I’m standing at the open tailgate of my brand-new seventeen-year-old fishing pickup, pawing through the contents of more fly boxes than any sane angler needs, gathering a fresh assortment of just the right flies before I plunge into a canyon where, for the past two days, hefty trout have done a number on my first-team supply of heavy-water nymphs.
More to the point, I’m looking for flies to match the Zug Bug hatch.
I know I’ve said this before, but few things delight me more in this sport than fishing with flies that make no pretense of imitating anything you can identify, with certainty, that fish might be feeding on. Or just as good, a pattern that seems to work because it comes out of left field, startling fish into sudden reckless behavior that nothing in your match-the-hatch lineup has been able to provoke. Of course, I’m making that part up: Who knows why a fish eats a Zug Bug, other than the claim, however oblique, that when presented just so, the fly looks, to a trout at least, good enough to eat? No doubt, we can always speculate why. My success the past two days has traced a proportionate decline in a lineup of Zug Bugs, tied years before, in a box otherwise loaded with the big black nymphs I associate with trouting in this sort of steep, deep canyon in the early part of the season. Oddly, there’s also been a prolific number of medium-sized gray mayflies, a smattering of chunky tan caddisflies, and hovering around the reeds and grasses knocked flat by high water, thick swarms of delicate damselflies, none of which has stimulated any of the thick-bodied rainbows to show themselves feeding at the surface. Not one. Does it have something to do with the off-colored water, dark enough to hide my boots once I’m knee-deep in the vigorous current? The Zug Bugs I’ve been using to clobber these fish — and, in many cases, get clobbered myself — are slender, unweighted versions, sizes 10 and 12, that have been waiting patiently in the same box from which I usually pull the gnarly beasts crowding the opposite leaf.
What’s made me turn to those neglected Zugs? First off, the big black stonefly nymphs haven’t exactly lit up the scoreboard; more often than not, they end up clinging to a river bottom filthy with sharp boulders hidden by the opaque currents. Plus, there are very few stonefly shucks displayed on rocks or weed stocks above the waterline when, at this time of year, I expected to find the edges of the river littered with the nymphs’ crunchy remains. And the few shucks I have found are much smaller than I usually encounter back on my home river.
As I often do when I’m on a new river and uncertain what’s going on, I’m also fishing with two flies, in this case, because of the time of year, the big stone nymph on the end of my tippet, with something smaller on a tail of the tippet knot above. That’s where I eventually attached the first Zug Bug. Beforehand, I’ve gone through my usual assortment of soft hackles, a couple of different Pheasant Tails that seem appropriate nymphs for the mayflies sailing on the water, and my wet or swimming caddis patterns, which generally produce some sort of action whenever those lively, size 14 tan caddisflies are fluttering about.
That first Zug Bug, anyway, soon disappeared after a big trout performed three spectacular belly flops before that tag end parted, leaving me free to retrieve but one of two flies.
What is it the Zug Bug represents? Could the slender profile of this particular batch possibly imitate the nymph of the swarming damselflies? I like to think that after all these many decades searching for trout, I’m capable of making this kind of subtle connection, when in my heart of hearts, I know it’s often pretty much a crapshoot. That didn’t work? Try something else.
On the other hand, I’m absolutely certain that changing flies doesn’t mean squat if you don’t present your cast in the appropriate, effective manner. In the case of deep, fast-water nymphing in marginal conditions with not a single fish revealing its whereabouts with any manner of telltale rise, that means getting your fly or flies down to the fish and aiming for a drag-free drift while at the same time remaining in close, strict contact with those flies, capable of detecting, immediately, any sort of touch, whether from rock, fish, or anything else that stops the downstream progress of the cast.
Easier said than done. When fly anglers talk about challenging technical fishing, they’re often referring to the kind of “fine and far off” sport we associate with gin-clear chalk streams or eerily quiet spring creeks, fooling snooty trout with application of, among other things, long, gossamer leaders and imitations perhaps best tied under a microscope. I agree: that can be awfully tough fishing, demanding an assortment of subtle skills and techniques acquired through keen observation, practice, and often years of frustrating experience. But over the course of a lifetime spent trout fishing, I’ve come to appreciate, as well, how “technical” big-water nymphing can be, requiring a set of skills just as challenging in their own right as those needed to get tough trout to rise — and the reward, as Charles Brooks told us long, long ago, is often the “larger trout” that so many of us love to encounter in our fishing.
