Martyn White | Thursday, 2 January 2025
Happy New Year everyone. I only fished one day over the holidays due to a virus that curbed all the usual festive excesses- except for cheese, obviously. So, since I've nothing new or interesting to report, I thought I'd write about another excellent fly: the hedgehog.
The first thing I should say, is that it's a hedgehog, not a sedgehog. The sedgehog name came about due to a rip off of the pattern by Stan Headly. Maybe I'm cynical but I strongly suspect he thought of the, admittedly better, name and added a superficial change to the pattern (a turn of hackle at the front that is then clipped underneath so as to be invisible) and published it in a magazine. Anyway, the hedgehog hails from the Orkney islands and muscled it's way onto the loch style scene probably 30 or 40 years ago now, has since spread across the UK, Ireland and occasionally further. It's pretty rare for a fly pattern to make an appearance and then stick around for the long haul, in my lifetime I can only think of a few-dabblers, hogs, maybe the octopus for loch style anyway. The rest are essentially just colour variations on a theme, which is why they come and go.
Those that do hang around tend to do so because they offer something different, not just that they catch fish. And that's the beauty of the hedgehog. Yes it catches fish, it's very effective at that, but it's also highly versatile and modifiable. It's a great dry fly, it sits nice and flush to the surface but will float all day and offers an excellent sedge profile. When tying hedgehogs that I intend to fish primarily dry, I usually go a bit sparser and opt for more(6 or 7 vs 4 or 5) but lighter wings to get the flotation without the bulk of a few bushier wings. The fact that they are so relentlessly buoyant means you can pull them subsurface and allow them to rise to the surface, deadly for imitating a hatching pupa or a diving egg layer. They can be fished wet too. Being dense they have very little pass through so are like little bricks of fur and hair, excellent water pushers that helps fish locate them especially when the water is a little coloured up. Wet hogs you can depart from the more traditional dry caddis colours and go more towards the classic wet fly colour combos. Of course If you've tied say, a black and blue pulling hog, you can still fish it dry if the mood takes you, and it will work on the right day. They're great indicators that are competition legal if that's your thing. Unlike some of the other hooked indicators that are available a hog will not twist up your leader and will, if tied heavily, support 3 big buzzers no problem, with the added advantage that other competitors might think you're fishing it dry. There are other ways to fish the hedgehog on rivers and still waters, but I'll leave that for you to play with and work out.