Wobbler Fly

[Bucho]

Hi!

This is a fly that I use for trolling behind a mini-sideplaner on the banks of the kiel canal. I needed a small, floating trolling lure with a single hook point for good penetration and a strong hook that holds a large fish. It is a stable producer of large brown trout. The Lip is cut from the side of a plastic bottle. I use to draw auxiliary lines on it with a needle and then cut stripes of differet width for different size lips. This one is rather large, 2/0. I fish it together with a little olive #4 dropper. I like the foam to be thick enough to carry both flies, which buys me a few more seconds dealing with tangles when launching the planer from the bank.

I understand there are fly lips you can buy, but since the fly body doesn´t come from a mold and is never 100% identical, the lip has to be fine-tuned by cutting of material anyway.

 

[LedHed]

Very cool flies - innovative tye. Do these dive and dart?

How bout heating up a small metal sphere to put a concave/cup on the lip???

 

[Bucho]

The shape of the bottle and the bend from tying it in is concave enough to give it a decent wobble and a stable action. They dive quite a bit, between 1-2 feet depending on size and shape. Darting - well they have no mass of their own, so they dive only as long as you pull them. You can vary a lot with the shape and size of the lip. A small lip allows for a stable run even at full walking-speed trolling while a bigger, wider lip responds better to a short pull on the fly line.

 

[JUNGLEJIM1]

Well done, really like these.

 

[StumpHunter]

Nice! I have to tie and try some of these on a smaller hook but I like the idea Nice work.

 

[Jig Man]

Very cool....

:icon14::icon14:

 

[Hawnjigs]

What advantages does bank "trolling" have over casting?

 

[Bucho]

it is really troublesome to get 3 yards down the 45° bank over skull-sized lose stones, make 2 casts to the sides, then walk another 50yards, repeat te same precieadure, until you finally bump into that one actively feeding trout every 5-8km... nobody fishes the canal this way. Its no fun. The fish are used to pedestrians walking the bank but get suspicious as soon as you shove your beany above the edge.
Trolling is the way to do, but nobody here has done it as everybody connects trolling to a boat - which isn´t allowed in the canal since the large ships don`t leave space for boat fishing of any kind.

I´ll post a video as soon as I can. Trout is open season as off today. It will give you an idea of the water and the fishing. Its quite unique.

 

[Bucho]

Nice! I have to tie and try some of these on a smaller hook but I like the idea Nice work.

If you tie the pattern without a tail, you get away with a much smaller lip which is easier to lift and handle on a fly rod. That´s how the original is being tied in holland, where i got the idea from. Deadly for asp ( a very picky fry-feeder) and large rainbows.

 

[toadfrog]

Those things would kill pan fish in the spring around here . You could even make a little popper for top water like that .

 

[Bucho]

The ones I use are streamelined for rather high trolling speed. For a short wobble on the fly rod, fished at the surface, I would take a simplier approach.

There are some nice foam patterns in this article

 

[Hawnjigs]

The link flyties were creative genius! The artistic side of the tying craft spectrum opposite from KISS jigs or the Bucho trolling fly. BTW what material is used for the multi-faceted reflective finish?

JiggerJohn coincidentally sent me this link today to a dead simple fly pattern using foam.
http://www.thebookmailer.com/Flies/Nymphs/bhMarabouWorm.html

 

[Bucho]

That´s holographic scale pattern tape, all coated with UV glue. Any tough clear coat will do.

 

[Bucho]

It bloody works just been out for a walk Not a giant, barely legal size (16") but good to see the fish are still active at the mild temperatures we are enjoying here at the moment.

 

[Hawnjigs]

That certainly is a wide body for a 16". You call that a brown trout? - Quite different from the lean USA version I've seen. NICE catch!

What speed is your trolling walk? Slow, moderate, fast?

Interesting that a lower jaw fly hookup looks more secure than a jig? Can see why I miss so many trout observing the hard upper jaw plates.

 

[Bucho]

Here in Germany we usually distinguish salmo trutta forms in what we call stream- lake- and sea trout. The "lake" trout are quite aggressive fish feeders, the seatrout are somewhat indicicive, some start fish feeding at 16", most of them rather from a size of 20". At the canal its hard to tell whether you´re dealing with a seatrout or a migrating stream trout. Sometimes you can´t see the red dots until you scale the fish. It is barely 100 years old so the trout haven´t really developed a form of their own yet. It seems like the shallower the body of water is, the browner they get. In the shallow sounds of Denmark you catch rather brownish sea trout in the salt that look more like stream trout than the silvery browns in the canal...

The one on the pic is probably a seatrout that has migrated in for the winter. Smaller fish tend to avoid cold salt water. Authorities aknowlege this mix-up with a general legal size of 16" which corresponds to the sea trout living next door.
Down south in bavaria on the other hand you would rahter have a distinction between a roughly 10-12" limit for brownish coloured stream trout and a hefty 20" for silvery lake trout even in the same lake or river.

The speed is about 3km an hour, thats about 2 miles. not too much. I once experimented with jet diver- and wobbler-guided apex lures and bait holders with whole sprat to crank it up a notch, but thats a whole different story I leave those up for my kayak fishing.

Remember I was once trying to make a jig with a hook pointing down, it does make a lot of a difference. I know a guide who is obsessed with sea trout on fly who doesn`t care about much in a fly but a stable downpointing hook. The upper jar is nothing but bone and paper so to speak.

 

[Hawnjigs]

I wonder if silvery salmos are better eating than darker? Upstream migrating steelhead & salmon in the Pacific Northwest color morph from bright silver at the ocean to dull dark the further up they swim, with the eating quality deteriorating according to popular consensus.

The brown trout in Colorado and Wyoming are always darker colored, and after tasting one I no longer keep any for the table if rainbow trout are available.

Being that practically all my jigging is in snaggy hard bottom habitat, I didn't understand a preference for down points until I saw your catch pic.

 

[Bucho]

The dark red fleshed silvery canal trout are excellent for cold smoking. I prefer them over sea trout, which at larger sizes are more yellowish-fleshed fish feeders and taste still good but. say, a bit generic. I don´t think its the outside colour but other circumstances that go together with the colour, mainly nutrition and the spawning situation. There´s a lot of dark coloured but well fed fish, for instance those danish shallow salt water trout, that make for a great meal.
In early spring, after an exhausting spawning run however, a seatrout in the salt might have already turned silver but still be slender, meager and depleted.
When it comes to hot smoking however, nothing beats a wild rainbow. Got some in between there, too, excellent foodstuff.
Btw I`ve been fishing again today, this time I got 3 fish of similar size. That makes 4 of them without a missed strike or a lost fish, quite a streak. Hope it will hold when I finally come across that elusive 50"er.
Edit: of course I meant 20" (50cm)

 

[Bucho]

Finally got a legal sized one today, together with another 2 small ones. Never knew what they were feeding on since it was too late for hering fry and they went equally well for olive and silver. Showed that they eat pearch fry as well as silvery roach.



match the hatch!

 

[plateboater]

Fantastic looking idea!