Martyn White | Thursday, 16 May 2024
I first saw a deer hair bass bug in the fishing section of a Canadian Tire during a family holiday in my early teens. I hadn't been tying for that long at the time and the handful of divers and poppers I threw in the basket were the only fly fishing things I bought along with a clutch of soft plastics, moss bosses, top props and other conventional lures that just weren't available in rural Scotland in the early 1990s. At that time, I'd definitely tied a muddler but that was the extent of my deer hair experience, so I was fascinated by the stacked bugs and spent ages trying to work out how they got the different colours of hair to sit in bands and patches across the fly.
When I think back, they probably weren't even that good, but they were different from anything I'd seen, so I committed the sacrilege of buying flies in a shop; "shop boughters" were generally looked down upon back then, despite the improvements in quality they probably still are in many circles! But regardless of the quality, they were still a puzzle to me. It didn't occur to me to try stripping one, and that probably wouldn't have helped me figure out the stacking technique. There was no internet (imagine!) and there were no books I knew of that would help. I had a book I got on the same trip, with Whitlocky drawings of flies but no step-by-steps and that was my lot. When I got back to Scotland it didn't take long for the local pike to destroy my bugs, after which they sort of faded a bit in my mind. Big rough spun heads and permanent pens got me close enough for my needs and so the idea of stacking hair fell by the wayside until a few years later when one of the magazines (maybe the now defunct Stillwater Trout Angler) had a piece on what we were missing because of legislation preventing the introduction of black bass to the UK. How times have changed eh? It included a section on stacking hair using a weird technique, somewhere between the Messinger square knot and modern stacking that I've never seen since. Anyway, that was it I was really able to drive my mother insane with the mess, even when I "cleaned up" there'd be bits of hair all over. Excellent!
Recently though, I decided to start doing it again. Chuck and I couldn't get out on the tubes this week because of the shit weather so instead of tying the carp flies I actually need I just decided to have a play about with some small deer hair bugs. Tubing opens up a lot of water and over the years I've discovered some places that I can go and have some quality top water fishing in the pre-dawn into sun-up so that's probably part of the justification. I'd also like to get properly good at it and maintain the skill now that I can (kind of) justify the effort. Plus they just look nicer than foam. So my first little frog was a struggle, and it took a fair bit of fannying about to get the hair to sit without spinning or blowing up because of too much pressure, but in the end I go there and was pretty happy. It could take more hair but the separation of colours was good and they were more or less where I wanted them to be. The second fly, a little Dahlberg , went much quicker and was ready to trim in a mere 30 mins. It was better too both in terms of placement and density. They're not perfect but they're not bad. I'll have to do several dozen more before I'm really happy with the techniques and end results I imagine, but that's fine these things take learning and practice. Stacking is fairly simple really, especially once you get through all the bullshit surrounding deerhair. Unfortunately it just takes time and repetition to get good at it.