The river was out of its banks, dark as peanut butter, and though I liked seeing the water up in the grass, where the bass often hide, I could tell as soon as my boots vanished in the brown soup that I wasn’t going to do much today but try out the new rod somebody sent my way.
As far as I could tell, it put the fly where I aimed.
Then I considered the little creek I had followed the last couple of miles after the long descent to the canyon floor. At the start of bass season in a region with little in the way of summer rain, I’d been surprised to see any water in the creek at all — and a lot more surprised when I climbed out of the truck to inspect the creek and came upon a pair of postspawn steelhead, lying clear as cats stretched out in a quiet pool beneath the sun’s bright rays.
That clear water’s got to enter this river somewhere, I surmised.
Sure enough, when I found the creek mouth, there was a patch of crystalline water rubbing up against the cloudy whorls spinning alongside the river current. Again, the rod did as asked, and just as I started to strip the fly, a swirl appeared out of nowhere, and I was tight to a scurrying bass.
Moments later, I was startled once more by how happy I felt with nothing more to show for my efforts than an eight-inch fish in hand.
And a new rod that could handle such a beast.
Something . . . for Smallmouths
I think it’s pretty silly going to too much trouble to create a serious smallmouth bass fly. Surely you already have something in your fly box that will do. But that’s probably an ungenerous opinion of the fish itself, and no doubt anglers, serious anglers, care to craft a more sophisticated offering that speaks to the sublime subtleties associated elsewhere with this sporty warmwater species. That hasn’t been my experience. As in so much of the fishing I do, I find that the real challenge in smallmouth bass fishing is locating fish, coming to understand their behavior, what they’re doing and why, and then putting a fly in front of them that they strike rather than reject. Hence the Woolly Bugger template for the Smallmouth Something. I saw a piece in “The Talk of the Town” in a recent New Yorker in which a Woolly Bugger was labeled a streamer, and for a moment, I thought, “Yeah, right, what do they know?” Let’s just say if you live in Salmon Fly country, you can’t help but think of a big black Bugger as a rough, but adequate imitation of a gnarly Pteronarcys nymph. And my go-to Little Olive Bugger, the first fly I generally try in a new lake, a lake for which I haven’t received any prior intel, is offered up as a damselfly nymph, though I’m well aware it might work so frequently only because it suggests something else good to eat, that wholesale criterion for so many of our tried-and-true patterns.
There’s something else besides feeding going on, however, during our efforts to provoke a smallmouth to strike or eat a fly. Smallmouths spawn in late spring, when water temperatures reach about 60 degrees Fahrenheit, and serious smallmouth anglers share all kinds of theories about big males and females behaving in aggressive or defensive or protective ways around their nests and young. Of course, I recall that it was once argued that steelhead strike a fly because it makes them mad, a theory nobody I know holds anymore, especially anglers who fish surface patterns and study the various ways steelhead eat or grab, none of which suggest anything resembling anger as we know it in a dog, cat, tuna, roosterfish, or ourselves. Still, we know for sure that a higher percentage of big bass, known in some circles as bruisers, are caught just prior to and during spawning time, and a lot of these fish are hooked in and around nests or known spawning locations. So let’s go ahead and agree that this is a good time to target these areas, although it still might be food that these big bass are looking for, the way some of us might want a big, juicy burger, medium rare, with all the trimmings, after a spree of frisky sex.
Does it matter? In my opinion, not much — which is why I find a fly like the Smallmouth Something perfectly adequate for most smallmouth bass fishing. It could be food; an immature crayfish comes to mind. Or it could be a baby pikeminnow, come to obliterate a nest full of eggs or a cloud of schooling fry. I know how many anglers love to claim this happens for that reason. But I also know the number of successful anglers I encounter who sense that nearly all fish are, in many ways, just like they are, fairly democratic in their tastes, happy to take whatever they can get whenever this or that occasion might arise.
It seems like a sensible attitude. I’ve never hooked a smallmouth bass, anyway, that’s made my heart stop or left me shaking in my boots. Nor, for that matter, have I landed one that felt as if it changed my life, for better or worse, or lost one that left a permanent scar seared across my breast.
