Bie's Blog Jam // Drake Fly Fishing Magazine

Bie's Blog Jam // Drake Fly Fishing Magazine

Funky swimmer (submerged walk the dog)

While fishing with a hardware chucking friend of mine this Summer, I couldn't help but stare at this new lure he was throwing. It actually walked the dog under the water! It was a new design by Larry Dahlberg. If you're not familiar with Larry, Google him and check out his body of work, he fishes lures, flies, bait he is the epitome of what a fishing junky is. Anyway with that being said, this new lure called "The Wide Glide" has this intoxicating back and forth swoon to it. My friend had the Muskies licking their lips that day, they couldn't lay off of it. From the first cast I witnessed to the drive home I couldn't stop thinking about how I was gonna tie a fly to mimic that deadly action. Well weeks of tying, testing, cursing, and constant incoherent mumbling, as well as 2 freezer bags of WTF's and I finally got it right! This in my humble opinion is one of the top 2 flies I have ever come up with. Once the mighty Susquehanna River comes down and has a little more clarity than the raging motor oil it looks like right now, I'm betting dollars to doughnuts the side to side swooning action is gonna be just what those river demons are wanting. I'll keep ya posted!

Symposium

I don't know how to begin to describe how much fun I had this past weekend at the New Jersey fly tying symposium! I met some awesome new friends and got to see some old friends as well. Some world class tying going on. I know I'm not going to remember everyone but if you're not familiar with some of these names google them or go to their web sites and check out some great patterns.. Mike Schmidt was tying some awesome sculpins, Steve Silverri always has some fantastic salt water streamers some you can learn to tie by finding him on you tube, Pat Cohen was spinning up mind blowing deer hair patterns, Rich Murphy was showing everyone the million and one uses for one of my favorite materials, E-Z Body! I was able to learn some sweet tube techniques from some of my new friends from Sweden. Last but not least I was able to sit in on a buck tail seminar with Bob Popovics, to say I learned alot there is an understatement! Keep an eye out for some future posts of some buck tail creations I will be posting!

Tubes

Hardware guys have been chuckin tubes for years, and for the last several years musky companies have been producing huge tubes for hunting the river wolf. This is my take on these fantastically versatile lures.

Lefty Crays

This is my take on the jig and pig, or another bait I used to devastate the smallmouth with when I used to spin fish as a kid called a salty spider.

Frog Blog

This is a recent frog pattern I came up with some of the many patterns I've been hammering out in preparation for the Symposium in New Jersey.

big ol jiggin bug

After watching Doug Stange on an episode of In-Fisherman use a type of swim bait similar to this design to catch various species of fish from freshwater to the salt, and a buddy of mine who chucks lures telling me about a 47 inch Musky he had recently landed with the same type of bait, I was instantly grinding my gears as to how I was going to mimic this design for fly fishing. This is what I came up with. This type of fly is very versatile, from Jigging off the bottom, ripping it back to keep the twister tails going, or simply swinging it through likely holding lies.