the good ol gurgler meat version

the gartside gurgler needs no introduction , a legendary surface fly that has caught a gazillion fish worldwide , from peacocks in the amazon to sea bass and trout in the UK , and of course largemouth in the states , if i was to take just one fly for top water work in the states this would be it .

has to be said though i didn't even own one of these flies until last may , yes id heard of it it was even on my list of stuff to make and play with , but just never got round to it , so last year when i traveled to see ken at pike adventures in the states he said it was a fly i would need , but don't worry about tying one up as he had plenty (well he did until his box got run over by a BMW that's another story) and around day 3 of my trip we headed out onto the big lake to chase large mouth bass on the surface he gave me one to play with (yes i nicked it at the end of the trip) it is now a very very chewed up gurgler that ken gave me and the thing caught me a pile of largemouths check it out casting into jungle cover bass

me being me i decide that i wanted to sex it up a bit and do a triple whammy give em something to chew on version (pike in mind as well) i also thought that we were missing quite a few fish on these which although apparently this does happen a lot i thought a may be able to shorten the odds a bit by changing the style of hook as have experienced myself first hand the misses i thought a hook with a wider gape may be partway to getting more fish in the boat (ken may well say I'm talking shite) but below is my version of it

OK so you may think threes not a massive amount of difference to kens but I've done a few things different , the hook is a 4/0 sakuma manta (for the wide gape) and I've replaced the feather on the hook shank with some UV chenille from the piketrek chaps , to give it some bulk

i struggled for ages to find the same foam as ken uses and then by a quirk of fate i was about to throw away a child's life jacket that was damaged and thought "mmmmmm life jackets float whats inside them" one pair of scissors later and i found myself with identical foam to kens , and enough to make thousands of gurglers brilliant so surface to say I'm going to be busy at the vice for the next few weeks

from the picture above you can see kens original on the bottom and my version above you may think from looking at the 2 together that there isn't a great deal of difference size wise , well my picture below shows that there is in fact a whole heap extra meaty goodness on my one and that will sure shake em up .

although I'm not going to do them all massive as ken says sometimes they only want small stuff so i will be making some identical ones to kens , well hey who am i to argue with him the brother fishes it almost every weekend and evenings and he likes the meaty version (trust me if he didn't he would say so)

so the fly above has a bit more curve on the back did i design it like that for any reason actually no i just didn't pull the foam tight enough when i tied it , sometimes mistakes work out good this one looks like it will be good

i didn't get a massive amount of tying time yesterday due to having to work but i have some really radical ideas on some additions for this fly so i will be putting these into practice tomorrow as I'm really hoping to get out on the water this week as I'm quite burned out with work (unfortunately i have to work so hard as the bloody flights are well costly) lessened learnt next year I'm going in may when it will be cheaper to fly , but the fishing is so good threes no way I'm not going end of story .................

later brothers and sisters
mcfluffchucker
(a cave in Scotland)