With the possible exception of fundamentalist upstream dry-fly fishers, everyone enjoys fly fishing with poppers. Whether it is the splashy assaults of panfish or the arrhythmia-inducing explosions of bass, stripers, or snook, fishing poppers puts a big dose of fun into fly fishing. Poppers range from runty little painted cork stoppers mounted on size 8 hooks to gaudy foam plugs large enough to clog the barrel of an overbored 12 gauge and armed with hooks that could easily double as gaffs. Regardless of their size or construction, poppers pop and gurgle as they plow across the surface of the water. You can twitch a popper to create a small wake such as may be made by a drowning dragonfly, nervous frog, or crippled baitfish. Alternatively, you can yank down on the line so hard that the popper rips a hole in the water and creates over 80 decibels of underwater noise. Few flies have such a broad performance repertoire.
Recently, while conducting microcystin toxin testing at a local lake, I discovered a wonderful new popper body. The test kit provides plastic droppers for measuring reagents. While waiting for the test to run its course, I realized that with a little work, the droppers might make extremely lightweight popper bodies. I tied up a few prototypes and took them back to the lake the following weekend. To my delight, the Dropper Poppers were easy to cast and landed softly on the water. The bass in this lake get a lot of pressure. The conventional-gear guys have figured out that you need a lure that enters the water as quietly as possible. This is especially true when the fish are in the shallows. The Dropper Popper proved to be quieter than the gear most of the local experts use. Even with my prototype flies, I caught several bass and a monster crappie. I went home grinning.
Accuracy
Most of the commercially available half-inch-wide foam-bodied pencil poppers weigh over 3.6 grams and are difficult to cast with any degree of accuracy. To control these beasts properly, you need a 10-weight or heavier stick, a matching line, and a hawserlike leader. Even then, it can be a challenge to drop the fly within three feet of the intended spot. In open water, that usually isn’t too big a deal. The problem arises when you are after bass hunkered down close to bankside cover. Large bass can be suckers for a well-placed pencil popper. To connect with these finned explosives, you often need to drop your fly within a foot or so of some seriously snaggy structure. I’m not a bad caster, but I can’t consistently manage that level of accuracy with large foam-bodied poppers. You don’t get too many shots at monster bass, so you want to make every cast count. A half-inch-wide Dropper Popper weighs in at just 1.8 grams — half the weight of its foam counterpart. The lighter weight makes it much easier to throw the fly accurately with a 7-weight or 8-weight rod. I won’t say that I hit the mark every time, but the ratio of successful drops to flubbed casts is much higher with the Dropper Popper.
Distance
Another neat thing about Dropper Poppers is that they can be cast quite far on relatively light tackle. I spend a lot of time fly fishing the Pacific surf for striped bass. In the early morning hours, stripers will often exhibit extreme anger-management problems toward top-water lures. They regularly clobber the big pencil poppers thrown out by conventional-gear guys. Fly fishers can get in on this action, too. However, you often need to heave the fly out some distance. Sixty-foot casts are OK, but 70-foot or even 80-foot casts are better. This can be a challenge with big poppers. And casting top-water flies long distances on a 10-weight rod for several hours is quite an ordeal. If you don’t have good casting technique, you can end up needing quite a bit of Ibuprofen. The Dropper Popper’s light weight means you can cast the fly a considerable distance using just an 8-weight rod and line. I consider 80 feet a reliable target for fishing large Dropper Poppers. I’d have a very hard time managing that with normal poppers on a heavier rig.
Rapala-like Wiggles
There’s one more thing the Dropper Popper does that is really cool. It turns out that the fly can be made to wiggle, too. I discovered this quite by accident while fishing the fly on an intermediate line. I often use an intermediate line for top-water flies in the surf. The line sinks a few inches, which is just enough to reduce the effects of waves, but not enough to sink the buoyant fly permanently. Poppers fished this way pop, then swim underwater for a few inches, much like an injured baitfish trying to escape the surface. For some reason, the head on the experimental fly I was fishing had slipped a few millimeters, leaving about a quarter of an inch of bare mono connecting the hook eye at the rear of the fly, where the hook is dressed as a tail, and the popper itself. As I retrieved the fly, it popped and submerged a few inches, just as expected.
