats. Peanut Envy, a somewhat restrained version of the type, might be called a gatito, although I better be careful, because I can imagine getting into trouble with that line of nomenclature, as well.
Another fact worth mentioning, right here at the start, is that until recently, I’ve never been much of a streamer guy. In salt water, of course, many of your baitfish patterns are essentially streamers, flies you pitch out there or, from a boat, up against the shore or in tight to the mangroves, before stripping them back your way. It’s not much different from fishing streamers on a river, drifting in a raft or a boat, which, throughout most of my trout-angling career, I’ve never done much of, in part because my home river doesn’t allow fishing from a boat and also because much of the Western water I fish doesn’t hold brown trout, the fish we associate most with streamer fishing.
Everyone recognizes that a brown trout over a certain size becomes a different kind of predator, no longer satisfied feeding on aquatic or even terrestrial insects. We may never be sure what food type a big brown trout sees when attacking a gaudy, overdressed streamer, and it may not really even matter. What we do know, instead, is that when big browns are on the feed, which is more or less always, they’re usually looking for a mouthful.
Bull trout, too. Not many places in the West still have bull trout populations healthy enough that anglers are allowed to target them, but such spots do exist, and if you’re lucky enough to find one, you’ll no doubt soon discover that some sort of streamer, say a Vanilla Bugger or the like, will go a long way in satisfying a bull trout’s longing for juvenile steelhead, salmon, or small resident trout.
That’s how I finally started to get interested in streamer fishing. I like heavy trout. No doubt I was also influenced by my pal Joe Kelly, a Michigander, like Kelly Galloup, who learned long ago that one way to pull big browns — or maybe any big trout — off their lies is to offer them a steak, or even a Big Mac, rather than the usual picayune bug. Not always, of course; big trout don’t get big being reckless.
Or dumb. Instead, they seem to choose their prey selectively, something vulnerable, yet worthy of their attention, and then attack. At least that’s my sense of it — or how I rationalize those strikes I get when I then fail to secure a hookup.
But as mentioned earlier, I’m not an accomplished or even very experienced streamer guy. Which is why, perhaps, during a recent trip to the Southern Hemisphere, I spent the first two weeks feeling I was missing a lot more fish than I ought to. In time, I figured out a couple of issues. First, while stripping, I often don’t hold the line firmly enough. If a fish strikes and the line skids through fingers of your stripping hand, you haven’t provided the resistance needed to pin the fish with the hook. My second common mistake, somewhat related, is failing to hook a fish that has actually grabbed the fly and held it long enough for the feeling of weight to pass through the line and into the rod. In this second instance, the mistake, I believe, is striking with the rod tip, rather than with a classic strip set: instead of swinging or lifting the rod tip, it’s much better to aim the rod directly at the fish while setting the hook with a couple of sharp, heavy tugs on your end of the line.
This is fairly basic stuff. But unless you do it often, streamer fishing has a way of humbling you, in part because we often feel it’s somehow easier than other fly-fishing techniques. Don’t be fooled. The subtleties in all forms of fly fishing should never be discounted. It’s rarely luck when the other angler in the boat gets what seems like more than his or her share of fish. Notice where their casts land, how straight the leader falls, or maybe how they put a little upstream hook or mend in the line before the fly hits the water so the fly isn’t yanked immediately away from the bank, away from a trout’s lie.
I know I notice. Which is why I like the Peanut Envy more than a lot of other big, heavy articulated streamers. I want a fly I can cast reasonably well. My fundamental belief has always been that a well-presented fly is the most important aspect of success. Even if a fly looks good in the water, it also has to behave like something the fish might see, which isn’t a fly getting jerked off the bank as though you’re playing a game of Crack the Whip.
The fish will usually tell you if you’re getting it right.
If you fish streamers only occasionally, as I did, as we leave another winter and attend again to the signs of early spring, you may want to do yourself a favor and in preparation for the traditional start of a new trout season, get yourself a copy of Kelly Galloup’s Modern Streamers for Trophy Trout II or even a used copy of Modern Streamers for Trophy Trout, coauthored by Galloup and Bob Linsenmann, which came out over two decades ago, but still has more useful and insightful information on the subject of streamers and streamer fishing than most of us have gathered as capricious students of this specialized, yet timeless aspect of the sport. As I recognize more and more throughout a long career in fly fishing, my enthusiasm is often reignited by explorations of new or different strategies or techniques. What’s worked in the past will no doubt work again. But is catching fish all I’m really trying to do?
Any answers offered up as to what any of us is after in fly fishing are nebulous at best. There’s every real chance that we’ve yet to stumble upon even the right questions to ask. Big streamers in the Southern Hemisphere, I was fascinated to learn, are a relatively new discovery in a place where the sport of fly fishing has grown from virtually nothing to what it is today within the span of my lifetime. The motive behind the use of streamers has nearly always been to catch big fish, a timeless aim in any sort of fishing, but, I would argue, never the final one.
Still, a big fly knotted to your tippet is always a sign of hope, and who has enough of that in his or her life today?
