I have come up with a new way of tying wooly buggers (for me) and I
call them "Halo" buggers (as in a halo of light). I've borrowed the
halo term from Gary LaFontaine's flies because it uses Gary's
favorite light reflecting material, Antron yarn.
Tying them is very simple:
Use the bead, weight that you normally use.
Attach a marabou tail to match the body material, as usual.
Here comes the "innovation" (I know, there is nothing new under the
fly tying sun). Take a three inch piece of sparkle yarn and unwind
it into its three plys. Take two of the plys and attach them to the
hook shank, tied down to the tail. Then take an electronic tester
tool (it has a wire loop that pops out of the end and grabs things,
in this case the end of the plys ) and grab the ends. Take a tooth
brush with the the bristles cut short and rough the plys up so they
are nice and fuzzy, but still intact. Put your favorite wooly bugger
material (ice dub, mohair, rabbit fur or chopped marabou, peacock
herl, etc) into the two plys, as if they were a dubbing loop (if
using peacock herl, tie them in parallel with the plys and grab them
with the tester tool as well). Twist until tight, wrap and tie
off. Then take the toothbrush and brush the body out toward the
tail. The result is a nice, full bodied wooly bugger with an antron
halo surrounding the body. And it is a very fast tie.
Here are my favorite combinations so far:
White Antron, white Ice Dub.
Black Antron, black icedub.
Olive Antron, Peacock herl with olive ice dub.
Olive icedub with "spectrumized" mohair (you spectrumize it by
blending a lot of different colors to get a new color that is
different than any of the individuals. This is the technique used in
Canadian mohair)
The same with a little icedub added to the spectrumized mohair.
Goes good with a Chili Pepper on top!
At my last trip to Strawberry Reservoir I tied some up in white using
white icedub, and caught three trout before anyone else had any. I
ended up giving the rest I had away to the other's fishing with me,
so they could get into fish.
Now, go ahead and tell me who had already thought of this technique
first, and while you are at it, let me know how you REALLY spell the
plural form of "ply".
Tom Davenport