What I had not anticipated was the way the head forced beautiful wiggles into the long feather tail as it swam underwater. If this fly had not “failed,” I doubt I would ever have thought such a thing could be possible. You gotta love serendipity. I now tie most of my Dropper Poppers with a quarter-inch mono gap between the hook and the popper body.
Plastic droppers are available in a variety of sizes. You can use them to tie flies for everything from sunfish to stripers. You don’t need to order a microcystin toxin testing kit to get hold of them. Typing “plastic droppers” into your favorite search engine will lead you to a bunch of companies selling them for as little as two cents apiece. Compared with the cost of a hard foam or cork popper body, that’s a real bargain.
Materials
A plastic dropper
A sharp hook
Six inches of 20-to-40-pound-test mono
A quarter-inch split ring or tippet ring
A small plastic bead
Superglue
Six inches of 10-to-20-pound-test mono
Fly-tying thread
Bucktail or feathers Flashabou
Tying Instructions
Step 1. Using a razor blade or scissors, cut the thin dispensing tube off the bulb, leaving about an eighth of an inch of the tube attached to the bulb.
Step 2. Take a needle and make a hole right in the middle of the fat end of the bulb.
Step 3. Using your fingernail, push the convex end of the bulb inward. This creates a concave face.
Step 4. Take about six inches of 20-to-40-pound-test mono and knot a split ring or tippet ring onto one end. Push the other end through the needle hole in the popper. Pull the ring into the concave face of the popper. You will now have a popper body with a ring in the middle of the face and a tail of mono trailing behind.
Step 5. Using an emery board, slightly roughen the section of mono where it exits the rear of the popper to create a rough surface that will help super glue adhere. If the dropper dispensing tube is narrow (under an eighth of an inch), you can skip the next step.
Step 6. Slip the bead over the free end of the mono tail and slide it up until it is snug against the tube end of the popper. Superglue it in place. The bead and the whipped knot described in the next step act as a stopper, keeping the popper body from sliding down over the hook eye.
Step 7. Take a six-inch piece of 10-to-20pound-test mono and whip it onto the mono “tail” using a three-turn or four-turn Uni Knot. Slide the knot up to the back of the popper body (or to the bead from Step 6), cinch tight, cut off the tag ends, and add a drop of superglue.
Step 8. Secure the mono to the hook with a full-tensioned layer of tying thread. To ensure the hook doesn’t slip off the mono when a huge fish lunges for freedom, you have three simple options: double the mono over (my preferred method), burn a blob on the tag end, or add some surface texture by squishing it with serrated-jaw pliers. Remember to leave about a quarter inch of bare mono between the hook eye and the bead/ sleeve so the popper can wiggle. Saturate the thread and mono with super glue.
Step 9. Tie some feathers or bucktail onto the hook and add some Flashabou, if you like.
I often leave the popper head unfinished, but it can be painted easily enough. I like using Scribbles fabric paints, which come in a huge selection of colors. I particularly like the sparkle gels, which contain flecks of Flashabou-like material. Being water-based, they are non-toxic and easy to clean up. The downside is that the paint does tend soften and detach from the body after a few hours of use. That’s no big deal for me, since I can quickly tie a bunch of Dropper Poppers and simply swap out any fly that has lost its color coating. A layer of clear nail polish can keep the paint layer intact a little longer. If you want an ultradurable painted popper that never sheds its coat, simply suck some paint inside the dropper and let it dry for a few hours or days (drying time depends on the air temperature) before building the fly.
While the dropper popper excels as a fish or frog imitation, it can also make a great dragonfly, too. Largemouth bass will often come out of the water to take dragonflies. Most of the time, they miss the fast-flying insects, but occasionally they knock one into the water. You’ll know when that has happened, because the fish will come back and suck the crippled insect down with a loud smack. This is when a small dropper popper with the appropriate body coloring can be deadly. There’s no need to tie on wings or legs unless you enjoy the extra realism. The bass really don’t seem to care. Simply cast the popper where the bass was last feeding and give it a series of feeble twitches. It usually doesn’t take more than a few seconds for the bass to home in on the fly and annihilate it.
Even when tied on an expensive brand of hook, the dropper popper still costs less than a buck. It’s cheap, easy to cast, and highly effective. What more can you ask for in a fly?
