Egan's Poacher Fly Tying Instructions by Charlie Craven

Описание: Egan's Poacher Fly Tying Recipe:
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Hook: #8-12 Umpqua XC400BL
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Bead: Black Slotted Tungsten Bead, 4mm for #10 and #12 hooks, 4.5mm for #8
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Weight: 0.025" Lead Wire
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Thread: Olive 110 Denier Magpie
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Body: Sculpin Olive Pine Squirrel Strip
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Belly: Mother of Pearl Ripple Ice Dub or Ripple Ice Fiber
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Head: Dirty Olive Arizona Mega Simi Seal Dubbing
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Legs: Whiting Coq De León Hen Saddle Dyed Olive
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There’s little new under the sun, let alone something new in the fly-tying world, but I might pose jigged trout streamers as a caveated exception to that statement. While streamers have been tied on jig hooks for a long time by guys like Cliff Watts with his deadly Kilowatt pattern or Dan Blanton and his jigged Whistler series, these patterns have been exclusively limited to steelhead, salmon, and salt water and not directly toward our trouty friends. There could be a lot of reasons for this, the first of which comes to mind being the thought that jigged streamers don’t seem to hook fish that well when they’re being stripped fast. I recall having a conversation with the star of this column, Lance Egan, years ago where he relayed that he didn’t find that streamers tied on jig hooks connected reliably when being retrieved quickly, and that lined right up with my experience. but here we are again today, Lance and I, writing about jigged streamers for trout. What happened?

What happened was, fly-fishing competition guys like Egan and George Daniel (see page 48) figured out that you didn’t always need to strip a streamer to draw a trout’s attention. Sometimes a very slow, swinging and even hopping motion down deep was just what the fish were after. When I recently asked Egan about his statement regarding the hooking capability of stripped jigs, he gracefully backed off that statement. Of late, he has not found jig hooks to be the culprit if an angler isn’t hooking up on stripped flies, which was a polite way of saying he has just gotten a lot better at it.

Egan, a shining if not so young face in the world of competition angling and no slouch behind the vise, has debuted his latest jig-hook streamer offering, and dubbed it the Poacher. It is not only a compelling fly to tie and fish, but the logic and thought process behind it are interesting as well.

I must admit, my first glance at a Poacher made me think of it as a leech pattern, and Egan agrees with that resemblance in regard to the black version. However, the olive version, Egan’s favorite, was purposely built to imitate the small sculpins in his local waters. His tying procedure is straightforward and does indeed seem to allow the pattern to cross over as a leech pattern with the same tying and fishing process, but the beauty of it, I think, is in the actual design.

Sculpins—small, almost flattened baitfish found in many trout rivers—have a disproportionately large and flat head and a rapidly tapering body, along with very prominent pectoral fins. They’ve been imitated by scores of patterns throughout history, but Egan’s pattern has gone about aping them in a whole different way.

Where Egan went off the conventional fly design rails was on the head, which could be easily confused with what we tiers would call the body, so you’ll have to stick with me here. Remember when I mentioned that sculpins have a rapidly tapering head and body shape? Egan creates the head of the fly using coarse Arizona Mega Simi Seal Dubbing twisted in a dubbing loop and wrapped over the entire hook shank to build a perfect silhouette of that large, flat head without unnecessary density and weight. He brushes the dubbing out to the sides after a quick haircut to form the blocky flat head shape, and finishes it off with a large, mottled soft hackle collar to replicate those big clown-like pectoral fins. The result is a fly that is far better designed and more accurate than your first look might indicate. The end product is a small, dark, heavy fly that has a slinky, tapered body being led around behind a wide, flat head that plummets right to the bottom and mimics the exact shape of its mentor. It becomes readily apparent when you fish this fly what a dead nuts ringer it is for a real sculpin, and that sort of thing always ups my confidence immensely.

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