Fishing Flies
Inside the Box: Ray Schmidt
"OK... I'M A STREAMER GUY, tried and true, and I guess I have been most of my now 47 years of fly-fishing. Shortly after I caught my first Brook Trout in Northern Michigan on a Royal Coachman Trude, my buddy Ruell up the road a ways talked me into tying a 'Rubber Band Special.' A Rubber Band Special was a fly that fished just under the surface and brought brook trout out from the log jams. Ruell is gone now, but his influence on my sub-surface twitching and stripping has stayed with me all these years."
Fly Fishing Hooks: Jig Hooks
"The Jig Is Up"
NINETY PERCENT or more of all saltwater flies are tied on some sort of "J" hook. Whether you purchase flies at your local fly shop or twist up your own creations, this is the standard used by most fly fishermen. Tiemco, Gamakatsu, Mustad, Eagle Claw, Daiichi, Dai-Riki, and Owner (to name a few) offer "J" hooks in a plethora of styles designed to hold the many different types of flies saltwater fly fishermen create.
In the last seven to eight years, however, there has been a movement among salty brethren on the left coast toward tying saltwater flies on jig hooks — specifically, jig hooks with 60-degree bends. Now, this movement has grown and spread its way eastward, riding the buzz from a lot of anglers who believe that patterns tied on a 60-degree jig hook are superior.
Fishing Flies: Muddler Minnows
Muddlers Made Easy
THE ORIGINAL Muddler Minnow was actually a very simple affair. Minnesota angler Don Gapen invented the pattern back in the 1930s to tempt the big brookies of Ontario's Nipigon River, and it has been undergoing constant tweaking, revisions, and reinventions ever since. For example, digging through some fly-tying books from the early 1960s — not long after Joe Brooks popularized the pattern in the pages of Field & Stream — we can find examples of Muddlers that consist of nothing more than a tinsel-body streamer with a short bucktail tail and wing, and a single untrimmed clump of deer hair for a head.
