Bob Popovics never set out to make a prettier fly. He set out to make one that would last. His bucktail baitfish were getting chewed to the thread after a couple of Jersey bluefish, so sometime around 1970 he started coating the bodies in epoxy to protect them — and only later noticed that the resin did something he hadn’t planned on. “The epoxy also added a translucency that mimicked what you see in silversides and other bait,” he said. That accident became the Surf Candy, and it reset how a generation thought about tying small baitfish for false albacore. Popovics, who died in 2024, spent the next fifty years refining the idea, and the fly still solves the two problems it always did: how to build something an albie will eat, and how to build something a fish can’t destroy.

What actually destroys an albie fly

False albacore are not a toothed predator in the way the word implies. The fish is Euthynnus alletteratus, the little tunny, a small tuna built for short, ferocious bursts — a hooked albie will routinely peel 100 to 200 yards of backing off a 9-weight in seconds. It feeds by sight, with large eyes, and eats with small teeth. It doesn’t cut a fly the way a bluefish does.