the mother of invention

hell i love tying flies i get sheer pleasure from it and sometimes i get to fish them as well long story but yes i do get out now and again but those with family and work pressures will know how hard that can be sometimes especially with the line of work I'm in so i do get a lot of pleasure from what i do sometimes though necessity is the mother of invention

i was siting thinking the other day that i needed some really big surface baits for pike put didn't want poppers i wanted something that was going to make a lot of noise on the surface so i sat and thought about things i had used in the past and hey presto the gurgler popped into my head i thought OK what if i could have a gurgler head with a big synthetic broken back bait fish behind it hell that would click all the right buttons son i set to work

a 6/0 sakuma manta extra was on the cards for this one because it has a fantastic wide gape on it which i suspected i may have needed for the amount of foam i was going to use this really did have to stay on the top and go nuts , i cut a rectangle of yoga Matt foam (that stuff is cheap and loads of it) and placed half on the hook and bound down with normal sewing thread in red i knew once i got near the head it would pull up gurgler style making that lip that spits the water , having tied it up the lip wasn't quite at the angle that i wanted , but that could be fixed easily at the end of the tie . but i was getting the shape i wanted

the next thing was to get some material on there , i thought at first it may be tricky to hollow tie a load of material behind the foam , but it turned out actually to be no problem as i pulled the fibers back with my fingers well there no way was getting a pen tube over that sucker was there
stepping back and looking at the overall shape i was was more that happy with it

the quick fix to get the angle correct to spit water was quite simple all i did was build up a dam in front of the foam this i found could be made to have any angle you like simple really

adding eyes was a simple affair all i did was a five min epoxy on the back of each eye , i didn't want to do a full epoxy head on this as it would have weighed to much

so the final all singing all surface dancing gurgler bait fish I'm actually very impressed with the thing , I'm not saying Ive designed anything new hear i suspect that the bill fish fly anglers may have designed something similar although Ive not been able to find it through searches be interesting to see if there is anything out there if there is let me know would love to take a look at it

I'm planing doing some video of this in action hopefully next week i suspect it could be quite spectacular

tight lines brothers and sisters of the fluff

(mcfluffchucker )

a cave in Scotland)