Aside from having one of the most colorful names of any fishing flies (though many new-fangled flies now vie for this title—meat whistle, Montreal whore, hippie stomper, Craven’s two-bit hooker…)—the Wooly Bugger has a storied history among fly anglers. With its closest rival a Clouser minnow (maybe a Lefty’s deceiver), Wooly Buggers have almost certainly caught more varieties of fish more consistently than any other streamer/wet fly.
I won’t need one on that perfect day when all manner of large, tan caddis flies are doing their thing, touching down oh-so-briefly on the surface of the stream to release untold numbers of eggs, the trout keying in on them, sometimes leaping clear into the air to try to nab a meal before it flutters away. Nor will I use one if large mayflies are hatching, nymphs swimming to the surface, breaking free of their nymphal shucks, drifting along for several treacherous seconds as they unfold, spread and dry their magnificent delicate wings, trout looking up, awaiting these moments of vulnerability to calmly inhale them. On other days, however, when none of these admittedly more poetry-inducing, entymologically-magical moments are at play, I clip back my leader to something shorter, stouter and tie on a favorite, olive-bodied, black-tailed, flashy-sided, heavily weighted, ugly-but-oh-so-effective Wooly Bugger.
Gone for now are delicate candy-caning casts hovering above me in the romantic air. If I’m fishing bamboo, it’s going to be especially challenging, especially if I’m using my 7-foot, 4-weight setup. But no matter. I’ll heave the line and fly up and back in a big, ungraceful loop, letting the line unfurl as far as possible, then forward, stopping more abruptly than normal at 10 O’Clock, the fly whizzing ear-piercingly close, landing right up against the far bank. On the far bank is also ok, too, so long as it doesn’t wrap itself around a sapling branch—causing me to ease through fast, deep water to unravel it and spook any potential fish there. If it is too deep between where I am and where my fly has knotted itself on a limb, and the water looks just too good (or if I’m just feeling too lazy), I’ll give a good yank, snap off my tippet, tie on a new one, and leave it there for some other, braver, more disciplined angler to discover.
But when all goes right, it will splash down with a gratifying plop, and I’ll instantly—instinctively now—make a quick flip with the tip of the rod, putting an upstream belly into the line that will allow the Bugger to sink a bit before the current yanks it all-too-fast for any respectable trout back into the flow. When the upstream “mend” lands, I’ll make several quick strips, then pause, this instant filled with expectation, the most likely moment when a strike will come, a big trout holding up tight to the undercut bank waiting for something that looks enough like my big-flashy-marabou-tail-wiggling thing to eat.
The strikes, when they come, are always rash, hapless, violent. The old adage “big fly=big fish” certainly holds true. Those big browns and rainbows holding tight in a seam of slightly slower water, scanning for leeches, minnows, crayfish, small rodents—anything that seems big enough and juicy enough—go out of their way to smack a Wooly Bugger. They seem more like their dumb cousins, largemouth bass (who will hit the most outrageous contraptions sent gurgling through the lily pads).
Trout are known for their refinement, and many fished-over trout call on anglers to tiptoe up to the edge of a stream, get down on their knees, taper their leaders, tippets out to barely the width of a strand of hair, and land their flies with the utmost precision—the whole line-leader-fly mechanism landing altogether with but a whisper of movement, the fly perfectly crafted to capture the silhouette from below of a sub-half-inch, diminutive insect. Despite all this, the trout will often as not rise up, follow along beneath the fly for a good long time before detecting something not quite right, a flash of the metal hook where there should only be the dark, barely perceptible movement of insect legs, the current nudging the line that in turn pulls the fly in a slightly unnatural way (what is known as “micro-drag”)…and return back to the unseen depths from which it emerged.
Wooly Buggers, on the other hand, bring out the frat-boy-doing-funnels-on-the-lawn-at-three-AM alter ego of trout. They are so effective I know if one doesn’t strike, and especially if I’ve managed a good enough cast, I should simply move on. That’s it. One cast, two or three strips, let the fly swing in behind a rock or other downstream eddy, maybe give it another strip, take two big downstream steps, flip the line into a back cast, and shoot the thing out so it lands a few feet down from your last cast. Mend. Strip. Pause. Move on….
The Wooly Bugger experience is also fundamentally different for the fly angler. Gone are the endless casts to one infuriatingly finicky trout who has examined every variation of small olive-brown flies you can find in your dry and wet fly arsenal, standing stock-still in one spot, toes going numb. With Wooly Buggers you cast blind to good looking water. You hope for a strike, and if it doesn’t come, you move on. It’s itinerant fishing, probably best practiced from a drift boat, a good guide at the helm. The challenge when wading is for it to be most effective you will need to cover a lot of water, and if people are fishing up and downstream of you, you’re in trouble. I have often decided to leap-frog past the fellow downstream from me, announcing my presence as I move into the danger zone of his backcast, only to be met with the most fearful of all gazes—that of the angler whose “water” you are violating or about to violate—and so moved well beyond him, around the next bend, out of sight if possible, to continue on with my crude but deadly approach.
A further benefit of Wooly Buggers is they are so easy to tie, and I’m certain they are often the very first fly most tiers attempt. Little can go wrong. You wrap on the marabou and something flashy at the hook bend, tie in some chenille and a wet-fly feather, move your thread and everything else forward, and tie off. An experienced tier can make one in under a minute. If I look in my box and see that I’m low (knowing a certain percentage of them will surely be left ornamenting stream-side vegetation), I’ll always take a few minutes and whip off a few more.
As my eyesight has deteriorated and my patience for demanding, pretentious, fussy trout has waned, I turn more and more often these days to big-dumb bluefish, big-dumb largemouth bass…or hurtling indelicate, perfectly-named Wooly Buggers trout-ward.
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