Many fly fishers have an understandable tendency to tie flies that look “right.” For folks who focus solely on trout, this makes some sense. Few trout are going to rise to a chartreuse blob mounted on a 1/0 hook when they are selectively feeding on tiny Baetis mayflies. Trout fishers’ tippets usually sport flies based on some concept of correct colors and the visual acuity of the fish. I must confess that I sometimes do the same when I find myself knee deep in salt-free water. However, there are lots of fly fishers who venture beyond the banks of the trout stream. For these intrepid adventurers, flies can be a more complicated and even bizarre concept. Step onto a bass boat with fly gear, and you can kiss parachute-hackle Pale Morning Duns goodbye. Things sometimes get even weirder in the salt. Take a look at the animals that call the Pacific surf home, and you will quickly realize that we aren’t in Kansas anymore.
Evolution of the Flea
Perhaps the most common food item in the California surf is the sand crab, often erroneously referred to as the sand flea. This critter makes its living by filtering particles of food from a part of the ocean where few other animals can survive, let alone prosper. Over 66 million years of evolution has adapted this small, egg-shaped crustacean to survive and thrive in the swash zone — the place where the ocean meets the land. Take one look at a beach getting pounded by waves, and you’ll appreciate the kind of crushing hydraulic pressures and powerful sandblasting currents that sand crabs have to endure. To add to the drama, gravitational pull from the moon and sun forces the swash zone up and down the beach every day. Sand crabs have to be highly mobile in this brutal environment, too.
Observing a sand crab up close certainly provides an idea of how it may look to a nearby fish. Many surf fly fishers, myself included, have, at some time, tied gray or tan-colored egg-shaped flies in the hope that the facsimile will catch more and bigger fish. As most folks eventually find out, these “realistic” flies don’t perform too well. Humans evolved as hunter-gatherers on the plains of Africa, where sight was usually the best way to locate edible plants or animals over long distances. The other senses, while important, typically took a back seat to sight when it came to finding food. This reliance on sight is so hardwired that we often blindly assume vision to be the dominant sense for other animals in other environments. The California surf isn’t like the Great Rift Valley, and fish aren’t human. For most of the fish that dine on sand crabs, the visual appearance of their prey is probably irrelevant.
Rips and wave backwash are well-known surf-zone feeding areas. These food-rich features are also full of suspended sand, which seriously limits the range of sight for any foraging fish. An object the size and color of a sand crab will effectively disappear into the background haze in a few inches. As such, a tan or gray fly would have to pass pretty close to a fish to be visible. No doubt that’s why sand crabs evolved their tan/ gray color scheme: any crab that stood out would quickly get eaten and thereby exit the gene pool. Many surf fly fishers incorporate fluorescent colors into their flies. While certainly helpful, the fluorescent boost adds only a few more inches of visibility to the equation.
So if surf-zone fish don’t rely so much on sight, how do they locate their prey? This is where things get interesting. Let’s consider the surf fly fisher’s distant cousins — bait fishers. Irritatingly, folks fishing live sand crabs often outscore fly fishers. The most likely reason is that a lightly hooked sand crab produces a scent trail and makes a fuss as it desperately tries to return to the safety of the sand. Using their noses, ears, and lateral lines, fish home in on the struggling sand crab long before it becomes visible.
So what can we do to get the attention of fish that are swimming in these turbid waters? It occurred to me that while it isn’t technically fly fishing to make your fly smell like a crab, making it move like one would be OK.
Being intellectually lazy, I decided to look at the lures used by bass, salmon, and steelhead anglers. I figured someone else had probably solved this problem, or one like it, long ago. Digging through a dusty tackle box, I found an old flatfish lure. This simple lure has been popular with salmon and steelhead fishers for over 80 years. It dives and wobbles, which makes it a pretty good platform for a sand crab fly. I took the flatfish to the beach, to see how well it performed on the end of a fly line. It worked like a charm in the water, but was an absolute disaster in the air. It rotated like a propeller during the cast, quickly turning my leader into a Chinese egg noodle mess. Apparently I had to do some more thinking.
What followed was a three-month exploration of design, materials, and construction. In all honesty, I lost count of how many flies I tied and fished. It had to be several dozen. I made flies from credit cards, yogurt carton lids, antiperspirant sticks, beer cans, and epoxy-soaked foam. My fly-tying desk resembled a recycling plant tip floor.
Things finally started to pay off in the spring of 2015. I had developed a pattern using 2-millimeter foam and the end of beer can. The foam/aluminum combination provided just enough strength without excess weight or density. The result was a fly that barely floated in salt water. I was able to observe the action of the fly in a shallow tide pool. When I pulled on the line, it quickly dove down with a nice, tight wiggle, and the lip dug into the bottom, sending up a comet tail of sand, just as a sand crab does when it’s trying to escape.
Barred surfperch poured into Monterey Bay in March, and I took the opportunity to run some fly tests. How would the new fly compare with my regular go-to patterns? While not exactly an FDA-approved double-blind test, the results were solid. As long as I could get the fly down near the sand, it produced almost twice as many hits as my old patterns. Some days I found I was even able to outfish the bait guys. That doesn’t happen very often. A few weeks later, the perch were gone, but thankfully, some schoolie stripers moved in and livened things up. The stripers went nuts for the new fly. There were several days with double-digit hookups, completely trouncing the bait-and-lure guys working the same water. Just to be sure this wasn’t a one-hit wonder, I dragged a couple of buddies down to the surf to see if they could replicate the results. To my relief, they also put fish on the beach.
Building the Flea
If you are comfortable working with foam, beer cans, and superglue, you’ll have no trouble building the flea. Most of the work involves drinking the beer and making the component parts. Putting the fly together is quick and simple.
