Pool Toy Hopper 02/04/2022 Photo Album

The pool toy hopper is another Andrew Grillos creation that I have grown to love. This is my favorite grasshopper imitation and a frequent occupant of the surface position on a dry/dropper configuration. I also tie fat Alberts, Charlie boy hoppers, and hopper Juans, but the pool toy is consistently my top producer. The fat Albert spends a lot of time on my line, because it is even more visible than the pool toy, but during hopper season the pool toy outperforms the fat Albert in terms of eats on on the surface.

Nine Damaged Pool Toy Hoppers

My post of 01/31/2021 provides a comprehensive update on all things related to the pool toy hopper with links to a materials table and directions to a source for tying instructions.

Brand New Pool Toy Hopper

I inspected the canister that I maintain with damaged and unraveling flies, and I discovered nine pool toy hoppers. This is an indication of my frequent reliance on this productive fly. These flies were missing front and back legs, and I was able to refurbish them without stripping them down to the bare hook. In addition to nine repaired flies, I made three new ones. I have reduced my tying of pool toys to tan bodies with tan underwings in size 8. Bring on the hopper hatch in 2022.

Zoomed In

Chernobyl Ant 02/01/2022 Photo Album

In spite of the surge in popularity of the chubby Chernobyl, I continue to value and stock the classic Chernobyl ant. I have very little to add to my writings of 01/23/2021, so I refer you to that comprehensive report.

Counting Chernobyl Ants

As was the case then, I counted my supply and determined that I possess more than adequate quantities of size 8 and 10 Chernobyl ants. I passed on tying more and moved on to the next foam attractor on my list.

Sunk Ant 01/21/2022 Photo Album

If you visit my post of 12/21/2020, you will discover that I added sunken ants to my arsenal of trout chasing flies during the winter of 2020-21. The aforementioned post contains a materials table and points the reader to an online video by Kelly Galloup that provides the tying steps for his sunk ant. The brief report also explains why I adopted sunken ants, and they now represent a significant weapon in my search for wild trout.

Size 16 Sunk Ant

I made five size 16 and five size 14 ants last winter, and after I counted my remaining supply, I decided to increment my inventory by another five of each size. During the 2021 season I enjoyed continued success with my sunken ants. They seem to be particularly productive on small high mountain streams, and this seems logical, since trees and bushes tend to be closer to the water, and this in turn suggests a high probability of the ever present ants tumbling into the creek. I recall days on Clear Creek, South Boulder Creek and Lake Creek where the sunk ant was popular with the local stream residents.

5 14’s and 5 16’s

My goal for 2022 is to utilize the sunk ant even more, and in doing so I plan to test it in larger rivers and in all seasons. Ants seem to exist in spring, summer and fall; so why should they not catch fish in all three seasons? I plan to find out.

Fat Albert 02/04/2021 Photo Album

As is my custom during the cold winter months, I visited my fly storage containers and counted my supply of fat Alberts. I was pleased to discover that I possessed adequate quantities of size 8 fat Alberts with yellow bodies, so I quickly moved on to the next pattern on my schedule of flies to tie. I tend to use the fat Albert quite a bit in the early season, and I missed the latter half of April and most of May during 2021 due to my recovery from heart surgery. This perhaps explains the lack of shrinkage in my inventory of this popular fly.

Plenty of Fat Alberts in Stock

Click on the link to my post of 12/30/2019 for additional information about the fat Albert. The brief report provides a materials table and several links  that describe my introduction to this popular fly. In addition there is a link that takes you to a post that describes some of the successful usages of the yellow fat Albert. Hopefully I will be on the western rivers early during 2021, and the fat Albert will bounce along the currents and attract attention from hungry trout.

Pool Toy Hopper 01/31/2021 Photo Album

The pool toy hopper designed by Andrew Grillos has evolved into my favorite hopper imitation. I tie them mostly on a size 8 Tiemco 5262 or equivalent. Andrew recommends the heavier hook to serve as a keel that allows the fly to always land right side up, and that seems to hold true for me. A reader of this blog asked me to explain the difference between the pool toy hopper and a fat Albert, and I was forced to admit that there is not much to separate them. Nonetheless, I tend to favor the pool toy hopper during the summer months when natural grasshoppers are most prevalent. The fat Albert is my favorite top fly on dry/dropper rigs in the pre-runoff season and during July, as the river flows subside to fishable levels. I tie most of my pool toy hoppers with a tan body and a tan foam underlayer; whereas, I tend to use yellow for the body of the fat Albert. Perhaps body color is the simple explanation for why one fly seems to outperform the other during the various seasons of the fishing year.