We all know some anglers, of course, who say they just don’t like this kind of fishing, which always sounds to me a little like that kid in class who complains about a lesson he’s having trouble with because it’s “boring.” You don’t like to hook big trout? I understand a preference for fish tipping up to take my seductively drifting size 20 Go-Go Dun, but I don’t see this as in any way superior to sticking a beast down deep in heavy current among the rocks, one of those thick, overweight trout somehow still capable of throwing its entire self three feet out of the water not just once, but four straight times right in front of you, the end of your fly line barely beyond your rod tip, the sound of the fish, each time it lands, splatting as if a plastic gallon jug filled with lead is hitting the water.
Maybe a Zug Bug, in all its unrefined glory, is no more sophisticated — or technical — than that. As I continue to dig through my many fly boxes, trying alongside my new truck’s tailgate to supplement a much-diminished Zug Bug supply, reduced in part by encounters with just this sort of bounding rainbow, I’m suddenly tickled by the thought that
I’m searching for f lies that imitate another fly, one that doesn’t look much like anything I’ve seen in or on or along the water. What I’m looking for, instead, are flies I hope might work as well as the Zug Bug has been working.
That’s a pretty funny way to match the hatch, but there you have it. To sophisticates out there who need to draw a clean line between what they do and what happens at the business end of their cast, a clear cause-and-effect relationship that explains how and why fish do or don’t end up connected to the fly, the Zug Bug may not be the pattern for you. It implies that you forgo certainty, accepting outcomes that you can’t legitimately explain. From a personal standpoint, I’ve long believed that’s one of the appeals of the sport: things happen for mysterious reasons.
In fact, I’ve always thought that’s kind of the whole point.
Materials
Hook: Standard 1X-long or 2X-long nymph hook, size 10 to 16
Weight (optional): 10 to 15 turns of .015-inch lead wire
Thread: Black
Tail: Three or four peacock sword fibers
Rib: Small oval silver tinsel
Body: Peacock herl
Hackle: Furnace or brown hen, sparse
Wingcase: Mallard flank fibers clipped short
Tying Instructions
Step 1: Secure the hook in the vise and, if weighting the fly, cover at least two-thirds of the hook shank with wraps of lead. Leave plenty of room between the forward end of the lead and the eye of the hook. Start the thread, build small dams at each end of the lead to hold it in place, then cover the lead with a base layer of thread wraps.
Step 2: For the tail of the fly, use three or four fibers from a peacock sword feather. Make the tail about half the length of the hook shank. Tie in the tail so that the curve of the fibers sweeps upward. Cover the butts of the fibers up to the aft end of the lead and clip the excess.
Step 3: Secure the oval tinsel for the ribbing as you wind the thread back to the root of the tail. For the body of the fly, create a dubbing loop, slide four or five lengths of peacock herl between the legs of the loop, then spin the loop until it forms a tight herl rope. Move the thread to in front of the lead, then wind the herl rope forward, ending the body just in front of the lead, tie off, and trim the excess. Then rib the body with four or five evenly spaced wraps of tinsel.
Step 4: From a furnace hen neck, select a feather with fibers about half the length of the hook shank. Brown hen hackle will also work. Secure the hackle feather by the tip. While folding back the fibers, make a single turn of the hackle feather and then tie it off and clip the excess. Use wraps of thread to force any errant fibers to lie back along the body of the fly.
Step 5: Patterns for the original Zug Bug call for a wingcase tied from a wood duck lemon flank feather. As I mentioned in my column about the Light Cahill Wet (September/October 2020), these feathers can prove hard to find, and tyers have now taken to substituting mallard flank feathers dyed lemon for the wingcase. Or better still, simply pull a bunch of fibers from one side of any mallard flank feather, tie them in at the eye, and clip the fibers to create a pronounced wingcase that extends about one-third the length of the body behind the hook eye. I doubt very much that this slight change of color will be the reason a trout either accepts or rejects the fly. Now clip the forward butts of the wingcase feathers, create a tidy head with thread wraps, whip finish, and saturate the head with lacquer or your favorite head cement.
