Building Confidence

My preference is for chenille worms. Chenille offers probably the wides range of colours and sizes in worm body material and moves wonderfully in the water. I've experimented with squirmy type materials and while they are excelent for trout, I've always found that they get more refusals from carp than chenille worms do. I can't tell you why that's the case, although I had a conversation with someone who has the same opinion the other day and he thought it's smell. It might be, but I'm not so sure. I always think the smell thing, whether it's for permit crabs or carp flies is too unknowable and although it might be true, I don't think it really makes sense. We use dyed materials, often stored with mothballs, borax or camphor. Thousands of fish are caught on commercially tied flies that all have head cement or superglue in them. Then there're flies that have already been fished several times and sat in a box for weeks. I just can't see the smell being the problem. I've caught plenty of barbel on squirmy type flies too, and they have similar smell and taste systems to carp. I think it's far more likely to be me that's the problem, maybe the presentation wasn't as good as I thought or I misread the carp's body language or maybe I'm less confident so take shots at fish that I would normaly ignore.

So this week, I decided to try again with the squirmy worms. They look good and I want them to work, but really it's more spite at this stage because I can't work out what the issue is. It was boiling hot and I knew the carp would be feeding heavily as their metabolism is around its peak in these temperatures. The water was very low and clear and with the bright sun I decided to start with a black marabou bug-generally the best choice near me for bright sunny days. I caught a few fish which meant I could relax a bit as I moved down stream to where the river is wide, slower and siltier. Time for the worm! It turned out to be far more productive than I expected and I even managed to catch a couple of cruicans that really raced the others to eat it. I normally only get 2 or 3 crucians on fly a year. All this really reminded me of something I was told long ago; if you have a pattern you need to test or build confidence in don't do it on the hard days, do it when it's easy and the fish are biting anyway. I wonder if this might be the problem I've had with the squirmy worm, it wasn't a confidence pattern so only got tied on when things were tough and the fish didn't want to eat anyway. I don't think It'll replace the chenille worms, but it'll get tied on more often as I become more confident in it and can really start to work out if there are situations where one is more suited than the other.

You'll see in the picture that it's as simple as it gets.
Hook: Owner C5
Thread: Fl.red (or match the suirmy colour)
Weight: bead chain or dumbbells to suit
Worm harness: 15-20lb mono or fluoro.
Body: squirmy material of your choice.

Tie on the weight, then tie on a little loop of the nylon inside the hook gape, make the loop about 50% the diameter of the worm material and make sure it's perpendicular to the shank. After that, whip finsh and varnish the lot.
Make sure the varnish is completely dry before you put a worm anywhere near it as the solvents will destroy the squirmy material. The simplest thing to do is just carry a bag of worm bodies with you while fishing and have the harness rigged hooks in your fly box. When you're ready to fish just use a loop of tippet to pull the worm body into the loop you've tied on the hook and it's ready to go. The worm can be easily replaced if it gets damaged or you can swap ou colours without having to retie the fly, just pull the worm off and stick it back in the bag for later and add a new one.