Bringing It Closer

Check out my post of 01/13/2020 for links to a materials table, and a link that describes my introduction to the fly.  I have a scanned copy of fly tying steps from Southwestern Fly Fishing that I can email, if a reader would like to tie some of these hopper patterns. Just let me know in the comments. I experienced one of my best pool toy hopper days in quite awhile on 09/18/2020, and I was very pleased to be able to fish the buoyant foam hopper solo for much of my time on the North Fork of the White River. The pool toy hopper is extremely buoyant and easy to track, and I took advantage of these features on the September day in the Flattops.

Tan Pool Toy Hoppers Complete

I tied eight new pool toy hoppers to replenish my supply for the upcoming 2021 season. I adopted the practice of dabbing a bead of super glue to the rear leg knots to prevent slippage and unwinding. In addition I cranked out a few versions with a tan ice dub body. The tan ice dub body chubby Chernobyl has yielded some surprisingly solid results in a dry/dropper arrangement, so I thought I would give the sparkling body color a try with a pool toy hopper. Stay tuned for a report on the results of this experiment.

Another Underside View

Jake’s Gulp Beetle 01/16/2021 Photo Album

There are 800,000 species of beetles in the world, so it makes sense that a significant number meet their demise in a body of water. Every fly fisherman should have a supply of beetles. My go to beetle pattern is a Jake’s gulp beetle. It is constructed from foam and very easy to tie.

A Size 14 Jake’s Gulp Beetle

To learn more about Jake’s gulp beetle click on this link to my post during January a year ago.  This account provides a materials table as well as a couple links that describe my introduction to Jake’s gulp beetle, and the conditions that prompt me to pluck one from my fly box. I’ve had several days in September, when this style of beetle literally brought up a trout in nearly every hole, where I plunked it.

A New Batch of Six Size 14’s

Unfortunately this is not always the case, and during recent years refusals have also been a significant part of the beetle experience. For this reason I approached my vise to construct six additional size 14 beetles. Previously my supply consisted of mostly size 10’s and 12’s. Hopefully when I observe future rejections, I can pluck a smaller size from my box and realize success.

Sunk Ant 12/21/2020 Photo Album 

For years I read magazine articles about the effectiveness of sunken terrestrials, and the insect at the top of the subsurface list was generally the ever present ant. Think about it. Ants are everywhere, and they travel in armies, and inevitably they fall or get blown into the water. Once in the water they are highly vulnerable, and assuredly many give up the fight and drown. Because they are small and narrow, they are not buoyant, so dunkings are probably frequent happenstance among the ant colonies. Unlike large terrestrials such as grasshoppers and crickets, ants are tiny and difficult to observe, even when they remain struggling on the surface. Consider the number of ants that float past an angler on every fishing trip that go undetected.

Other Side

On rare occasions I experimented with a sunken ant during my many forays to western rivers, but I never enjoyed quick success. On 08/27/2020, however, the game changed. I knotted a hard bodied ant to my line a foot or so below a visible surface fly, and during an hour of fishing at the end of the day, the ant accounted for seven gorgeous cutthroat trout. Eventually I broke off the ant, and I was certain that it was the only remaining fly of that type in my storage boxes. Eventually I uncovered another one in my back up plastic bin, but I yearned for a larger supply for the upcoming season.

Just before Christmas I sat down at my vise to remedy the absence of sunken ants in my fly inventory. I initiated a search online for sunken ants and stumbled across a tying video on YouTube by Kelly Galloup of streamer creation fame. I viewed the video, and I liked the simplicity of it, so settled on the sunk ant as my subsurface ant fly of choice. Kelly repeatedly stressed that simply tying an ant by forming two lacquered bumps with thread with a couple twists of black hackle was a killer pattern, but he offered his with slight modifications as an alternative. For my first size 16 ants I mostly followed his instructions, but I utilized a nickel bead behind the eye rather than a black bead, since I did not possess black in the necessary size. Before I started my thread, I wrapped three twists of lead wire to form a base for the rear bump. Otherwise it was the same pattern, as the one demonstrated by Kelly. I covered the lead wire with a massive quantity of wraps of black thread, and then I moved to the front of the hook. I attached the pheasant feather by the tip and built a smaller front bump behind the nickel bead and then folded the feather forward to create legs and a narrow shell on top of the front bump.

Two Black Beads Used

For the size 14 ant I slid two black beads on the hook. I began my thread at the bend of the hook behind the rear bead and built a dam that tapered to the top of the bead. I completed a whip finish and then reattached the thread and built up a tapered front section in front of the rear bead. The remainder of the fly was the same as a size 16, except that I had a black bead for the front that fit the larger hook. When I was done I applied lacquer to the front bump, but I utilized UV resin to coat the larger rear bump. Kelly does not favor the look of UV resin on his ant bumps and is perfectly happy with thread wraps soaked in head cement, but I liked the epoxy look for my rear bump.

