How to Tie a More Durable Squirmy Wormy

Producer: Fly Fish Food

“The Squirmy Wormy has a reputation of being a very good fish-getter and, granted, you don’t have to tie these perfectly for them to work. But getting a nicely tied Squirmy Wormy is a little bit challenging because the material basically is a huge pain in the butt to tie with. So I’ve been playing with them for about the past month and I’ll show you what I have found.

Anyway we’re gonna start this one out with a new hook from Fulling Mill.  It’s the heavyweight grub black nickel, a barbless hook, and it’s just super super beefy. I like a size 8 with a 3.8 millimeter tungsten bead on these.  So before we put any squirming material on there we’re going to start our thread. But one one critical thing is you want to be able to kind of move your bead back a little bit, so I’m going to start my thread a little bit back from the bead, and then if you dress the hook you’ll have something for the squirmy material to kind of lay on top of.

So this is the kicker: I’m gonna thread this piece of squirmy through the bead, and it’s not the easiest thing in the world to do, so the way that you do that is you’re going to take a bobbin threader and stick it through your bead. Now I have taken one of the pieces of squirming material from the package and I’ve cut it in half.  That’s about the length that I like with Squirmies. Now I’m gonna thread just a little bit of it through here, and then I want to moisten my my fingers and get that whole thing nice and wet because you want to lubricate it a little bit. And then what I’m going to do is I’m going to take this bead and I’m going to push it back a little bit so that there’s a little bit more room on top of the hook shank.  And you can see there’s just a little bit coming through….

This pattern can be as easy or as complicated as you want it to be mostly because even the really poorly tied ones will catch fish. The main thing that I tried to achieve is a uniform body and durability. I was able to dial down a cool technique for the uniform body, but as far as durability, I did lots of tests, and the main factor to make your squirmies last longer, is to keep them cool. Extreme heat is the squirmy’s kryptonite.”