Climbing out of the Wooly Bugger Box
The Wooly Bugger has to be the most popular fly in fly fishing. It has become the fly fishing equivalent of the “jig tipped with a worm or minnow” as the be all and end all of what to put on the end of our tippet.
The fly became popular in the late 1970's through the
innovation of Russell Blessing of
The phrase I use as a topic title came from one of our message board members (http://mbff.proboards21.com) was responding to another fly fisher’s bad luck casting every kind of wooly bugger at some early season trout. He suggested back swimmer patterns and caddis patterns and anything to get them out of the “wooly bugger box”
Now early on in my fly fishing life I was in a “box”. But mine was dry flies in general and in particular Parachute Adams. I also knew a fly fisherman who was in his own self imposed box of the bead head nymph variety.
But arguably the most popular fly is also the most popular box to be in. And considering the versatility of the Wooly Bugger it is not hard to imagine how this happened.
If you were to multiply all the streamer hook sizes x all the colours of chenille, saddle hackle and marabou x the additions of bead heads, cone heads, dumbbell or bead chain eyes, tinsel, flash-a-bou, rubber legs etc the you literally have an almost unlimited number of variations. The Wooly Bugger has caught more fish for more fly fishers than can be counted and is easy to tie making it very popular with new fly fishers and tiers alike.
Woolly Buggers, in this multitude of sizes and colours, catch trout, bass, salmon, steelhead, Arctic char, northern pike, bluegills, drum, goldeye, walleye, sauger, sunfish and even carp. It would not be an exaggeration to say that there is hardly a fish that swims in fresh or salt water that could not be caught with a Woolly Bugger. This wide-ranging success is due to the fact that these flies are be used to imitate a variety of fish food forms, including baitfish, crustaceans, damsel/dragon fly nymphs, salamanders and leeches. . So with this resume why would anyone ever fish with anything else? That is because fish don’t have Wooly Buggers in their food chain.
Here is the rub, if you are catching fish on your Wooly Buggers what did the fish “think” it was eating? We all know there is no such thing as “wild” wooly buggers or a wooly bugger “hatch” so has the fish made a mistake? No the fish just reacted to what it “thought” it was eating. But what about fish that take there time before ingesting? The older, cautious, bigger, more wary fish may take that extra second to examine the wooly bugger and then reject it as non food. So you are catching fish with your wooly buggers why change? Truly I don’t know but the root, I feel, of fly fishing is figuring out exactly what the fish are eating (or at least willing to eat). And that means learning just a little more about the nature of our fly fishing quarry.
If you catch fish on the ubiquitous black wooly bugger then guess what…the fish probably thought it was a black leech. So why not go full out and fish leech patterns? Maybe that big older fish might use that extra time that it would have used to reject the WB to accept your leech fly.
Of course that opens a new chapter. Leeches can be black or light brown with mottling. Then do you tie a marabou or rabbit strip leech? Or maybe a chamois leech with hand done mottling. Do you weight it and how much and so on.
Maybe the fish thought your brown wooly bugger was a crayfish so let’s go whole hog and fish a crayfish fly. Now will you tie you crayfish pattern with large or small claws, what colour and molt stage, small or large ones, hook tip up or down? And what about the blue claw variety?
The olive wooly bugger might be seen as an emerging or migrating damselfly/dragonfly nymph. Your white WB might appear like a drowned worm after a rain. Your grey WB might appear to be a minnow. Small, so called micro, buggers are being mistaken for mayfly and caddis nymphs. So instead why not fish minnow (streamers) or damsel (gomphus) patterns?
So why not tie or buy your patterns in accordance with the fish’s actual tastes? Why not give the fish what they really want? If the fish want a crayfish or a leech why not give a fly designed to look like one? Maybe you can increase your hookup/ catch rate. Maybe you will catch bigger fish but if we can climb out of our boxes (even a little) we might find the fun and challenge of the detective work enough of a reward in and of itself. The good news is that learning is good for us.