bait fish things

old ideas with new materials

OK so some time ago and I'm talking a few years ago now i was looking through that awesome book by bob veverka - innovative saltwater flies and i was forever drawn to a pattern for a long sand eel type fly made from stiff mylar and silver foil and although it was a great looking fly and would no doubt kill in saltwater i didn't think it would do so well in the uks fresh water so with that in mind i stuck it in a draw in my head to be pulled out when i found suitable materials

the material arrived a few years later in the form of piketreks 3/4 inch creature skin (click the picture for more colours) the material is perfect for what i wanted as i had an idea all those years ago and this was what i needed to do it

bring on the real fish foam fly ( mk 1)

the problem i had was that i needed a wide mouthed tubing that would stretch over some precut foam but not stay stretched out and keeping its original shape therefore clamping back onto the foam to create a gorgeous shiny fish scale effect

i have also found that with the foam and creature skin its easy to sit in front of the tv on cold nights and make a load of the body's up the ends are heated with a lighter and rolled between the fingers to give a hard point there is a good reason for the points as they make an ideal mount point for the tail and for whipping onto the hook (see its still a fly)

so far I've done a few test ties with different colours of foam and so far i think that the silver sticky back foam is the best to colour with sharpie pens and i colour the foam and then colour the creature skin as well , i think there is a better depth of colour when you do this but that's just my opinion I've still got some experimenting to do

playing with epoxy

i slightly over did the epoxy on this one but the thing is you learn by your mistakes and the one below has been consigned to the mmmmmm not quite right box funny you don't often see gone wrong patterns on websites so thought id break the mold ...lol no doubt ken will extract the urine for this one but its good to learn from your mistakes and actually although i got the fly a bit wrong I've now because of it come up with a great baby smallie that ill play with in the next few days

epoxy is a funny thing i pretty much nailed it on this fly the difference being i wasn't using normal 5 min epoxy i was using Mr bond from piketrek and so far its been the best out of all I've been using on these

i tried again with normal 5 min epoxy and i feel that it just is a bit to thick to suit these no matter how thin i try to put it on so ill be sticking with Mr bond in future for these


still playing with colours on these green glitter foam and an eye from www.deercreek.com i like the combination of colours on this one so i think ill keep the pattern along with the silver bait fish you can see the small pinch of buck tail I've used for the tail this is whipped on the points i was talking about earlier

these flies are still in the experimental stage I've still got a lot of work and ideas to do on them but as these are all 4 inch's long they will make great little flies for predators either fresh water or saltwater ill be playing with them for a few weeks so you'll hopefully see some some improvements in the design

tight lines

mcfluffchucker

(a cave in Scotland)