Thread, Pheasant Feather and UV Resin

I made five size 16 and five size 14 sunk ants, and hopefully this will be an adequate supply for the 2021 season. If not, it means that I have discovered a new killer fly for my fly fishing future.

Moodah Poodah 05/14/2020 Photo Album

I possess quite a few foam dry flies, but I am always susceptible to adding a new pattern. Toward the back of one of my past issues of Southwest Fly Fishing, a fly that carried the unusual name of moodah poodah caught my attention. During this coronavirus and surgery recovery time I could not resist the temptation to construct a few of the foam attractors.

The features that differentiated the moodah poodah from other foam flies in my boxes were the dangling Klinkhammer-style body, the size, and the shape. This foam fly struck me as a size that fit in between a hippie stomper and a Jake’s gulp beetle. It was large enough to float a single beadhead dropper, and the shape reminded me of a beetle, cicada and horsefly. Surely this fly covered enough bases to be a viable addition to my fly box.

Pumped to Try

I gathered my materials and churned out five reasonably accurate imitations of the moodah poodah that was displayed in the magazine article. I lacked UV hot orange ice dub for the hot spot, so I substituted orange poly and coated it with UV resin. The pattern specified black elk hair, but I utilized black deer hair instead. I also improvised for the legs by dabbing orange-red rubber appendages with a black magic marker to achieve the speckled effect. I was quite pleased with the final product, and I am anxious to give the moodah poodah a spin in western lakes and streams.

Standard Materials

Bionic Ant 05/01/2020 Photo Album

As I gathered the materials required to tie the ugly bug, I stumbled across three packs of black foam cylinders. I decided to abort my ugly bug project, and I became intrigued with the idea of using my long dormant supply of black foam cylinders to produce some oversized ants. I performed a search on YouTube, and I found several patterns that utilized black foam cylinders. The one that caught my attention was called a bionic ant created by Lance Egan. I decided to experiment with a few of these creations. The tying video can be found on YouTube, if you are interested in producing a few of these terrestrials.

Closer View

Unlike the Chernobyl ant and foam ants of that ilk, these ants could actually imitate naturals. I always assumed that Chernobyl ants and chubby Chernobyls were misnamed, and that they actually mimicked large beetles, hoppers and stoneflies. I extracted some size 14 standard dry fly hooks from my collection and manufactured five ants. I made one with an orange tipped foam cylinder, and the others contained a solid black barrel-shaped piece of foam. I followed the YouTube directions closely and added a white poly wing and black sili legs, and concluded the buggy creation with wraps of brown hackle. I was rather pleased with my output, and although the bionics are larger than most natural ants, they do replicate the distinctive shape of the real insects.

Ants Go Marching

I added a pair to my main fly box and then stashed the remaining three in my boat box, which I use for back up. The bionic ant provides another foam terrestrial that is smaller than a hippie stomper but larger than a Jake’s gulp beetle. I sense that this fly will see some line time during 2020.

Ugly Bug 04/30/2020 Photo Album

I continued my progression through new flies, that I scanned from my magazines and encountered yet another large foam terrestrial pattern. My fly boxes already contained fat Alberts, pool toys, Amy’s ants, Chernobyl ants, hopper Juan’s, Charlie boy hoppers, hippie stompers and Jake’s gulp beetles. Did I really need another foam terrestrial offering? This fly was portrayed as an ant imitation, even though the instructions prescribed a size 10 hook. How many natural ants are this large? In my mind this fly was another variation on the Chernobyl ant theme.

Hard to Tie

This would be my first tying effort since returning from the hospital after my surgery, so the idea of beginning with a large foam ant pattern appealed to me. I took the plunge and gathered the necessary materials for an ugly bug. The designer of the pattern is Hans van Klinken, and I am fond of his Klinkhammer series of emergers, and this also motivated me to give it a try.

Looks Rather Buggy

I made two ugly bugs, but I found them difficult to tie. The foam tended to spin around the hook shank, and the front section of the fly seemed bulky after folding back the black foam bottom layer and then adding a white foam indicator. Perhaps I did not have the exact materials specified, and this may have contributed to the bulkiness. For my second attempt I tied in the black bottom layer by a pointy tip and then folded it back over the top to provide a more secure mount and minimize spinning. This improved the fly to some degree, but in the end I decided that the fly was too similar to other patterns that have proven to be effective, and the ugly bug was not worth the additional frustration encountered. If I fish the ones that I made, and they perform at a high level, I will revise my thinking on the ugly bug.