Fly Candy

Stripes on flies! I mean, Jerkbait fisherman swear by them so why shouldn't they be effective on our flies! Personally I like to add stripes, especially with regards to perch patterns.....for obvious reasons off course! Whether they improve the amount of takes you get I cant be certain, but they make the fly a little more visible regardless of the colour fly you are fishing with.


I should use them more often, but I fish with these kinds of flies maybe once or twice a week at that, and so I often forget to add stripes to the flanks of my baitfish patterns anyway. Time to snap out of it I think!

Fly Candy

Had a fantastic 3 hours with Jani last night. I ended up with 11 fish in total with 2 around the 87 cm mark and Jani bagged 3. God knows how many we lost aswell. I mainly fished with a pink and white schlappen/raccoon streamer with a small spinner blade running loose on the wire trace. I just couldn't be bothered changing over to one of these everytime I caught a fish. I did manage a couple on these perch patterns though.

These are just a mix of Electric yellow & mottled green slinky fiber patterns enhanced with a few perch stripes with a perma marker pen. Eyes have been bug-bonded on for extra longevity.

Fly Candy

Well I'm back from the Finish fly fair which was interesting to say the least. Saturday could only be described as manic.No sooner had I set up camp and my bench was swamped, and by the looks & sounds of it, the interest in Pike on the fly over here is definitely growing. I could genuinely feel a real hunger to learn new tying techniques and flies.

Those that do regularly fly fish for pike here though have a limited knowledge of how to tie an array of different flies.This I put down to most of them following the same forums and reading the same few articles that have been written about pike on the fly over here. Most flies I've seen whether in Helsinki or in Tampere all generally looked the same. Slinky fiber tied onto a tube then the front of the fly epoxied. I know this by the way most use a tandem hook system which they construct themselves from long shanked hooks. By the sounds of it they all work but having just one style fly in your box is very limiting.

So being able to show them different tying techniques to create different baitfish patterns was how I spent most of Saturday & Sunday. I know they'll be an influx of pictures in the pike fly sections of the forums here in the next week or so.

Anyway I explained to a lot of people how to tie this fly over the weekend and Eumer actually sold all of the Mirror Image and packets of raccoon zonkers they had available on their racks. A big shout goes out to all those that mentioned PikeFFArticles and It was great to meet up with some familier faces from the Helsinki show again.

Saltwater fly candy

Some more Saltwater cross over fry. Am sure there are are similar designs out there that people tie,but maybe with different combinations of materials. With these I start by tying on a small sprig of white bucktail to the rear of the hook near the bend.Then I wrap Holographic tinsel along the hook shaft up to the eye. I then add another sprig of bucktail....With these I've used either Chartreuse,Turquoise & yellow. To finish of the fly I tie on a single strand of holographic tinsel on either flank at an angle. Tie on a couple Peacock hurl feathers for lateral lines and then bugbonded on some eyes.

Fly Candy

Some Perch baitfish patterns tied with Slinky fibers on to tubes

"The Bob Marley"

I used a slightly different combination of materials when I was primarily fly fishing in saltwater but have been using this pattern now for around 5 years since moving to Finland. Yesterday I caught 2 perch with it and only last week when I visited Merikarvia did I catch my 1st Merikarvia rainbow trout with it. I gave it the name "The Bob Marley" purely because he's the king of Reggae and I listen to plenty of it when I'm out fishing. Its also great salty fly for Stripers, Pollock, Trevalley,Trout, Salmon you name it.

Step 1:

This fly can be tied either on hook or tube. Run your cotton along the length of the thin tube and back to half way

Step 2:

Cut an 8 mm strip of white raccoon zonker fur and tie on

Step 3:

Turn vise upside down and tie on a small clump of pearl angel hair

Step 4:
Directly after the white raccoon tie on a dumbbell eye any size.Here I used large.

Step 5:

Turn vise back over and then tie on a 120 mm microbarb grizzly saddle

Step 6:

Directly after that tie a small clump of brown Raccoon fur on.

Step 7:

Tie on your second microbarb grizzly saddle (This one only 80 mm long)

Step 8:

Turn vise over again and tie on a very small amount of red arctic fox fur.

Whip finish and add a dab of head cement to finish off

Alternatively,one can replace the dumbbell eyes with two grizzly variant neck hackle and finish off with a conehead like in these two examples.

Click images for a larger view.

Tied up several of these 180 mm Perch patterns yesterday.