Last March my friend Steve Supple and I enjoyed our second annual spring fishing trip to the North Platte River below Grey Reef just west of Casper, WY. Our guide, Greg, rigged us up with the standard rock worm and egg configuration, and we certainly landed a lot of fish on these flies. The North Platte at Grey Reef is an amazing fishery, and given its proximity to Denver, I need to schedule more trips to this excellent river.

Best View

Unlike my rig, Steve began with a pine squirrel leech, and as the morning progressed, he began to land a disproportionate number of hefty rainbow trout on the leech. This circumstance caused Greg to tie one to my 2X tippet, and with this strategic shift, I began to land hard fighting rainbows as well. Needless to say, the pine squirrel leech left a favorable impression on my fishing brain. I am always looking for new productive flies, and the leech certainly jumped to the top of my list.

My Best Cone Head Leech

On Memorial Day weekend Jane and I visited our friends the Gabourys in Eagle, CO, and my friend Dave G. insisted that we could catch fish in the muddy and bloated Brush Creek. Despite his confidence I was not experiencing much success until I tied a pine squirrel leech to my line on the second day. Wham! I landed several fish in very difficult conditions as the dark color and undulating movement proved to be irresistible to hungry trout trying to find refuge from the heavy run-off flows.

A Lineup of Leeches

With these experiences in my mind, I purchased some pine squirrel strips and watched a video on YouTube last weekend. I sat down at my vise and churned out five size eight leeches with red thread heads. The tier on the video insisted that the red head was critical for success on the North Platte, although I do not recall using red head leeches during our March float trip. Once I completed five, I threaded a gold cone head bead on to the hooks and tied five more. For these I wrapped a section of lead around the hook shank behind the bead and then pushed it forward to fill in the vacant space at the back of the cone.

Ten Leeches in the Boat Box

I’m pretty excited to have this new tool in my fly box as I anticipate my assault on the Rocky Mountain trout in 2015.

The woolly bugger is a classic old standby that I hadn’t tied in many years. I lived off a supply that I’d made perhaps 5-10 years ago and given my reluctance to toss streamers, this sufficed for quite awhile. My best experience with woolly buggers was during the float of the Gunnison River that Dan and I did in 2007, and I lost a few there.

This summer after returning from Alaska I occasionally tied on a woolly bugger with a black marabou tail and olive chenille body, and during these infrequent forays into the world of streamers and woolly bugger fishing, I pretty much depleted my remaining supply. It was time for woolly bugger tying. I went to my iPad YouTube application and watched several videos of tyers making woolly buggers to refresh my memory. It remains fairly simple especially if one skips wire ribbing between the hackle wraps and reflective synthetics in the tail.

A Fresh Supply of Woolly Buggers

I dug deep in my hook supplies and uncovered some size 8 streamer hooks with a limerick bend. I have quite a supply of these unfortunately as it is almost impossible to slide a bead around the bend so I’ll have to resort to crimping a split shot on the line just above the eye of the hook. Everything else was there; .02 lead wire for weighting, green chenille, black marabou and large grizzly hackles from one of the necks where the tiny dry fly hackles were depleted.

A Completed Woolly Bugger

I sat down and made five on one weeknight and completed the job with another five the next evening. Will this supply last me another five years? Hopefully not with greater dedication to streamer fishing.