Martyn White | Thursday, 23 October 2025
After all the trouty flies over the last few weeks I thought I’d go a bit salty this week, and with seabassing starting here now, the surf candy was the obvious choice. Obviously, it’s nothing new, but it’s an amazing fly at what it was designed for, and also loads of other applications.
I imagine most people reading this will know that Bob Popovics came up with the surf candy for striped bass and toothy bluefish The US’s eastern seaboard, but it’s since proven deadly effective pretty much anywhere big fish eat little fish in both fresh and salt water. They’re amazing for all the saltwater bass species, not just stripers. They’re probably one of the best choices for pelagic species both inshore and in a blue water environment. You’ll not get a better example of the elephants and peanuts theory than offering a small surf candy to some tuna or mahi blitzing on anchovies or baby sardines! They work well for other inshore and demersal species from pollack and cod to sea-run trout.
Aside from being effective, the surf candy has other great advantages. It’s durable as hell, and unless you hit them off rocks, concrete structure or a hull while casting (flexible resin helps with this) there’s a good chance that the fly will outlast the hook. They’re nicely prototypical and can be adjusted in size, shape and colour to imitate a range of small bait or suit a certain scenario; tan over white that’s an anchovy, make it a bit chunkier and paler it’s a silverside, smoky blue and that becomes a baby herring, go long and skinny with an olive over white and you’ve got one of the best sandeel patterns, stick the eye at the bend of the hook and you have a good little squid . Tie a fluoro pink one for mahimahi or winter seatrout, or put a dark back on your anchovy so you get more contrast for night fishing. The candy really is versatile!
Another great thing about it is that you can use a range of materials to tie them and they’ll come out good. Bucktail is nice but it’s inconsistent and you need a tail with short hair that’s relatively straight. Craft fur and polar fibre are Good but need a bit more handling and result in a less durable fly. There are other choices, although honestly you’ll struggle to find anything better than the classic super hair or ultra hair. You can add more mobility with a hackle or bit of zonker out the back- the rabbit candy with polar flash substrate is a real favourite of Tokyo seabass! You can add fleye foils, they don’t make the fly any more effective but they do save you adding eyes between the coats of resin. Or maybe you just like the look of them, I don’t mind it, but I do think the more realistically printed foils look really off when matched with the rest of the fly that is obviously much less detailed than the foil.
The basic pattern for a surf candy is:
A quality saltwater hook size 4-2/0 depending on model
Thread: clear mono
Underbody: flat tinsel or just the thread
Body: Super hair
Lateral line: flash of some kind
Tape eyes:
UV resin
- It's quite an easy fly to tie but there are a few things to consider to get the best out of your candies. Probably the most important is material distribution I often see candies with everything tied on top of the shank, but this will almost always result in a top heavy fly that doesn’t track properly when stripped- you might get away with this if you’re only going to let it fall through a bait ball- but you’re probably not going to only do that with it. So make sure you have some of the substrate material and resin on the underside of the shank to create a keeling effect and keep the fly tracking true even on the fastest retrieve.
- Candies can foul, especially when tied with softer material, so to stop this happening make sure you run the resin beyond the start of the bend, it doesn’t have to be much but it does make a big difference.
- It needs to be as bubble free as possible, so although it might seem a bit counter-intuitive it’s better to use a thinner resin for the first application as it is easier to work it into the material without leaving hollow pockets, then coat it with a thicker resin to get a smooth clean finish. In winter I tie them with Solarez thin and medium, in summer with medium and thick to account for the temperature-viscosity relationship.
- Coating the shank with the tying thread will help the resin grip to the hook and make breakage much less likely
There are several variations listed in Pop Fleyes, an excellent book and far more important than most others including Fleye Design, in my opinion. Also, there are a various surf candies that people have “come up with” and named differently. Even though there were people tying similar things when Bob was coming up with the candy, it was Bob who got it right as well as popularising it. So as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t matter what other people want to call their little variations, they’re just surf candies.