A Sixty-Year-Old Dry Fly
The Stubby Muddler, a child’s creation, has proven itself over the ensuing decades. Photo: Jim Mize
I started tying flies when I was about twelve, long before the internet captured all the information in the world and then some. To find knowledge back then, you had to pursue it, particularly when it came to tying flies.
On the way to the lake one afternoon, we stopped at a bait shop that was having a fly-tying demo. Knowing my newfound interest in the craft, Dad let me stay to watch for a bit. I slithered through the small gathering to the front where a professional fly tier was spinning deer hair on a Muddler. Being a beginner, I had never spun deer hair, but thought I could manage it. Seeing my interest, the tier handed me the Muddler when he was done, and we went on to the lake.
That night, I stared at the Muddler and decided I should try to tie one before I forgot how. Going through my tying kit, I found most of the ingredients with one exception, namely, a long-shank hook. So for practice, I used a short-shank size 10. When I was finished and had trimmed the head to shape, I concluded that my fly looked more like a grasshopper than a sculpin, mostly because the short-shank hook made it stubby. In any event, it looked fishable so I decided to give it a try.
The section of the local trout stream I could walk to from my house was tough for a beginning angler. The pools were long and deep, the banks overgrown, and the fishing was marginal. It was a put-and-take trout stream where no one ever threw back a fish unless it was a sucker.
I discovered that my Stubby Muddler worked fine shortly after stocking, but results faded as the trout numbers did. It hardly gave me confidence.
The Stubby Muddler works great for mountain-stream browns. Photo: Phil Monahan
Go West, Young Man
The fly stayed in my box over the years, getting occasional use, and then I got a job at a camp in the Colorado mountains. I tied up a bunch of Stubby Muddlers before I left, thinking it looked like a Western fly. By then I had modified the pattern, as fly tiers tend to do, dropping the turkey-feather wings and adding orange bucktail in their place. The color seemed to help.
When I got to Colorado, my first fishing in early summer was on beaver ponds, and the fly worked well. Of course, any fly worked well on those ponds, as long as you didn’t scare the fish. But the Stubby Muddler was also durable, so it became my go-to fly.
As the summer progressed, I began to expand my fishing circuit, hiking into high lakes for cutthroats and fishing small to medium streams for rainbows and browns. As the summer progressed, stream levels dropped. On one of the creeks where I had been catching quite a few rainbows and browns, the runs between holes turned into riffles just a few inches deep. I could still catch a trout or two in the deeper pockets, though the regularity dropped with the water levels. The summer heat added to the problem as the water warmed. Then, it began to rain.
A thunderstorm snuck up on me one afternoon and dumped buckets in seconds, as Western storms can do. I got soaked, but thought the fishing might improve so I stayed.
As soon as the rain stopped, I fished a pocket that looked promising but it seemed devoid of fish. I walked upstream to the next hole, and it was the same. As I waded upstream, I came to a long, flat riffle that was mostly six to twelve inches deep. Before I walked through it, I noticed a trout tail sticking above the water. Then another.
Looking upstream, I could see tail after tail protruding through the surface as trout tipped to feed. Afterwards, I tried to understand why all those fish moved into this riffle, but the best I could do was guess that the runoff across hot ground warmed the stream further, and the trout moved into more oxygenated water.
But I didn’t ponder that long then because I was looking at too many trout tails. I had the Stubby Muddler on at the time, so I flipped it just ahead of the closest fish. It pounced. I landed and released a nice brown trout. Then, I targeted the next fish in succession with the same result.
I lost count of the fish I caught before darkness drove me off the water. Most were brown trout ten to fourteen inches, but size didn’t matter, as sight-fishing in small waters makes for a fine evening of fishing. The Stubby Muddler became the first fly I tied on for the rest of the summer.
Fish Tales
I was recently talking to a younger fisherman—a phrase that describes almost all the anglers I know now—and he explained he was going out West to fish for trout. He said he was thinking of tying up some flies that might pass for a spent hopper.
When I got home that night, I went to a closet with some old fly boxes, and found my gear from the Colorado days. The Stubby Muddlers were still in the box, so I took out two and gave them to him to try. I thought that, even after sixty years, they might still work.
The next time I saw him, he didn’t mention catching any fish on the Stubby Muddlers. Even if he hadn’t used the fly, you would have thought he might have lied about it, especially since I was kind enough to let him marry my daughter.
I know if it had been me, I would have made up a fantastic fish story.
Jim Mize likes to use flies about his same age. Jim’s award-winning book, The Jon Boat Years, is available online or you can purchase autographed copies at www.acreektricklesthroughit.com.
