I tie my own versions of two fly styles , what are commonly known as:
Clousers (designed by Bob Clouser)
Lefty's Deceivers (Designed by Lefty Kreh)
Mine are not tied the way they do it.
Mine are simpler and uglier and more durable.
They really aren't any different except for feathers--"deceivers" have feathers, clousers are really just bucktails.
A range of sizes all work, from #1 through 6/0. I even tie on jig hooks when I want a deep running bait imitation.
This is just a small selection. I tie them in many colors, with both lead eyes and without. All the actual flies in this particular pile caught fish this past season.
Probably my "signature" is the use of dubbing to make a body. Sometimes I palmer hackle instead. The biggest structural change over the clouser is I do not pull the bucktail over the eyes. That is a disaster. They always break there prematurely leaving an unsightly tuft that catches seaweed and loosens the eyes and the whole thing falls apart. If you tie the eyes on last, this does not happen.
Have you ever had one of those perfect fishing days? The kind of day where you don't think it can ever be better? That was Friday.
I had some business up in the north of the state that would be just brief in the morning. Of course I had to "blue line" some place interesting to fish on the way home. Somewhere not terribly out of the way, that I could fish for just 2 hours, someplace that is not stocked. (It was stocked privately until many decades ago). I'd only fished it briefly twice previously and only caught a couple minnows and a parr. For some reason, I was feeling very optimistic, which is usually a recipe for failure and yet, this time, it worked!
I walked the woods scoping downstream until I could find something especially attractive and then went a bit past it. I figured I'd "warm up" on the riffle running out of the particularly promising pool. I worked a small shrimpy fly I tied, and then switched to a blue lite-brite fuzzball that I tied identical to the little black "One Fly" in this case, on #16.
After working the riffle for another 15 minutes or something, I decided it was time to "move in" on the pool. It didn't take long. I made a pretty long cast and the leader got hung up in a bush. I tried to mend it out, that jiggled the fly and made it swim on the surface and BANG! A trout came up and took it! I brought that one in and it was simply beautiful. A young brook char, maybe two years old? Maybe even three? This is a small stream.
A wild brook char. A beautiful vibrant small fish, in a small Connecticut stream. It took the blue fuzzy fly--that's a first for that fly. I tied it on the black pattern to see what it might do. Well, it worked.
Now, that trout came out of only part of the pool. I was sure there were more in there. It is a very very good spot for fish and plenty of room for more to be in there with their own lies. I spent an entire hour working through my fly box. I tried surface (a rubberlegs) streamers (gray ghost and a little mini brown one I've had success with before), and the black fly as well as the blue one. Nothing.
Flies I tried over that hour:
I was sure a fish was in there, so I had this idea--what about a big
jig fly? It will get to the bottom. Maybe that's where I need to go. Do I
go white bucktail, or black feathers? I went with the latter. I let it stream downstream until it was the right length of line behind me for a lob going to the target at the whitewater. On that first lobcast, It landed, started moving with the current, I kept the line taught, and bump, bump, grab--fish on! Very exciting!:
What a fish! Beautiful and colorful. But the fly was big--as large as what I find is very successful at taking 5+ pound striped bass.
You can see the fly -- it's the lower one. The deceiver just above it is tied on a #1 and is my major producer for stripers. I also tie it in 2/0 and 3/0. But notice that I took a trout with the same size! This is a huge fly (by my conventional thinking) for trout But it worked! In this situation. The question of course is whether my narrative is at all useful.
If you've gone fishing and had one of these days, you know exactly what I am trying (and failing to say). It is an emotional thing. Impossible to describe.
