when is a fly not a fly or is it a lure

well that indeed is the question , you know i still laugh when i look at my flys well if you saw one of those around your head you wouldn't be swatting it you'd be running in the other direction i think , yea you know we call flies "flies" in the loosest possible way because whet we are aiming for is actually to make something that looks like a fish from fur and feathers (or synthetics) so technically not a fly so we are not technically fly fishing or are we , we dont cast a fly we cast a bait fish , we use fly rods as the method of delivering the fish to "the fish"  i suppose we are just waiting for somebody to come up with the right terminology for what we do with the fly rod or am i just thinking too much into this .......probably .

so kinda on the same track after the success of my new casting fly for lure rods i decided to look more into it because some people have said to me "well you know i love the look of flies but i cant fly fish" this usually means the guys are stuck on just fishing with lure rods or dont want to fork out a load of money for new gear to do it .

its quite funny , i remember a guy from a biggish club in the uk that saw some fish being caught on flies and wanted to jump on the bandwagon and be one of the cool guys so of he went and spent a bloody fortune on gear and headed to his local to fish , after a few days a post was made on there forum asking how the said chap got on well the reply was something like this 

"went for a few hours and didnt catch anything , this fly fishing isn't for me cant get any distance" 

he then promptly sold all his fly stuff without ever going again or experiencing the joy of a fly caught pike . you know every club or social media page has one , that one guy who really has all the gear and no idea , in fact what he should have done was gone with somebody who could show him the ropes  how to cast etc this is really something you dont just pick up in an hour like chucking a half a dead fish out and watching your rod or listening for a beep beep beep of your alarm. 

its something that takes a hell of a lot of practice over a long time , but you can be competent enough to chuck a fairly decent line in a few hours with some help but every time you go out your still learning and fine tuning what you do , some people take to it some dont  , i love fly fishing as a beautiful art form and am constantly learning every time i go out even after all these years .

stick with it the rewards are great 

so back to the original question when is a fly not a fly , well when its a lure so after the tests with the casting lure i decided that even the first design i did cast well enough and got enough distance to keep even that  mentioned club member happy and this was only a smallish lure so i sat at the vice and had a look at materials and thought about how i was going to build the perfect fly/lure and after a while i came up with these .

these are around 10 inchs long with epoxy coated heads , the reason these are only coated is that i wanted to create a lure that was heavy enough for a good cast but also light enough to be able to dance in the water 

these are only proto types at the moment and plan to make a few more before i field test them , fishing them the correct way is what will make them fish , as i said before the heads are not solid like your average jerkbait it coated on the outside the reason for this is i want to be able to fish them like a sink and draw style from the old days of pike bait fishing where you would let the fish sink to the bottom then lift your rod to raise it up , wind in the slack while its sinking and repeat , this way you will take full advantage of the materials movement in the water which will be something like this fly below 

im sure you get the idea but if the head was to heavy it would sink to fast and the materials wouldn't be able to do there job properly because im relining on the movement of the materials to provoke a strike ,   predator instinct and all that .

now the other way of fishing this is to fish it like a jerk bait with short taps of the rod tip to impart movement , now this i haven't tried yet but knowing how my flys work and having done a lot of jerkbait way back before it became popular with the masses im pretty sure that these will act the same way . so what next 

well hopefully by the time your reading this i will have been out and tried them and hopefully got some underwater footage also , im also toying with the idea of placing stinger hooks at the rear so will make a couple of those up also  for testing , but watch this space as there seems to be a bit of interest in these from my non fly fishing pals .

anyway onward and upwards

mcfluffchucker
(a cave in scotland)