On more than a few occasions I can recall peeping feeding trout from a distance, presenting my rig in a productive manner, not to disturb the feeding and right as my flies should be chomped they are promptly snubbed. A re-cast with the same rig yields the same result, a look and a snub. The third pass prompts general disarray and with that the fish simply swim away from the flies even with my best attention to presentation and drift. Right in front of their trouty noses and they say no. I often wondered if part of the issue was simply the overabundance of glitz, flash and sparkle. Many of my flies have flashback wingcases or krystal flash for tails something that perhaps the trout just say no to at times. My solution? Prepare a decent quantity of natural, plain jane looking flies. I mean, shit often I’m putting my flies in less than four feet of gin clear H2O, tell me they can’t pick it out? Using only the wire rib as an attention grabber, these Thread Headed Scuds are weighted lightly to have less of an impact on the presentation which can always later be altered with a split-shot and they are damn nasty looking. No tails, not sure if that was a good call or not, didn’t want to use flash, could have used hackle, antron, ect but chose not to. I think the picked out dubbing makes the fly and I’m sure trout will let me know.
December 16th, 2009 at 5:52 pm
That’s a tasty looking plate of flies– I imagine those will be great standards to have in the fly box. I really like the orange hotspot thread-head in the second pic. It wouldn’t surprise me if these work as scuds and caddis
cheers
–bj
December 16th, 2009 at 9:28 pm
I think you have some keepers there for show. Sometimes simple plain Jane patterns are the best. Nice work!
December 17th, 2009 at 3:32 pm
Thanks guys, the continuing evolution of a fly tyer. Who knows where I’ll end up. I am expecting the orange head to turn a few trout, we shall see in a few weeks.
December 17th, 2009 at 9:24 pm
those are solid J. I may need to head down your way during the winter season for an outing and a fly swap.
December 18th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
Arguably the best SE MN trout fly that a guy can tie on the end of a tippet: scud.
Sweet flies here.
December 18th, 2009 at 2:50 pm
Agreed Wendy.
December 25th, 2009 at 11:41 am
Nice flies! In the past few years, due to taking a “wee man” (my now 7 year old son) along fly fishing with me, I’ve been doing quite a bit of stillwater fly fishing and have become fascinated with chironomids and now also scuds.
I like the orange hotspot as well – there is good scientific evidence for this as well: There is a parasite that wants to live in trout – so it infects a scud, making an orange spot in the scud. The fish like this, eat the scud, and the parasite is happy.
What material did you use for the back?
December 26th, 2009 at 10:53 pm
Ian, thanks for the kind words. I used Scud back 1/8in wide in Olive,Clear, and Light Grey for the flies in this run of scuds. I expect they will do well. Take care.