The Spartan!!

"The Spartan!" 14" inches of craziness. The trailing tandem tail is a combination of yellow grizzly schlappen, yellow tinsel flash, tan and white bucktail. The main body is a combination of white cock saddles,tan and white bucktail Silver tinsel flash and a spun deerhair head crimped between a large fishskull. This is going to open up a serious can of whip ass on some stretch of water.

Fly Candy

This double bunny comprises of two light purple rabbit zonkers, three clumps of purple bucktail & a head of pink raccoon zonker.........thats it.....definite fish catcher!

Fly Candy - Musky madness

It looks heavy but actually it is bloody light. The Ostrich and peacock herl feathers combined with the schlappen tied over a couple of clumps of bucktail have give this fly a lot of volume for practically bugger all weight.

The only real noticable weight to this fly is the fishskull head I added.

All the main feathers have been tied on splayed outwards on both the main hook and the tandem rig. There's some gold fine tinsel as well as some Orange FFF Flash in between everything and the trailing rig also has a couple of black barred orange rabbit zonkers tied on for extra movement in the back of the fly.

Total length 12" inches long. Click images for larger view.

Fly Candy

I've noticed here during springtime over the last 3 yrs that many of the pike I catch are hooked right at the front of the mouth either in the top or bottom of the lip. I lost a lot of fish in my first season here purely because the pike were snapping the back of the fly and I was striking before the hook was set. Then two yrs ago I started using flies with trailing or tandem hooks attached to the main fly and my catch rate improved drastically.

The trick is with these tandem rigs is to use a much smaller hook for the trailing hook not only to cut down on the weight but to allow the fly to track better through the retrieve. I use Tiemco 811s 2/0 saltwater hooks for these kind of flies. I started by tying on three pink and 3 white hackle feathers towards the back of the hook. Then added 4 black microbarb saddles. I then made a dubbing brush with some new white speckled xmas tinsel about 70mm long and then wrapped that around the hook folding the tinsel back with each wrap. Then added a couple of clumps of white bucktail.

Attached the trailing hook with some thin flexible wire. then repeated the same process along the main hook shaft until the hook eye. Overall length around 220mm.
Click images for larger view.

Fly Candy

Another double from my vise last week.
Click images for a larger view!

Fly Candy

I've been tying up several doubles the last few days combining Bucktail with split mylar tubing,Xmas tinsel and Microbarb grizzly saddle feathers. This is one bad @$$ super light fly.

Click Images for better quality

Double pike streamer

Here is another buck-tail streamer being tied in by Eiland van Maurik. The difference here he has tied in a double hook system which although adds immense volume to the overall fly and looks very cool, I just find the back hook a little loose for my liking. The trailing hook needs to be a tied in a lot stiffer. With so much movement like this fly has, chucking it becomes extremely hard going………..Trust me I have tied and cast a few like this, and I have found they invariably double over themselves during their movement through the air. This causes a lot more wind resistance, so don’t expect to be casting this fly extremely long distances. What’s great about this fly though Is that one can tie in man made materials with the buck-tail as well depending on how creative you want to be.