Materials
Hook: MFC 7050 or Daiichi 2460, sizes 4 (aft) and 1 (forward)
Head (on forward hook only): Large or medium brass cone, nickel colored
Thread: White Veevus GSP 100
Tail: Olive marabou
Tail accent: Copper Flashabou or Kreelex
Body: Olive Ice Dub
Hackle: Olive schlappen
Counterwrap rib: Copper wire
Legs: Golden yellow pearl flake Crazy Legs
Overwing: Olive marabou
Bead: Brown or root beer medium glass bead
Connecting wire: 17-lb nylon-coated 1×19 Surflon, Intruder wire, or similar
Bead cover: “Aftershaft” stripped from the base of a hackle feather
Collar: Olive Ice Dub
Tying Instructions
Step 1: Secure the aft (smaller) hook in the vise. Start the thread about oneeighth of an inch back from the hook eye. Cover the hook shank with thread wraps, stopping directly above a spot between the point of the hook and the barb — what Galloup calls the “gouge.” He also makes a strong argument for using this sort of marker to help ensure your flies are more uniform.
Step 2: For the tail, select a pair of marabou feathers with even plume fibers. Strip away excess waste. Wet the first marabou feather for ease of handling. Measure the tail so it ends up the length of the hook. Secure at the tie-in point above the gouge and, keeping the stem and forward fibers to one side of the hook shank, cover with thread wraps up to where you started the thread aft of the hook eye, what I’ll call the “tie-off.” Now wrap back to the tie-in point. Secure a few strands of Flashabou and trim to match the tail length. Finally, complete the stacked tail with another wetted marabou feather tied in directly on top of the first one and the Flashabou. Again cover the stem, this time holding it to the side opposite the first stem. End your thread wraps at the forward tie-off point and clip the excess.
Step 3: For the body ribbing, secure a length of copper wire at the forward end of the hook and run thread wraps over the wire back to the tie-in point above the gouge. Move the wire aside. Create a dubbing loop and fill the loop with dubbing material. Spin the loop to form a slightly tapered noodle. Wind the noodle forward, again ending at the forward tie-off point.
Step 4: Select a hackle feather with fibers two or three times the length of the hook gap. Strip away the webby fibers and secure the base of the stem at the forward end of the body, with the shiny convex side of the feather facing forward. Palmer the fly down the body to the tail with evenly spaced wraps of hackle, maintaining the same orientation of the feather so that it doesn’t twist or spin while wrapping it. At the aft end of the body, catch the hackle feather under a tight turn of the copper wire and counterwrap the entire body, securing the stem of the hackle feather. Tie off the wire at the forward end of the body and clip the excess.
Step 5: Secure the rubber legs in the gap you left between the forward end of the body and the hook eye. Use two lengths of leg material; find their midpoint and secure them so that you end up with a pair of legs hanging from each side of the fly.
Step 6: Select another marabou feather for the overwing. Wet it, measure it so that it extends to about the midpoint of the tail, and tie it in on top of the hook shank directly in front of the tie-in point of the legs. Clip the excess, whip finish, and cover the final thread wraps with lacquer or your favorite head cement.
Step 7: You’ve now finished the aft portion of the fly. Remove it from the vise. The forward portion is made essentially the same way, only tied on a slightly larger hook. Plus it has the conehead. Slip the brass conehead onto the larger hook and secure the hook in the vise. Start the thread and cover the hook shank back to the gouge. Now slip the legs of a loop of the connecting wire through the eye of the aft fly and slip the glass bead over both legs of the wire. Attach the wire to the forward hook, positioning the aft fly so that the bead barely touches the top of the bend of the forward hook. Cover the legs of the connecting wire with thread wraps all the way up to the conehead. Clip the excess wire, but leave enough extra so that you can bend it back along the hook shank and cover the entire shank again with the tightest possible wraps.
Step 8: Starting above the gouge of the forward hook, tie in two wads of webby fibers stripped from the base of a hackle feather (Galloup calls this material “aftershaft”) so as to cover the bead, as well as fill the space between the two parts of the fly. This joining material can also be thought of as the “tail” of the forward hook. At the same tie-in point, secure a length of copper wire, cover it to the midpoint of the hook shank, then fold it back and wrap the thread back over it to the tie-in point above the gouge.
Step 9: At this point, repeat Steps 4, 5, and 6. You’ve already tied in the copper wire rib; now create the body with a dubbing loop and dubbing material, making sure you leave plenty of room between the forward end of the body and the conehead. Then secure the base of a hackle feather, palmer the fly with wraps of hackle feather, and lock the feather in place with counterwraps of wire. Add the legs (in this case, use three strands instead of two), then tie in an overwing that extends to the aft end of the cover material between the two parts of the fly.
Step 10: Finally, create a collar of dubbing material between the root of the overwing and the conehead. Form a dubbing noodle, either with a dubbing loop or by spinning material onto the tying thread. Wrap the collar so it presses tight to the conehead, locking the conehead in place. Make several Half Hitches directly behind the conehead. Now trim the aft legs so that they extend to about the same length as the tail of the fly. The forward legs are trimmed just enough to remove the material that connects the individual strands. (See page 15 for image.)
Tying Note
The Peanut Envy is made up of two parts, each essentially the same as the other. The list of materials is repeated in each part, except for the bead, bead cover, collar, and conehead. The bead separates the two parts; the conehead and collar create the head on the forward portion of the fly. You can watch Kelly Galloup tie a Peanut Envy at https://gQfO5k, which can also be reached via the QR code below.
— Scott Sadil
