Martyn White | Thursday, 5 June 2025
I've been back on a real deer hair kick this week as I top up my boxes for the summer float tubing. I also went fishing, but we don't need any more mulberry chat.
I've said before that I prefer hairbugs for my bass fishing. They're better fish catchers but more hassle than foam, cork or balsa. I think it's worth it, plus there's just something cool about them. And it's easy to make all kinds shapes to get all kinds of different behaviours and sounds out of the bug. When I tie them I don't always know what the bug is going to be when I start tying, unless I'm doing something that needs to have a certain type of tail in order to behave properly. But poppers, sliders, chuggers or walky divers I can essentially stick any tail on, stack the body and then sort of find the bug that's inside the hair. It might be a popper, but I could start thinking it's going to be square and skippy then at some point I sort of realise it's actually going to round and bloopy. These ones always seem to turn out better than when I set out to tie a specific shape. Don't know why though, because if I tie a say rabbit strip Dahlberg which I need to know before I start, they turn out well.. Weird.
Anyway I always prefer hairbugs, even if it's heartbreaking to have a snakehead or catfish destroy an hour plus fly in seconds rather than a ten minute foam thing. There's only one situation where I would generally choose foam over hair and that's when fishing a popper dropper. The main reason is that foam, or cork, is consistently buoyant while deerhair is basically losing buoyancy from the moment you start fishing it. This is an unnecessary variable that's too uncontrollable for my tastes, so coated foam it is. You need to catch a lot of bass before they start to lose buoyancy so there's not all the fly changing that a day of fishing hairbugs needs, which with a dropper would also mean the retying/replacement of the dropper link every time the hairbug stops being able to support the dropper fly.
I know a lot of people will choose foam regardless of the situation and that's fair enough. Not everyone actually enjoys tying flies or wants to spend the time on learning to stack hairbugs. Similarly not everyone is willing to put up with the extra hassle of keeping hairbugs fishing or doesn't believe that they are any better than foam. Maybe they're right but I enjoy them and do think they are the most effective topwater option for bass, and other species that aren't going to destroy them in one go.