Tying The Perfect Woolly Bugger
- This topic has 21 replies, 10 voices, and was last updated Jan 31, 2007 at 11:05 pm by
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For fly fisherman, the woolly bugger is a well known, versatile and relatively easy pattern to tie. The perfect woolly bugger, however has some specific characteristics. Every fly you fish (not the flies you tie and never fish) doesn’t last forever. They get consumed by the forces of fly casting and encounters with fish (if your good) until the fly is relatively useless. In the case of a woolly bugger, that means it doesn’t much look or act like the fly you originally tied. So the perfect woolly bugger for me is one that still looks and acts like the woolly bugger I tied, long after casting it a 100 times and landing lots of fish with it. So perfect, is really all about durability.
Fly casting puts tremendous micro-forces on the fly itself. Once a fly is wet, its materials loaded up with moisture, those micro-forces cause the material in a poorly tied woolly bugger to stretch, loosen up and move around. Everything slides to the bend of the hook and it no longer looks or fishes like a woolly bugger. Hackles break and it no longer acts like a woolly bugger. Most fish have teeth of some sort, and when the woolly bugger encounters the mouth of a fish (that’s why you tied the fly) abrasive forces go to work, damage can be done. Finally, many woolly buggers actually fool the fish and escape being eaten when the fish just nips at the marabou tail, consuming bits of it but not being hooked. If you encounter lots of foolish fish, then before long your woolly bugger has no tail and in reality is no longer a woolly bugger.
For those of you who have read this far and don’t know what a woolly bugger is, here goes. (This probably doesn’t apply for this group, but I wrote this for a bunch of non-fly fisherman first). The woolly bugger is a fly tied (mostly) on a number 6 or 8 long shank hook (about 1 inch long). It has a marabou feather tail (very fluffy stuff, acts alive in the water) and some flashy stuff in the tail (woolly buggers are not subtle flies). The body is made of a chenille yarn wound around the hook and a hackle feather wound over the top of the chenille. Since this article is not about tying to prettiest woolly buggers, the color of these materials is irrelevant (although fish do like pretty woolly buggers as well) and what does a fish think the woolly buggers is, is another article completely.
The first step in tying the perfect woolly bugger is materials selection. The marabou should be of the highest quality, have long fibers, and not brittle from any dying process. The flashy material should be somewhat stiff. Flashabou and Holographic 3D Flash work well. This stiffness of flash and high quality marabou helps reduce the consumption of the tail by the fish the woolly bugger fools. The chenille yarn should be dense, tightly twisted and if possible made of non-absorbent fiber. Crystal Antron Chenille is my favorite for these characteristics. Some chenilles are so loosely twisted and contain absorbent fibers to the point that one cast has the fly failing apart. Finally, the hackle used should also be of the highest quality, flexible and not prone to break anywhere along its length when wound very tightly. Saddles are usually the best, but even inferior saddles can have brittle hackles, especially ones that were improperly or cheaply bleached and dyed or came from chickens who didn’t know their role in the proper construction of the prefect woolly bugger
For the perfect woolly bugger, assuming you’ve acquired the perfect woolly bugger materials, assemblage of the materials goes something like this. Put the hook in a good rotary vise (this rotary thing is really important). Start your thread wrap about ¼ inch behind the hook eye. Oh yeah, use good, strong thread 6/0 at a minimum, but 3/0 is what I use. Cover the rear shank of the hook with tight thread wraps to the bend. Select a clump of flashy stuff (5 to 20 strands depending you desired level of subtlety). The total length should be slightly less than the hook length PLUS the desired length of the flash in the tail. Lay the flashy stuff on top of the hook shank so the protruding flash is the right length and bind it to the hook shank with thread. Stop the thread at the hook bend. This does two things. When your woolly bugger fools a fish and the bite is short, the flashy stuff doesn’t pull out and it also begins the creation of a solid base for the body material. Next, select the marabou you want for the tail. What’s important here is to select a fairly robust amount of long marabou fibers to create a substantial tail. This stuff gets eaten away when fish nip at the marabou tail. If you start with the perfect amount, you shorten the life of the fly. If you start with less than the perfect amount, you weren’t paying attention at the beginning of this article. Just like you did with the flashy stuff, tie in the marabou along the entire hook shaft. This creates a cushioning base that not only allows you to really wind the chenille tightly, it also helps dampen the micro-forces during casting that want to unwind the chenille. Next comes the creation of the body, a combination of chenille and hackle. Both must be tied in at the hook bend, and it doesn’t much matter which you tie in first. Lets take the chenille first. Chenille yarn is a twisted yarn with a two string core which twists up and secures another kind of fiber to form a yarn. Again, my favorite is Crystal Antron Chenille. Prepare the chenille by stripping away about a ¼ inch of fiber leaving just the twisted core exposed. Secure these to the hook shank at the bend of the hook. If you can pull on the chenille with a moderate amount of force and not cause it to come loose, you’ve got it secure enough. It not, you probably want to try securing it again. Before you wind the chenille body however, you must also tie in the body hackle. This is done at the same location as the chenille. The pretty woolly bugger requires tying in the hackle by the tip. The perfect woolly bugger merely requires tying in the hackle securely. I prefer tying in the tip because pretty and perfect woolly buggers are just better than perfect ones. Before continuing with the assemblage of the body I want to digress into the quality of hackle.
