JSzymczyk

Hi again from a long time member of the forum... sort of fell out of posting over the last few years. Life happens, as they say. Very soon a lifelong friend is going on a vacation/fishing trip to a small island off a central american country and will have bonefish, permit, and small tarpon outside the front door of his rented hooch. So I tied up a box full of Crazy Charlies and other likely things, which got me thinking that these would make great smallmouth flies as well. I have an affinity for correctly tied Clouser Deep Minnows so it was not much of a jump to adapt that style to my idea. Tying up a few of these in hopes of getting after some fish in a month or so. Thanks Mike Chell for reaching out-

I use some small "size 00" snaps marketed by VMC and other companies for streamers. They work great.

you could take a bit of whatever material, tie it on whatever hook with whatever thread, and it would be "original".... People have been tying bits of junk to hooks for at least a few thousand years. You can be fairly confident that whatever you come up with, someone has done something very very similar to it. Success matters, and we all have our own version of what is successful. Your little white moth pattern caught a bunch of grayling, and you can't argue with that. From the design of the fly, on a reasonably light tippet, it would cast like a wrecked helicopter and cause endless aggravation with twisted tippet to a lot of fishermen. I remember a few afternoons catching grayling on a little river in Alaska on flies that were so chewed up and worn out from so many fish that they didn't resemble much of what they "originally" were. Would a known pattern like a White Wulff have worked equally as well as your "original" Spruce Budworm moth? Maybe not. Maybe yes. Unless something is truly, unarguably DIFFERENT, and that difference is easy to understand and available to people, AND solves a problem (or brings an action, presentation quality, or some other attractiveness) which has so far been unsolved, it's not really worth the effort to claim "originality".... Rapala floating minnow (some will argue that other Scandinavians had the same ideas before Laurie Rapala...) ... Mepps Spinner which all other "spinners" have been based on (some will argue Andre Meulnart copied and modified other older designs....) Bumblepuppy streamer (Theodore Gordon himself wrote that he was influenced by other things he had seen, and feathers had been lashed to hooks to PROBABLY emulate baitfish for millenia.....) Nick Creme taking an emerging technology of the time (polymer "plastics") and solving what he thought was a "problem" with live bait, coupled with the construction of midwest reservoirs, and the emerging sport fisheries for bass, creating the birth of the soft-plastic lure industry.... yeah that was original. Bob Clouser and the Clouser Deep Minnow... People are quick to scream "it is just a jig" and "there have been weighted bucktails for a hundred years" and other ill-informed crap... learn the background, the merge of industry people, technology that created the injection molded lead dumbells at the right time and the provided to the right person at the right place, and Bob's understanding of what he wanted to do as it related to creating a "fly" to emulate baitfish in a way no other combination of technology and materials ever had... yep ORIGINAL but also incrementally developed from the past. Differences in fly tying as we commonly accept the parameters of fly tying, are so incremental at this stage as to be literally, a drop of water in an ocean. There is absolutely nothing wrong with approaching fly design and creation with no preconceived notions or boundaries, but we should realize that lashing bits of stuff to a hook with thread has been done for ages... The sometimes statutory and often moral limits of what a fly actually is, sort of puts it all in perspective. To me there are only two circumstances in which originality matters (and there are always exceptions) ... the first is a personal accomplishment, fooling a desired quarry with a pattern and presentation you yourself figured out (as in your moth pattern) and that cannot be argued or diminished. The second is if someone has the ego and desire to make a profit from whatever he thinks he (or she in case I was offending anyone....) created.

do you need a 27wt fly rod and a XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXFast sinking line?

