Elephants Eat Peanuts

Elephants Eat Peanuts

Martyn White | Thursday, 15 February 2024

The cold has persisted here in Japan, and there were public holidays while I was off so I didn't go fishing, I never do. An odd missed Monday is a small price to pay for the angler-free rivers I usually get thanks to my nonstandard weekend. So I had a bit of time at the vice and dug the crampons out and knocked off another couple of mountains.

Not long ago, I wrote a page about the best ways of sticking on eyes, it was inspired by a return to the EP fly. I've been thinking a lot about EP flies since then, and tying quite a few too. Mostly peanut butters, but a couple of other fiber baitfish patterns too. I know that they've remained fairly popular for years, but I can't help thinking that as more and more saltwater tyers and anglers seem to be fetishising the bucktail, Enrico's designs are getting a bit eclipsed. Which is a pity and I don't really understand it. Not least because the "credit due" mouthbreathers are so quick to jump down people's throats when it comes to other tyer's designs but seem quite content to keep quiet when it comes to "bozo shads" or whatever exact copy of the peanut butter companies are shamelessly pushing to try to sell their EP fiber.. Looking at you Semperfli. Maybe it's just that the BEAST fly has hypnotized a lot of people. It's understandable, it's a cool fly, a good tying exercise and I'm in no way trying to detract from Bob Popovics' contributions. BUT it's a very niche fly. Nice as it is to catch big fish on big flies, most people don't have much use for them in real fishing situations- only short windows of the season where the biggest bait is around, if at all.

I'm not opposed to bucktail and natural materials in any way, but with quality bucktail getting harder and harder to come by I can't help thinking that a lot of us would be better served by going back to synthetics. Of course there's the plastics issue, but I don't know that that's not outwieghed by the use of animal products. There's also a bit of snobbery among some who like to imagine that choosing bucktail and taking the right amount for a fly is some kind of arcane artistry.Bucktails vary in quality, with different types of hair being better for certain things, but not that much. Yes, it takes a bit more learning than uniformly consistent synthectic, but not that much and there'smore than one synthetic fiber to learn anyway. If your only hammer is a bucktail every fly looks like a nail, right?

But anyway, I think predator and saltwater fly tyers owe more to Enrico Puglisi than he necessarily gets credit for. Perhaps if he hadn't come up with the fibers and the peanut butter, someone else would have come up with something similar but maybe not. And if not, would we have all the other patterns he came up with that have accounted for so many fish of so many species? And how about the other fibers and patterns like SF blend and Johnny King's kinky muddler? Maybe, maybe not.