Winter's Bugs

by bob meseroll       
photos by kurt wilson

I’m old school.
Just check out my wardrobe, or the radio station I listen to in my car.
And as far as that dang designated hitter goes, don’t get me started.

Same goes for my fly tying. Give me elk hair, peacock herl, turkey quill and some hackle – natural fibers – and I know what to do with them.

I first learned how to tie flies in about 1985 when I took a night school class through the Idaho Falls, Idaho, chapter of Trout Unlimited. While I have branched out from the simple elk-hair caddis pattern we started with in that class, I’ve always pretty much stuck with natural materials.

But foam? That was always just something that floated on top of eddies in the river.

I realize using closed-cell foam to tie flies isn’t exactly cutting-edge technology. The Chernobyl Ant – the pattern that started the craze – dates back to the late 1980s or early ’90s, as far as I can tell. Even Google wasn’t able to give me a precise answer.

But tying with foam is a new trick to this old dog, so I enlisted the help of Kingfisher Fly Shop co-owner Matt Potter for a quick lesson.

Potter’s story is like so many others in this neck of the woods. A transplanted Easterner – he grew up on a dairy farm in northeastern Connecticut – he needed just one look at the trout streams of Montana to decide this was the place for him.

“We took a trip out here when I was 14 and from that point on fly fishing was all I ever wanted to do,” Potter said. “I chose (the University of Montana) to go to school because it had the best fly fishing closest to campus of anywhere in the nation.”

Potter started college as a fisheries biology major, no doubt trying to gain some insight into what makes fish tick.

“Then I hit quantitative analysis and a couple of the other really nasty separate-the-men-from-the-boys classes and I switched over to zoology with a natural history emphasis,” said Potter, who tied flies commercially while attending UM. “I have a degree.”

His “postgraduate” work has been hands on.

He guided for five years in Alaska and another year in far eastern Russia. He met his current business partner, Jim Cox, when both were working for Grizzly Hackle in Missoula. They’ve owned the Kingfisher shop for about 15 years.

And if this seems off topic, it’s not. Foam flies are what Potter terms “guide flies.”

“When you’re guiding 12 hours a day and then coming home and tying your flies for the next day, you look for effective and easy,” Potter said. “It’s simple, easy to see, your clients can’t sink it – that’s where foam bugs started, with Western guides wanting simple, easy-to-see patterns that your clients can’t sink and you can crank them out fast at night.”

It’s easy to see that Potter knows his way around a vise. He breezed through a local pattern called a Wing Thing, even while taking time out to explain to me what he was doing.
Using a stout 3/0 red thread, he wound an underbody on the hook, then tied on his first strip of dark foam that would make up the head and the egg sack. He twisted the true body of antron yarn around the foam, leaving just the head and egg sack visible at either end.

“It’s more arts and crafts than fly tying,” Potter joked as he tied in the body. “I’m aging myself when I say that. It’s not a Royal Wulff, we’ll put it that way.”
Using silicone silly legs, he tied in the tail fibers.

“There’s nothing natural on this fly anywhere,” he said. “One of the nice things about working with foam and rubber legs and that kind of stuff is it’s not like it’s elk hair where the tails and the legs need to be tapped and evened and stuff. If you need it to be a certain length, you cut it.”

He tied another strip of foam onto the fly as a wing about a quarter of the length back from the eye. Potter tied on more silly legs as legs, this time, tying them onto the top of the fly, then moving them around to the side. He tied on a small piece of yellow foam on top of the wing to make the fly even more visible and, with a few dabs of Crazy Glue here and there, the fly was complete.

Nothing to it.

“When you look at it, it gives you a great bug profile,” Potter said, holding the fly to give me a trout’s-eye view. “You want a skwala, you change it to dark olive; you want a salmonfly, you change it to orange.”

And that’s one of the unique characteristics of foam flies – the gaudy colors. And they come with names to match: Grillos Sideshow Bob, Mystery Meat, Gorilla Chernobyl, Fat Albert, Mega Meal Cicada, to name but a few.

Potter took a few more minutes to tie up the original foam fly, the Chernobyl Ant that was developed by a guide on the Green River.
Making this pattern all the more simple to tie, Potter uses a pre-cut Furry Foam Body produced by Montana Fly Co. It’s a piece of foam with a furry underside. Then it’s just a matter of tying in the silly legs and a small piece of yellow foam for visibility. That’s it.

A quick search on the Internet brings up dozens of results for Chernobyl Ant and no two look alike.

“The guy who tied the original Chernobyl Ant, he was an innovator,” Potter said. “Everyone else, they’re just imitating that.

“I’m a fly geek. I enjoy the history of the flies. It’s sort of like the Internet. You had foam flies, then you had this explosion of variety coming off of it. The advances and diversification of flies in the last 10 years is huge, just huge. You just didn’t see them before.”

OK, now for the real test.

A day after my lesson from Potter, I sat down at my own vise and tried to replicate the flies Potter had tied. I was forced to go from memory, because the photographer made off with the samples Potter tied the day before, citing some excuse about needing to get close-ups back at the office.

I started with the Chernobyl Ant since that seemed the easiest.

Bruce Staples taught that Trout Unlimited fly-tying class I took many years ago and I remember him saying that there are two types of flies: flies that catch fish and flies that catch fishermen. My first two attempts at the Chernobyl Ant would probably catch fish, but they wouldn’t impress too many fishermen. My third attempt, though, looked pretty good to my eye.

The only real trouble I encountered was having the foam slide upside down on the shank of the hook as I was tying. A little more tension on the thread got the foam to bite into the shank a little better and a couple of drops of glue after it was done seemed to cement it in place.

I’ll have to admit, I feel pretty sheepish that it took me this long to embrace foam as a fly-tying material. Now that I know how easy it can be, I’ll be using it this winter as I replenish my fly boxes.

There’s still a part of me, though, that likes the romantic notion of tying with fibers found in nature.

“There are really no disadvantages to it,” Potter said of tying with foam. “It doesn’t have the motion of natural fibers. It doesn’t breathe like something like marabou would, but for a dry fly which doesn’t need motion, it floats like a cork, it’s super durable, fish like it; there’s no real downside to it.

“Some people don’t approve of the traditional aspect of it. The older I get the more I understand where that’s coming from. But all you have to do is tie a parachute Adams with a poly yarn post versus a calf tail post and it’s so much easier to tie it with poly yarn. The fish don’t care.”

And that, after all, is the bottom line.