The Sidewinder bobblehead pike fly

Something that’s eaten away at me for ages is wastage with regards to synthetics. How many times do you end up with small amounts left from a clump of synthetics finding that it’s just not enough to tie another fly with. I’ve drawn inspiration from a number of fly tiers (Neal Osborn – Fly Art Studio, Stefaan – The lonesome piker & Matheus Gaper - facebook friend) & amalgamated certain characteristic & traits from their own flies, and come up with a novel way of using these left over’s and in the process producing a fly which I call “The Sidewinder bobble head” that has the qualities of a wobbled jerk lure.

Being able to fish ever day isn’t always about catching fish, in fact my morning sessions are generally spent testing flies, and over the last 3 weeks while waiting for the season to take off, I’ve been playing around with a number of variations of this fly until I was happy with not only its construction but how it moved both on & under the surface of the water.

There are two main attributes needed for the Sidewinder bobble head to work. The trimmed head (Mirror Image, Slink fibre, Funky fibre and Frizz fibre) needs to be as large & as round as possible and the tail section (Big fly fibre, Icelandic sheep hair, Party wig hair, Microbarb saddle hackles) shouldn’t be too long as it hinders the side to side swimming action it produces.

I’ve fished them with both floating and intermediate lines and although they work well as a surface lure and push a lot of water, they really come into their own fished with an intermediate line and short sharp continuous strips allowing for a decent pause between the next set of strips. You can tie these in any colour you want but to be honest it’s the undulating erratic zigzag movement this fly has that will attract pike and not the colour scheme.

I’m busy working on a tutorial for the “Sidewinder bobble head” which I hope to have finished on Thursday.

This version I used Orange Mirror Image for the head and combined it with black Icelandic sheep hair and white microbarb saddles for the tail.