The first task is to make the foam pennant that forms the action-inducing lip and back of the fly. You can make each piece separately, but it’s much easier to create a dozen at a time. All you need is a sheet of 2-millimeter foam and a geometry compass. Start by measuring the shank length of the hook. I use an octopus hook, because it has a relatively short shank and a wide gape, which helps convert more grabs into hookups. If you use a different type of hook, you may need to adjust the following ratios. Multiply the shank length by 2.6 and set your compass to that measurement. Now trace a circle on the foam. The next step is to reset the compass to 1.3 times the hook shank (half the size of the prior setting) and walk it around the circumference of the circle you have just drawn. Follow this by making a dozen equally spaced marks on the circle. Using a straight edge, draw a line that connects the marks on the circumference straight through the center of the circle. The end result should look like an orange cut for juicing.
Next you need to make the aluminum stiffener that keeps the foam from deforming during fishing. Take your beer (or soda) can and cut off the base so you are left with another circle. Don’t bother with the sides of the can — the metal is too thin. Using a hammer and a flat surface, pound the metal until it is flat. Cut this into segments just like the foam, making sure the wide end is the same width as the fat end of your foam pennant. The last step in the cutting process is to cut the pointy end off the aluminum triangle, so that the length is 0.6 times the length of the foam.
The next step is to superglue the aluminum to the foam. Cover the foam with a uniform layer of glue where he aluminum will be placed, then carefully press the aluminum onto the foam, ensuring that the fat ends line up and the sides are symmetrical. To make a really solid bond, I squish the pieces together with pliers.
The final step in the process is making a hole so the pennant can be slipped onto a barbless hook. Using a sharp metal spike (I use a cheap ice pick), punch a hole a distance equivalent to one-half the hook gape from the fat end of the foam. This hole should be large enough for the hook point to pass through, but no larger. You want the hook eye to hold the foam in place so it will never slip off the hook.
Slide the pennant onto the hook (foam side toward the eye) and place the hook in your vise. Push the pennant against the eye and build a bump of thread just behind the aluminum. This will stop the pennant from slipping down the shank and provide a substrate for more superglue, which is applied later on. Then tie in some chenille (or any other material you like) to create a body. Run your thread down to the end of the shank and follow with wraps of chenille. At this point, you can tie in a tail, if you desire. I like to add a couple of silicone rubber legs, but craft fur, Flashabou, or feathers all work well.
The last tying step is to bend the foam into an arc and lash it down to the hook shank just before the hook bend. You will be laying thread on a section of the pennant that is only foam, so use enough pressure to get a solid grip, but not enough to cut through the foam. Make at least half a dozen turns of thread, then whip finish. Line everything up so the fly swims true and thoroughly soak the rear thread wraps with superglue. Add a good drop of glue behind the hook eye, flip the fly, and add another drop on the opposite side, where your thread bump is located. If your glue job is done right, the fly will take a heck of a beating. Believe me, it’s going to get one when you fish it.
Fishing the Flea
Sand crabs usually dart across the sand, not high up in the water column, which means your fly needs to get down as fast as possible. This pretty much eliminates the use of floating fly lines, unless, perhaps, you are fishing in very shallow water for corbinas. When the surf is under three feet, you can use a Hi-D line. For bigger surf, you are going to need a tungsten-impregnated line. A T-8 or T-10 shooting head works very well for these conditions.
Leaders are pretty simple affairs. Take 18 inches of 10-to-20-pound-test mono, attach a small Duolock wire snap to one end, then knot a small swivel to the other end. Loop or tie the swivel onto the end of your flyline. This provides an antitwist link, in case the fly gets knocked or chewed out of alignment. Misaligned flies can helicopter on both the cast and the retrieve, which eventually forces a cast-killing twist in the fly line. The snap link provides a quick and convenient way to attach the fly. You can use Loop Knots instead, but quite frankly I find they are a pain to tie with cold hands. My insincere apologies to any insomnia-plagued dry-fly purists who have inadvertently read this article in the hope it might induce deep sleep and instead find themselves shocked senseless by the suggested use of swivels and snaps.
It is vital that you give the line enough time to drag the fly down. Casting and then immediately retrieving in water more than two feet deep will keep the f ly above feeding fish. There are so many variables in the surf that I can’t tell you exactly how long you will need for the fly to get to the proper depth. Use the old tried-and-true countdown method. Start with a five-second count and go from there. With a T-8 head and a clean three-to-four-foot surf, I can usually get the fly where I want it with an 8 to 12 count. The fly works best when fished wet-fly style through rips or retrieved in wave backwash. You will know when the fly is working, because the vibrations it makes will be telegraphed up the line to your hands. My friend Jim refers to it as strumming, which seems an apt description. Anyone who has used a leader straightener will know the feeling well. Vary your strip lengths and speed to get this strumming action. If need be, use the Scottish salmon fishing trick of walking back from the water to add/modulate your retrieve speed.
The flea works best when it is fished aggressively, which makes it a heck of a lot of fun. Cast out, count down, and then rip it back. While it certainly works well in the clear waters of troughs and holes, it’s the heavily scoured spots such as rips, wave backwash, and the edges of flats where the flea really shows its stuff. Not surprisingly for a fly that is moving at speed, you will get a lot of bumps that don’t translate into solid hookups. Don’t stress about this. Simply cover the water again and again until a fish finally locks down on the fly. I strongly suggest you wear a finger guard or glove on your casting hand. Constant hard strips of the fly line will eventually cut through skin, exposing nerve endings to saltwater. You won’t enjoy that.
Tie up some Frantic Fleas and give them a try. If you don’t fish the salt, take them to a local pond or lake. They also do a number on largemouth bass and crappies. I suspect that smallmouths might find them appealing, too. I plan to test that theory very soon. Tight strumming lines. . . .