Brittle hackle will break from the effects of casting and the effects of attempted consumption by fish. Avoid brittle hackle. If you tie in your hackle by the tips and lots of the hackles on your saddle patch or strung up clump of hackle have broken tips, don’t use any of that hackle. On a saddle patch, all that hackle came from the same chicken and was treated the same way when processed and/or dyed. Just because some tips are broken, doesn’t mean the unbroken ones won’t break when subjected to the rigors of fly fishing. Weak hackle tips will invariably cause the hackle to break at the tail of the fly early in its use.
Now lets wind up the body. This is where the rotary vise comes in. With one hand on the vise and one hand (or fingers) on the chenille begin rotating the vise and winding the chenille on the hook shank. Use as much pressure as you can to wind the chenille in tight, close wraps. Tight, close wraps help eliminate the material stretch that make woolly buggers fall apart. When securing the chenille at the head of the fly, ensure at least an 1/8 inch of chenille is captured in the securing wraps. Depending on your political leanings, you could have wrapped the chenille counterclockwise (left) or clockwise (right). It doesn’t matter. Just remember which way you wound it. The perfect woolly bugger benefits from bi-partisanship. When you palmer in (palmering is apparently a flying tying technique invented by some guy named Palmer who figured out how to wind hackle on a hook shank in neatly spaced increments) the hackle, wind it in the opposite direction that you wound in the chenille and secure it. Here again, use as much pressure as practical. Going in the opposite direction helps stop the chenille from stretching and thus loosening on the hook shank. It also creates a memory challenge for older fly tiers as to which direction did they wind the chenille. At this point, the perfect woolly bugger just requires you to secure the thread wraps at the head of the fly and finish with some sort of durable goopy stuff. When dry, the goopy stuff should not melt in the water or soften up, other wise the forces of fly casting and fly consumption will render the woolly bugger imperfect.That’s my recipe for the perfect woolly bugger—a woolly bugger that can be fished for a long time before all those destructive physical forces your going to subject it to can tear it apart.
🙂I would like to add a few points here.
Historically a palmered hackle wound for a salmon fly would be wound from eye to head, and wound in such a way as the hackle is close butted to the left side of the hackle.
This does two things. The first allows for the lie of the hackle in such a way as the the fibers will be more reaward inclined, if the wind was carried out well, the second was that the teeth of the fish would less likely cause the hackle stem to become brocken.In the case of trout flies, the best menns of security for a palmered hackle is to wind the hackle from the eye to the tail, and then reverse with a tinsel wind back to the head of the fly.
This adds way greater security to the wound hackle and also allows for additional attraction from the effects of that ribbing medium.Arguably, most Pacific Salmon (kings, silvers, chum, and pinks……sockeye seem to be a bit more selective) eat any hot pink/chartreuse/purple fly tossed in front of them, including wooly buggers variations. If it’s big, heavy, and obnoxious its going to elicit a strike.
Those Pacifics are a very different deal to Atlantics, if you have fished for the two species you will find that one out.
Never used woolly buggers for Atlantics, but l see no reason why they would not take such a fly at times, if the color and method of presentation was right.
Might give that a try when l go to the St Mary’s river later this year, at least some orientation color wise l know Atlantics prefer.
Davy.
Mike,
No worry l did not take it that way, you got me thinking in a direction here.
When l lived in Chicago, l did fish for the Salmonids in the lake and when they migrated into some of the river systems in Wisconsin, to be honest, l really have no interest to fish for black fish that are within a few days of death.But did real well fishing for steelhead, one of the flies to use was a large black bugger.
Steelhyde,
The traditions if you like for Atlantic Salmon fishing are from my homelands in the UK. I lived very close to some of the great Salmon rivers there. But fished many others in Scotland and Ireland for those fish.
These are of course anadromous and not land locked fish.If l were to choose 3 flies for Atlantics they would be.
Silver grey
Munroe killer
Shrimp patterns various, which overall l consider to be the best flies to use.I’ve been tying buggers for a while. Got boxes of them….They are my main cloudy water go-to fly for large trout on a 6wt sink tip.
Zach,
I believe the fly below is the one you are referring to? It is called a wog. It is a top water fly for silvers. It floats on the top of the water, and as you strip it in, it makes quite a disturbance in the water, which in turn, elicites violent strikes from the silvers.
another…(sorry…I can’t figure out how to post two pics in the same message…is it not possible without creating a collage, or in effect one jpg, in photoshop????)
That pink one is a gurggler where I come from.
I think Zach is speaking of the flies in the very top left of your box.
Those flies actually belonged to a client of mine and to be honest, we never really fished with any of them.
Cool looking mouse pattern though, I’m not sure what it’s called. My client definitely didn’t tie them, and for some reason I recall it being an Umpqua pattern. (What happened to Umpqua’s website?)
As far as the gurgler discussion. These types of surface flies have always been called pollywogs or wogs in Alaska. I have no idea why. The pink foam wog Feild posted is called a techno-wog. And yes, they’re no different then a gurgler – who knows, even the fly distributors refer to them as wogs.
Circling back to the topic at hand…
I’ll take a bunny fly over a woolly bugger any day.
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