"Chucking Buggers"
By Dave Anderson
To say that I am an expert on streamer patterns would be stretching the truth a little bit. To say that I am well versed in the area of woolly buggers might be a pretty accurate statement since that was the very first fly pattern that I learned how to tie and fish.
Wayne Bartz of Gander Mountain was my first ever fly tying instructor, showing the class I was in some basic patterns. Tying the woolly bugger was very easy because it is a large fly and allowed a great deal of room for error, which happens almost on every fly that you attempt to tie when you first get into fly tying. However, the saving grace of woolly buggers is that sometimes the gaudier it looks the better. Creative input when tying woolly buggers is endless - different color chenile, different color marabou, krystal flash, beads - just about anything will work when tying a bugger. My fishing adventures have led me to tie black wooly buggers with a shortened marabou tail (too many misses by trout hitting the tail only), a mixture of purple and olive bodies (leech yarn is a chenile I have been experimenting with lately), black hen hackle, a mixture of beaded and not beaded, and perhaps the largest change I have made since Wayne showed me how to tie buggers is the hook. I use a black salmon hook - a curved body in about a #8.
Since it was a relatively easy fly to master, it was the fly that I fished exclusively the first year that I became a "fly fisher." It taught me many things, including humility. Buggers aren't usually too productive when it's 70 degrees, sunny, and the caddis are everywhere - in your nose, on your face, inside your fancy polarized glasses, yet for some reason they don't want a #6 bugger pattern. Seeing that the fly fishing world was made up of a variety of insect that I knew I had to learn how to "match" made the bugger a bit obsolete for me in the years following because I was keen on finding hatches and fishing emergers or dries that accompany those hatches. The obvious bonus to hatch fishing is that the amount of trout you can catch is infinite, which leads to a fealing of obvious mastery.
The plus side for fishing buggers exclusively for a year in any and all conditions were the monster fish that I encountered. It wasn't always that I managed to hook them and land them, because some of the best encounters, the ones that left you shaking as if you were just scared out of your gourd were the times when out of the blue a two foot brown trout the size of a submarine would appear. It was a year filled with numerous fish in the 16-22 inch class that I actually landed and many more, often larger, that got away. But it were the ones that got away that fueled my appetite for chasing large trout and ultimately learning new patterns to fool trout.
The bugger didn't remain dry and in my box for long as I gradually learned when and where to fish them. The when portion still answer to a year round pattern. April and May are super times - overcast days, cool weather and some dingy water are great. The same holds true of the weather in September - overcast and cool at times, so buggers become a hot ticket as those brown trout beef up and prepare for October spawning. Where to fish them is an easy answer - anywhere you can drop it into water. I can't give you an answer as to what a trout thinks it is, but they obviously attack it with intentions of destroying it.
I made a resolution to myself to fish some of the bigger water (Root River for example) and go after those large hogs of years gone by. The amount of those bruisers available has certainly decreased despite any of that crap data the DNR pours down your throat. I run into significantly fewer biggies than I did five years ago. Anyway, I have decided against "another day of nymph fishing" to test some water and see what lurks below on several occasions - mostly in cooler weather, overcast conditions (today it was in a downpour) in some of the deeper holes where they reside. Results so far in 2000 have been mixed: the largest trout I have taken was 22" on a caddis nymph, while the biggest brown on a streamer was 18". Go figure.
Anyway you look at it, the wooly bugger is a pattern that will remain a constant pattern in my box. I am no dry fly elitist that all of us have encountered at some time or another. Heck, I love to catch trout on dries as much as the next guy, but what does that elitist do the other 95% of the time? The bottom line is that I fly fish to catch trout and to get away from civilization as we know it. The woolly bugger is one of those patterns that I have fallen in love with and if you give it the same attention that I have in the past years, you too can experience the thrill of a 24 inch angry brown trout all done up in spawning colors, kipe jaw, the works. Be sure to take a nice photo to put on your desk at work and let him go for another battle another day.