Okay I’m pulling you leg amigo, but one positive effect of this God awful, sinking pandemic is this: I spent oodles of time behind the vise. Hours and hours. Snipping, cutting, stacking, gluing, clear coating, whip finishing. Tying, tying, tying.
Dozens of flies got cranked out. Man oh man. Check out the photos, and this isn’t all of them. There are more.
My focus was often on sand eel flies as you have seen in recent posts. They are very important at this time of year. Got to have them. They are in the bottom box of the adjacent photo. I made small one, typically in the 2″ size. Some are a tad longer. This allows me to trim them down to match the bait on a particular shoreline. These are YOY imitations. And I tied them both in green-over-white for use during the day and in black for night work. Some are unweighted and some weighted.
Along with the small sand eel flies, I also made a run of larger sand eels flies. Little tough to see but they are in the center row of the photo below. You occasionally find these bigger sand eels along beaches exposed to the open Atlantic. These babes can be 6 inches long, although the flies I tied are closer to 5″. Good enough, I think.
Naturally I whipped up some Deceivers and Clousers too. Meat and potatoes. Both of them got tied in a variety of sizes and colors. The smallest green Clousers actually double up as sand eels patterns. My Deceivers are from 4″ to almost double that length. Juvenile sea herring are fairly common right now on Atlantic facing beaches and the smaller Deceivers are a decent imitation. They have worked well in the past. The bigger Deceivers are excellent searching patterns, and make a passable squid imitation. You can see a few in the right hand row of the photo above. Need those babes too.
So is this flurry of intense tying going to pay off? You bet your backside. Why? Because I’m heading to Cape Cod at week’s end. Man, been looking forward to seeing the Cape again since I moved back from Florida. With any luck at all I should run into plenty of striped bass. And perhaps even some big boys. The kind that can air out your backing. That would be the icing on the cake.