Other fish, yes; plenty, in fact. But not a smallmouth bass.
Fishing the Fly
Still, that doesn’t mean I’m just glad to be out there, happy to work on my casting. Hooking fish, in my experience, is more fun than not hooking them. Any fly I tie to my tippet is meant to do something that I hope might bring a fish to hand. Yet I’ll be the first to concede that the Smallmouth Something is not a particularly sophisticated pattern. I think of it, in fact, as sort of a compromise between what it takes to catch smallmouth bass and the effort I want to put into the game.
For a few seasons, a dozen or so years back, I got serious about that game. I was fishing with a gear guy who had smallmouth down, who fished these big, fat, artificial Senko worms and caught five fish or more for every one I managed to land. Eventually, I devised flies to imitate the size and profile of a Senko, and I kept experimenting until I figured out the appropriate full sinking line that allowed me to move the fly slowly, at the right depth, without hanging up too often on the bottom.
And I did catch more bass. At least for a while. Because, you see, over time, I discovered I wasn’t all that interested in tying those flies and fishing those lines or even the sort of water where the gear guy and I caught those smallmouth bass.
Something was missing.
I wish I could tell you what it was. All I know is that I pretty much gave up on smallmouth bass until, recently, I spent some time on a remote river running through lovely country where you can f ish for the species with the most traditional of gear and tactics — the same river, of course, where we started this loopy essay. Spring was in the air, the river was high and off-color, there were wildflowers in all directions; deer and elk and even bighorn sheep appeared along the steep canyon walls. The Way as important — or more so — than the destination? All I know is that as I waded into the dirty water and dangled the Smallmouth Something in the current, watching it come alive, I enjoyed an old, favorite thought that has returned, again and again, for as long as I can remember.
Now, we’re fishing.
Materials
Hook: TMC 5212, size 8
Thread: Rust brown UTC 70
Tail: Brown rabbit fur
Body: Light olive/brown medium variegated chenille
Rib: Small red copper wire
Hackle: Furnace
Tying Instructions
Step 1: Secure the hook in the vise and start the thread. Cover the hook shank with a layer of thread wraps. Forward of the bend of the hook, tie in a tuft of rabbit fur cut from a Zonker strip. Make the tail as long as you can with the rabbit fur at hand — at least as long as the hook shank. This is a fly that relies on action as it swims in the current. That long, tuft of rabbit fur does the trick.
Step 2: Before you wrap the chenille body of the fly, you need to attach both a length of copper wire for ribbing and the hackle feather with which you’ll palmer the fly. Secure the wire at the root of the tail. Now select a hackle feather with a defined dark center that contrasts sharply with the feather’s lighter-colored outer edges. Stroke the fibers away from the tip of the feather and tie it in by the tip at the same location where you secured the copper wire.
Step 3: Strip the color off the core of the tip of a length of chenille. Secure the stripped tip to the fly at the root of the tail. Advance the thread to just behind the eye of the hook. Wrap the hook shank with chenille, secure it with thread wraps, and clip the excess.
Step 4: Now palmer the body with evenly spaced turns of the hackle feather. Use hackle pliers to hold the stem of the feather and keep it from twisting as you wind. Close the distance between wraps as you approach the front of the body. If all goes well, you should end up with a fairly even taper of hackle tips, with the long fibers forward and the shorter ones toward the tail.
Step 5: Now rib the fly with evenly spaced wraps of copper wire. The idea is to protect the stem of the hackle feather so that the f ly doesn’t unravel after getting gnawed on by a fish. Work the wire in between the hackle fibers, trying not to flatten the fibers against the chenille body. Some tyers choose to wind their wire in the opposite direction of the hackle feather wraps. Once the rib is complete, secure the wire behind the eye of the hook, clip the excess, and create a tidy head with thread wraps. Whip finish and saturate the head with lacquer or your favorite head cement. (See the completed fly on the previous page.)