twinkle twinkle shinny baitfish

hell that was a week and a half , where has the time gone , well her indoors has now started university which will see her becoming a maths teacher "yea i cant work it out why shes with a dumb ass fly tier like me either" but because of this change in home circumstances i now no longer work during the week and i look after the kids and house , well that takes me only a few hours after i drop the kids at school , so that gives me the rest of the day to do flies , and i still have my weekend job as well , so things are most defiantly on the up and its taken me a while to get into some kind of routine hence no posts ........

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with an upcoming mission and the fact i had some nice shinny flashbou in a draw i decided i needed to top up my bigger all flash baitfish patterns , you know they get a lot of hammering and do need replaced i try to keep em fishing as long as possible to get value for money , you see i only get a couple of 7 inch flies out of one pack of flashbou and at around a fiver a pack that works out around 2.50 uk per fly , so although a fantastic fly bloody expensive so i like to make em last
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ok so first of the starting block is a classic silver and red head baitfish the red head is done with angel hair and a 6/0 sakuma manta hook .... when this baby hits the water fish take notice
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same pattern all i have done with this is to add a slight bit of weight on in the form of a couple of eyes "courtesy of http://www.pikeflyrod.com/ you may think that by adding eyes it wont make much difference put trust me it makes a difference from the action of the fly above this one experimentation is the key
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MILLIONAIRE JACK PIKE

gold flashbou just looks expensive and if your fishing a water with a high population of smaller jacks then this is a helluva pattern the thing is you don't really need to think to much about the coloration's as as long as you have gold and green in any kind of combo you will catch fish with this pattern again tied on a 6/0 sakuma manta
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millionaire row

2 different styles both slightly different in the way they swim

the bottom fly is completely unweighted and allows you to fish it very very slow and working the fly to give a fantastic fluid motion in the water and depending on your line fishable at all depths a real killer of a pattern , the fly above it has a bead chain eye and works like a sink and draw pattern pause it and it dives down head first strip it after a pause and you'll get the fly doing dying bait impersonation's because the bead chain isn't that heavy so it just off balances the fly to give you that killer action ........

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moving back to the classic colours i also had some pearl flashbou pearl on its day can out fish any other colour out there particularly with waters high in silver baitfish populations and the red spectrum flash from http://www.pikeflyrod.com/ really does top it of nicely and as you can see produces a different shape of head than the angel hair , don't worry about getting the red head all nice and neat with the same length of flash , being a bit different can be the difference between fish and a long day of nothing

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give a bit of a wiggle

threes always new ideas out there that you can play with i personnely love the magic heads from http://www.petitjean.com/shop/en/magic-head.html although purist will say "oh no that's not a fly its a lure " well actually if it helps me catch fish trust me i bloody well use it it and you can stuff your size 22 olive up you jacksy matey I'm fishing for big bad predators here thanks very much .

but there can be a problem with these heads as what your effectively casting is an egg cup and a load of fluff so when your trying to cast it it can end up just spinning round and round as it is quite wind resistant , I've found that by using a size 2/0 head on a 6/0 hook you can counteract the spinning head and the action will be the same as using the bigger recommended sizes for the bigger hooks if not better .... just my view on it through trial and error

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so with that the week draws on and hopefully ill get a few more patterns in the box for an upcoming trip this week that is of course after I've done the washing , cleaned the house and fed the children .....

mcfluffchucker

(a clean cave in Scotland)