Designing your own fly can be an awesome project! But it can also be nerve racking as well. I have tied up many flies in my day only to get on the water and realize they don't swim or perform in the water the way I have planned or imagined. But then there are days like I experienced last week where I get to the water, test my new fly, it swims great, and after a couple hours of fishing it I am rewarded with the success of a really nice fish! The feeling of catching a fish on a fly or jig you tied is a rewarding ordeal in itself and it's one of the reasons I make my own flies and jigs. But the feeling of making something your own way that you thought of and catching a fish on it gives you a huge amount of satisfaction that is hard to match in the fishing world.
So when designing your own fly where do you start? Well honestly I would say 90% of the time you are using another already established pattern as your base. For me, designing flies can be broken down into two categories. Altering/improving an already established pattern and creating something new from scratch. The clouser minnow is a great example of altering/improving an established pattern. I like to tie mine with craft fur, and sometimes I add rubber legs to them. It still has the same basic principals in construction and tying as the original that Bob Clouser designed, but I change out materials and add in extra materials to create a unique version. It's not my fly, Bob Clouser created it. But it's my rendition of it. And it's something unique to the fish.
Creating a fly from scratch is a whole different ball game. When altering a pattern, some one else has already ironed out the kinks for you of how the fly swims, how much material to use, weight or no weight and so on. When you create something from scratch you have a large trial and error period of testing that pattern not only to see if it performs like you want it to, but to see if it catches fish. I can honestly say, I don't think I have ever created something new from scratch. I always have some sort of a base pattern already created that I am starting from. Have I tried? Sure. But I haven't really been successful yet. But that is the fun of tying, its a blank canvas for you to go crazy with imagination.
So lets cover my development of this fly. I don't even have a name for it yet. And I'm sure if you searched the web long enough you could find another fly very similar. But it wont be the same. So where did I start? Well I wanted a fly I could swing for trout. I wanted the fly to be larger than the standard nymph or dry fly but not as big as a streamer. So I chose a number 8 hook. I chose a 2x long number 8 hook so I had enough room to add the materials I wanted.
After choosing the hook, I thought of some kind of base pattern to go off of. For this fly I was thinking about some of the various emerger patterns out there for trout because at the end of the swing the fly will rise like an emerging insect. I also wanted a fly that looked the same from all angles so that way if my swing wasn't perfect the fly would still fish. Nothing is more frustrating than tying a beautiful baitfish pattern and then get to the water to realize it rolls over and doesn't ride right. So I wanted a fly that would fish even if it wasn't riding upright.
Next I had to decide on what materials to use. I knew I wanted it to be a soft hackle and my favorite soft hackle is partridge. Then I wanted to incorporate something to the fly to make it stand out from the many various soft hackles that trout see go by their face on a daily basis. So for that I chose UV copper polar chenille. But the standard length of the polar chenille I had was too long, so I cut it down because I wanted it to blend with the hackle.
Now I needed a body material. With this whole fly I wanted a natural color theme, so I opted for pheasant tail. The tail of the fly is pheasant tail with some UV copper chenille in it for high lights and I used pheasant tail to rap around the hook to form the body. I also added some copper ribbing to reinforce the body and increase durability.
Ok, now we're cooking! On to the hackle. I didn't want the hackle to collapse too bad around the hook. I wanted it to puff out a little and make for a bigger silhouette. So before adding any hackle I built a thorax with dubbing (black metallic UV dub) to help prop up my hackle. Then after the dubbing I added about 1 1/2 to 2 turns of the trimmed polar chenille. Just enough to get the flash effect I wanted. Then I added my hackle over the chenille. Now how many turns of hackle is completely depended on what effect you are trying to achieve. I wanted enough hackle on there to cover around the hook 360 degrees, but still be sparse so the fly had that "see through" translucent effect. Another factor to the hackle was also that I wanted enough to also have great movement in the water. Even when just dead drifting. I ended up using about three turns of the partridge.
The final little touch I wanted to add to the fly was color contrast. Even though I wanted a natural colored fly for clearer water, I still wanted some color contrast to make it easier to see. So I opted for a white nose. I did this by simply tying off my black thread and tying on white and creating a white nose on the fly to finish it.
Performance, how did the fly work? The fly swam exactly how I wanted it to. And the UV polar chenille had awesome flash in the sunlight. I fished the fly on my 5 weight, with a 10ft type III sink tip line. As you can see from the picture below, the fish liked the fly! Success! Well sort of. The fly worked in that specific situation. But I would still like to try it in other situations/water types to see how it performs. But overall I am happy with it and think I'm on to something.
I hope this helps you out if you want to design something new or unique. Sometimes having something different, even just a little different can be the difference in getting bit or logging a 0. And I, by no means know everything about designing flies. But I do know just enough to be dangerous! Tight lines and good luck.
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