zig rig my backside

 you know carp anglers in this country sometimes think they invented the wheel the latest craze in this country is a thing called a zig rig , i wont go into the rigs themselves but what you see below is a fly pure and simple its a fly mate , the reason I'm so bloody annoyed is that i had a rather heated "conversation" on a forum with a bivvy bandit who tried to tell me that the things in the pictures below were a specialist buoyant bait, Er no mate they are flies , he continued to bleat on about it until i sent him a link to an American forum where there was pictures of numerous flies like the ones below for carp , and crappies in fact i fished with small foam flies a couple of years ago on lake Champlain for crappies so don't try and tell me this is something brand new mate its a bloody fly end off zig rig my arse

so yet again rain has stopped play on the fishing , don't get me wrong i don't mind fishing in the rain and the odd shower but I'm really not taking a boat out when its going to be heavy rain all day without a break and an 18mph wind driving it into my face isn't my idea of fun to be honest even with the great water proofs i have and I'm really done with soggy sandwich's so I've sat down and whipped a few new ideas out

I'm still on my bloodworm trip for trout and coarse fish so i wanted to whip up a few new ones for the box , above is my box for this purpose everything i could need for coarse fish in one place and to be honest for the coarse fish this is really all i need , and of course its also very portable and i don't need to rummage around for stuff if I'm tying at work or in the living room

when i tie in the living room away from my main desk i tend to only take through what i really need and you can see from the picture above a video box with some foam a pair off scissors and I'm ready to go , i like doing this as it keeps me focused on doing one particular pattern when I'm at my desk ill think as I'm tying stuff mmmmmmm i could do this and that ill just try that and i end up doing 20 different patterns instead of 20 of the one pattern I'm sure you've all been there

so the picture below is where i chuck these little bloodworm's and its only a few Min's from my house and even if i don't catch what a fantastic place to fish I'm sure you'll agree although i cant even see me fishing this with the old 3wgt if the weather doesn't bloody improve and I've just heard that we are going the suffer the worst may weather for over 100 years i really hope there wrong as I'm going bloody stir crazy just now.

some new ideas

i was sitting a few weeks ago watching a video of a guy making a fantastic looking trout fly with a dubbing loop and i was fascinated at how he did it , he made this very cool trout fly using scrap material on his desk , well i thought about this and i just happened to have a few scraps of white and gliss and glint plus and some red angel hair so thought about it and decided to have a go with the dubbing loop and see what i could come up with. and the first try with the scraps produced this fly below not bad with scrap material if i say so myself and a good way to test a new method....

of course there is dubbing ropes ready made out there but there is a problem in the fact that there so bloody expensive there one company that does one dubbing brush (yes one in a pack) which cost around £2.00 UK for one, now excuse me nice as they are if i want to make half a dozen flies that's like £6.00 UK Er no thanks so find a way to make your own is pretty cool

---------

with that in mind and the method working well i went for a gliss and glint plus matrial all the way through perfect for doing a big fly and well impressed with the final result and i worked out you could probably get at least a dozen flies out of a pack of gliss and glint and for a price of £2.69 a pack thats a whole lot better than £2.00 for one brush im sure youll agree

so we now come down to how to do it well ill probably do a step by step next week for it but youll probably get the idea from the pics below ill say now that you could use normal tying thread for this but the reason im using a thick cooper wire is to add some weight to the head this will aid the movement of the fly when you strip and pause it

so after tying in the back end i take a length of cooper wire and then fold it in half and tie the two loose ends onto the hook shank just in front of the tye in point of the back body piece, then you place lengths of fibre inside the loop a little at a time , keep adding small pieces of materials in then tease them out so you have something looking like the above (don't worry if that don't make sense ill do a proper step by step next week)

after you have wrapped it round you end up with something like above I've now tyed in a deercreek dumbbell type eye and I've now made another loop and tied it in , now you can get a view of the wire loop in all its glory , i found its easier to tye in shorter sections of the dubbing loop rather than one long on

I've teased the fibers back so there all facing the back , this is why you don't add to much material clump wise as your head would just be way to big , you then just wrap it round the shaft till you get to the hook eye , i did a quick figure of 8 around the eyes to fill them . so that's just a teaser ill do the full step by step next week enjoy

a quick heads up a friend and fellow tier rich who has started doing his own tying videos and you know its always good to feature other guys work because you never know even if you don't want to tye the fly you may pick up a really tasty tip or even get a new fly idea so click play and check it out

mcfluffchucker

(a very wet cave in Scotland)