Tying the Galloup Cripple with Kelly Galloup

Producer: Kelly Galloup

Kelly Galloup: “This is my Olive Cripple. A lot of you know me for my streamers and stuff like that, but before I started the streamer game, for probably the first 25 years of my guide life I was basically a technical dry fly guy and steelhead guy. We didn’t do a lot of streamer fishing back then. Hardly anybody nymph fished, people out west a little bit, but not a lot. It was mostly dry flies. And so you know I wrote this book about streamers and kind of got pigeon-holed and then I wrote Cripples and Spinners. Personally I think if if you get a contribution to this business that is my biggest contribution and it’s probably not that well known.

But the thing about mayflies and that’s what this is about, mayflies, is that they almost always once they hit the surface, regardless if they’re duns or if they’re a cripple, they almost always have a radius to their body and the radius is a stabilizing mechanism. And the fly if it’s a dun and there’s any sort of wind and any sort of ripple to the water, you know that gets them going over bumps, anything like that and the fly has to stabilize itself. And so they do that by putting in a radius to their body, and just move their legs a little bit and the wings, you know, but they’re always moving their abdomen back and forth. And that was this fly was known to represent.

So, it’s a super-simple fly. But the thing about it is that it’s a single-wing fly. What I found was that about 70% of your spinners end up with a one-wing profile.”