Phred’s Phlies
I think I’ve run out of flies to tie. I’m pretty sure that other than a few trout fishing staples like scuds and stuff, I could fish the rest of my life with what I’ve got packed into the many boxes in my room, in my garage, in my vests and in my boats. The way this spring has been shaping up weatherwise does not get someone inspired to put a lot of miles on their wading boots. “Winter is coming” they say. I am starting to think this is really Westeros, we are actually in Winterfell, and any day a horde of White Walkers is going to come over the hill.
On a weekend like this I still find myself sitting at my tying desk, trying to figure out something to tie up. I was looking for some inspiration and for some reason I got down a stack of fly boxes from a closet shelf, and one of these boxes had some of my grandpa’s flies packed into a compartment. They were mostly cork poppers, but there were a few other things too.
Since I couldn’t come up with anything I really wanted to tie [alright, I tied up one “hare’s ear wooly bugger”, can’t ever have too many of those], it got me to digging up some of his other flies. Some were in boxes, some were in bins. I have his vest hanging in the garage, I crept out there in stocking feet to pull a box out of a pocket that has been living in there for many years.
The old man was one of a kind. We all knew him as Phred, even though his name was Ray. He was a decent fly tyer and tied way more than he ever used. His materials were either from Herter’s or was stuff he salvaged from something else. He never used a bobbin, didn’t own one, instead pulled about 30 inches of thread off the spool and tied a half hitch after each step to keep everything in place. This was how I learned to tie.
I know I never saw him use a popper for bass, we did wear the paint off a lot of small poppers on sunfish though. I’ve used a few of these in the picture, they actually work. Really well. Many of you know my love for cork poppers, this is where it comes from. The green one at top left caught about 30 largemouths one day on Gadbolt Lake. If any Camp Fish guys are reading this, they’re thinking, big deal, you could catch bass on your shoelace or piece of gum there. This is true. One time there I rigged my fly rod with three flies and caught three largemouth at once. For some reason back in the 80s this little lake was overrun with 12” largemouth, it was a great place to take kids. And adults.
The effectiveness of Grandpa’s popper that day was forgotten, possibly dismissed due to the fact you could catch the bass in that lake on anything. Until one day when I was getting prepped to fish smallies on the Mississippi. For some reason my fly box was short in the popper department, but I remembered I had a few of Grandpa’s rat holed away somewhere. Up until that day I was mostly a deer hair popper guy, as the foam poppers never really did it for me, and cork poppers just weren’t readily available and I hadn’t ever gone through the process of learning how to make them. I had no reason to–after all, my mantra then was nothing works better than deer hair poppers…until I ended up with the yellow one in the middle of the right side tied on. After one cast I was like “WTF, this thing pops better than any popper I’ve ever used”. You can see by the scuffed paint that the smallmouth also thought it popped really nice that day. It wasn’t long before I figured out a good source for cork popper heads and had the process of making them dialed in. I rarely use any other kind of popper.
Sometimes I would see an article in Field and Stream or some other magazine about a particular fly. That is how my “Hair Frog” came to be. I know there was an article about a “hair frog”, and at my request Phred managed to put one together for me. It doesn’t look much, or at all, like a frog. There is actually a clipped deer hair body under the wrapped yellow chenille. I’ve never tied it on and can’t imagine a scenario where this design would be desirable. How someone came up with this particular design as a good idea is puzzling. But here it is.
Another strange design is the “Alley Minnow”. He used to use these things when fishing off the Hudson bridge for crappies. How a fly rod would be the weapon of choice while fishing off a bridge never made sense to me, even back then. I accompanied him on one of these bridge sessions as couple of times, I was probably 6 or 7. We fished at night, under the lights, and he brought a wooden crate for me to stand on so I could reach over the railing. The Alley Minnow is a white bucktail streamer with a head that is made out of a section of TV antenna. I can’t find any reference to this style of fly anywhere, it must have been a short-lived local thing. The metal head really doesn’t add any weight or flash but he was proud of them. I think he liked the design because it gave a good surface to paint eyes on. I am disappointed that I only have a few, possibly the only Alley Minnows in existence.
Some of my earliest fishing memories is of wading for smallmouth bass and silver [white] bass on the St. Croix. We wade fished around different access points in the Hudson area. A bucktail streamer is what we used. Mostly white ones, and they were pretty small compared to what most of us use for smallmouth nowadays, maybe 2 inches long. Late summer was prime time for this—the smallmouth and white bass would be chasing shad and easily caught. Here’s how we fished—using a vintage fiberglass seven weight fly rod [mine was from Herter’s, Phred had a Fenwick], you made a roll cast with your white streamer, and then retrieved it by steadily raising the rod tip, sometimes in a jerky manner. When your rod tip was just past straight up, you would just make a new roll cast and repeat the process. Inevitably you would get a strike when your rod tip was straight up, and setting the hook was not possible unless you did some quick back peddling. Somehow, we made it work, and while cars whizzed by on I-94 we put a hurting on the local bass population.
When Phred trout fished he always used worms, at least when I was around. It wasn’t always that way, until I came along he fly fished for trout quite a bit. Once he had me in tow it was easier to camp out at a deep hole and fish with worms. He still used a fly rod, roll casting an angle worm with a tiny sinker upstream and then letting in drift through the hole. When I got to be about ten I started trying to catch trout on flies, and anytime trout started rising around the area we were worm fishing at invariably I would want to try a fly. So out would come his small Perrine box with little trout flies, they all seemed to be about the same to me, at some point I actually started catching fish on them. The wood duck winged things on the left side were favorites of his, and that is probably why I use wood duck in so many of the trout flies I tie today. I’ve written before of the first trout I caught on a fly, but it bears repeating. Trout were rising steady in the Harvard Hole, so Phred rigged my Herter’s fly rod with his go-to trout fly: the black nothing. The Black Nothing is truly that—black fur on a small hook and nothing else. After whipping the water to a froth for a while I somehow ended up with a fish on the line, my first fly caught trout. When Phred cleaned it later he showed me the trout’s stomach contents; it had been feeding on black beetles, and it had more than a few in its gut. “That’s why it ate your fly, it thought it was another one of those black beetles”. My takeaway from that was to not get carried away with trying to exactly duplicate something with your fly.
Phred also poured and tied his own jigs. There was a style of bucktail jig with a distinctive diamond shaped head that was very popular in the Hudson area in the 70s. They were sold in stores, I think they were called “Super Dudes”. Phred tied up his own version, if I recall the story he borrowed the jig mold from a Hudson local, a guy name Carl Overmuller. Phred made a lifetime supply of these Dude style jigs with Carl’s mold. More than a lifetime supply I guess, as I’m still using them. The ones in the picture are some I keep in the boat, they are a little beat up. He was famous for his crappie jigs, I wish I had some good examples of them, the only ones I have left have seen better days.
It’s the middle of April, and there is over a foot of snow on the ground. I bought Savannah her own waders this year, we have yet to get them wet. I had great plans for us to trout fish together this spring. Maybe next weekend? Doubt it, it will be at least two weeks. I know, I’ll get her to start tying flies…