flybop wrote:
I hope my buggers are at the post office tomorrow, can't wait to see all of them. Thanks to all you guys.
Here is the material list.
Hook: Size 2 4x streamer
Large silver cone head. I epoxied them in place. Not at all necessary, I was experimenting some.
Tail: Black Marabou with a few strands of black Krystal Flash on each side.
Body: Black Chenille, or crystal. I had some stuff with a little bit of flash in it.
Hackle: Disco Yarn, palmered heavily and then trimmed. It is not necessary to tie in a rib as far as securing the "hackle" goes.
Collar: Big, webby grizzly hackle and then lots of red thread wraps. I made the red wraps that way to get some red in the fly.
Many of the big fish that we catch on the Yellowstone and Madison rivers are caught on big, any color, buggers. I really like black though. I very often tie mine real heavy. The flies for the swap are not weighted, except for the cone head.
A very effective way to fish these big buggers is to drop a soft hackle about 18" off it. Use the weight of the bugger to get that soft hackle down deep. Many, many big trout are caught not on the bugger, but on the soft hackle dropper. The big, heavy fly gets the soft hackle deep and when the line begins to tighten the soft hackle does the killer lift and swing.
This does work on Pa streams. The first time I fished this rig on Penns it was like night and day. Standard nymphing was working ok, but the method above worked so well that I gave my spot up to a few guys that were having trouble and rigged two of them up. They then went into the pool and slammed some fish.
Good luck. I will take all your buggers fishing and hopefully post some of the fish they caught. It may be warm enought to fish the Yellowstone this week, so I should get to break some in.
One more thought. The discussion about tippet size a while ago made me want to suggest using no smaller than 3x for this bugger. We chuck 'em with 1x and the fish do not care. I have seen guys loose their big flies just simply casting them with 4 or 5x. We use 1x on the bugger and 3x for the droppers. The hits on the droppers are often very hard.