I'm going back to fishing with night crawlers.

happy birthday Jarhead, a day late. BTW you're a cheap bastard. :D :D

Niugini bass.

that is a fact right there. People who like to say LMB and SMB fight equally have not done much fishing. Anyway, we all lose fish. If on any particular day it seems as if you are losing a lot of fish right after they strike, it may well be that the fish are just not in the mood to really eat. If you are losing a lot of fish well into the fight, after they have jumped and run a few times, then it is probably operator error. I've caught more than a few SMB over 6 lbs in lakes and rivers from New Brunswick to Pennsylvania and other places and they just don't really make long hard runs to the point that it is really beneficial to get them on the reel. It doesn't hurt, as long as you're not losing them WHILE trying to get the slack taken up... but they just don't make long drag burning runs. They are more short range hard hitters. It is great fun to watch them jump, but not great for keeping them hooked. I agree, it is USUALLY easy to anticipate when they will jump, and give them counter pressure to minimize it. The really big ones often don't make the crazy violent jumps that 17-18 inch fish do. As for setting the hook, fly tackle sucks. I say that in comparison to casting or spinning tackle using modern fast action rods and ZERO stretch superlines. It is just the way it is. It is something we deal with if we want to use fly tackle. It may be a difficult thing to visualize, but try not to set the hook with the upper half of the rod. A combination of a strip set and using the bottom half of the fly rod to hit the fish is important. Again, simple to demonstrate but difficult to put in words. Sharp hooks and perfect knots are required.

I love these "old" movies.... as feathers5 points out, all the most wonderfullest modern technology doesn't mean a thing if the operator doesn't know what the heck they are doing. Millions of tons of big fish were landed with tackle modern spoiled fly fishermen would consider to be junk in today's over-marketed world. the fish have not changed.

"order a spare parts kit with o-ring, jaw spring, jaw adjusting screw and ball bearings - just in case" wow.... seems as if those are known high failure parts, they would fix the design or just include them when you buy the vise... if my vise had that many probable failure points, I think I'd be giving it away.

so explain to me the sorcery involved in cutting pieces out of a 9 foot blank and ending up with a 9'6" rod...... maybe it's still too early for the coffee to have helped.

same situation as with the jet drive boat operators on the Susquehanna all summer. A rare few know, or CARE, what they are doing, most are inconsiderate and self-centered. Worse yet are those who decide to "slow down", come just off plane dropping their stern deeper and creating a bigger wake than if they would have just been gone. The most aggravating are the ones who have no business being on the water to begin with, refuse to learn how to trim their drive, and run full out while never getting on plane. Yes, they have every bit as much privilege to be out there with their toys as I do, but a little consideration goes a LONG way. Sadly it happens less often all the time.

got a big bottle of ketchup? Although there is a huge variance in the quality of "buck"tail, that ain't it.

good God, just go fishing. This is fishing, not splitting the atom. I'm all about particulars, but please provide a real-world scenario in fly fishing where it is critical to know the MASS--- weight is not mass--- of two inches of .035" lead wire. Yes is casts differently and sinks differently than a differently tied fly, but it is all relativity in the field. What if you put two more turns of hackle on a fly with exactly the same mass of lead wire as the next one? The hydrodynamic drag and the buoyancy of the fly will change, making it perform differently. Put some lead on the hook, make it sink. Put some more lead on the hook, make it sink faster. Put some more turns of the same diameter lead, make it sink faster. Use larger diameter lead with the same amount of turns, make it sink faster. To me part of the beauty of fly tying and fly fishing is the analog nature of it... SO MANY variables at play during each presentation that individual bits of data are nearly irrelevant... only the situation as a whole. The very next cast, enough variables will have changed to make the last cast, and most of the static factors, reset.

so, WHY are any male humans spending time wondering WHY women do the things they do? I've been with my lovely and talented wife for about 29 years... and in most situations I have a fairly good idea WHAT she is going to do, but no way will I understand WHY.

I have the set of Stealth Bomber cutters and have cut many hundreds with each size. they are still sharp. If you use the cutting block they provide with each set and don't abuse them by cutting on a hard surface, I'm not sure how one tyer could wear them out. How many do you need to cut at one time? Cut one layer of foam at a time. Just do a whole bunch of bodies. It doesn't take long. The point is to cut each body perfectly, not a ton of bodies as fast as possible. Straight from their website FAQ's : I have sandwiched 3 layers of foam together and I can't get your foam body cutters to cut through all the layers. What is wrong? Nothing is wrong. Our quality control involves testing 100% of our foam body cutters on a single sheet of 2 or 3 mm foam and we guarantee that the cutter you receive will easily cut a 3 mm piece of foam. In practice, most of our foam body cutters will easily cut through 2 layers, and many of our customers report being able to easily cut through 3 layers of foam. However, if we routinely set the blades to do this for all of our patterns, stability can be lost and the blades may become distorted. If there is a specific cutter that you need for deeper cutting depths, please contact us, and we will see if it is possible to work out a solution for you.

