{{+1}}Fuzzy spiders – Chatto’s original{{-1}}
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Over the last few years some of the best fishing I have had has been polaroiding to wild brown trout in the relatively clear waters of Lake Jindabyne. I find my self spending more and more time engaged in this "hunting" like pursuit. The more time I have spent watching the behavior of fish when they see a fly the more I lean toward presenting smaller more delicate flies fished either static or very slow in order to entice a strike. I notice more often than not that when confronted with a small static fly that browns in particular either take the fly or if they don't take the fly, they are not spooked as often as they would be with a bigger fly, and often will respond to the same or another small fly presented to them a few minutes later. The same can't be said when fishing larger flies. The fish either take the fly or more often than not take fright and spook off into the depths. For polaroiding treat them and the leader so that they sink and allow them to sink naturally through the water column in sight of the fish. Only retrieve enough line to keep in contact with the fly.
I have extended my belief in small flies to my loch style fishing where they are good as an attractor or top dropper in a team of loch style flies. Fish them up through the water column at various speeds or slosh them around just below the surface when fish are taking emergers.
They work well in rivers also particularly in the faster bubbly water where fish respond to them well when fishing across and down and particularly on the swing at the end of the drift.
Soft hackle flies are more of a class of flies rather than just a fly. The key elements of the tie are a ribbed nymph body that has been fuzzeled and then just a few soft hackle fibres to create movement that have been tied in with a dubbing loop .
There is almost no limit to the combinations that you can come up with and these are the ones that I regularly fish and you may like to try. I don't know if fish pick them up as emerging insects but they do fish well when fish have emergers on the menu.
I tie unweighted versions on curved caddis hooks and bead head versions on curved nymph hooks and a selection of my favourites are shown below.
Materials
Hook | Thread | Body | Rib | Hackle |
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Grub | Match body | Seals fur | Copper wire | Dyed hen hackle, partridge hackle or crow |
Process
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C |
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D |
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E |
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F |
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G |
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