I've tied a very similar pattern without the interchangeable tail for many years- I put a short marabou tail in the end. Originally tied them as a sort of floating baitfish to use in salt water on the Gulf Coast but have found them to be a lot of fun for river smallmouths as well. Closed-cell foam inside what I think was called "Corsair Tubing" for the body and 3D eyes at the head covered with silicone.

No. for years, decades, I used loop-to-loop connection for my tippet to the leader. I still do sometimes. I have caught fish from Maine to Florida to Alaska to Nevada to Japan to Ireland using loop-to-loop connections. If you tighten them correctly without making a girth-hitch there should be no problems at all, within reason. Tippet rings are neat. They work. As with EVERYTHING in fly fishing, there are many ways to effectively do the same job.

I use them all the time and I notice absolutely nothing.

there is no 100% right or wrong way to do it. I usually brush in some thinned home-made flexament on the "belly" of my deer hair bugs after they are finished. It soaks into the thread windings and all the way to the hook shank. I trim the belly of my deer hair flies very close to the hook shank to maximize clearance of the hook gap. It works for me. It has been a few decades since I had one of my flies come apart, but yes, they do get twisted sometimes while fighting a fish. No prob to just realign them.

There is no way those hooks are sharp enough to catch fish. No fish were ever caught before the mid 90's, so your hooks are non-functional. Is this really what our sport has come to? Please take my sarcastic first two sentences for what they are worth- absolutely nothing. Yes hook technology has "increased" over time, and perhaps some hooks are "BETTER" today than some hooks used to be... but by what metrics? Game Fish have not measurably changed in the last few hundred years. How many billions of fish have been caught worldwide prior to your questioned time of 1995? I have many hundreds, if not thousands, of "OLD" fly hooks dating back to the early part of the last century, and yes they look different than the current crop of jewelry-store fly hooks, but they still work perfectly fine most of the time, and the people who designed, made, bought, and tied flies on them when they were new, were just as pleased and proud as the people doing it today. If not more.

GSP for deer hair, zero stretch, no looking back. That is really all I use it for. 100d for muddler minnow heads and the like... heavier for deer hair. As with any other material, it has it's place, and it is not the answer to every problem. Use it, figure it out for yourself, and go with what you find. Just because some big name says you "should" use it, doesn't mean you will find your answer there.

Anyone who has stepped outdoors in the last 50 years owes him a bit of thanks. I have read his books and learned from him my entire life.

more likely you'll see some "highly educated" trout take a swipe at the drop shot sinker instead of the fly.

Small sharp-nosed, flat jaw (non-serrated) as others have said. I've flattened tens of thousands of hooks of all types from the side with almost no breaking or damage. USE THE PART OF THE JAW CLOSEST THE HINGE, NOT THE TIPS. In this type of work, the leverage AND control is at the hinge, not the tips. ONLY USE ENOUGH FORCE TO DO WHAT YOU WANT TO DO... no need to be a gorilla and keep squeezing once the tiny little piece of metal is folded over. Even on relatively large hooks, when using the part of the jaw as near the hinge as possible, it doesn't take much to flatten the barb. GENTLY INCREASE THE PRESSURE UNTIL THE WORK IS DONE. Don't try to do it with a quick snap of pressure. Same as with nearly everything else in this world, if you approach it with a tiny bit of thought and understanding, it goes well. If you break a hook by flattening a barb CORRECTLY, that hook was garbage before you started. Flatten the barb before you tie the fly; find the garbage sooner rather than later. Look at a supplier such as Techni-Tool for the right type of plier.