Martyn White | Thursday, 3 February 2022
I've mentioned before that I'm quite heavily dependent on the rubber candy for the seabass. It's a year round producer, and easily the best pattern on Tokyo bay. A while ago someone asked me about the durability compared to the standard surf candy, which I thought misses the point of the fly a little but does raise an interesting point and led me to do an experiment or two. I knew the answers but wanted to prove it to myself.
Since about March last year I have fished the same rubber candy on my 6wt for seabass trips-i just leave the loop knot attached so I know which one it is. Since then fly has caught well over a 100 fish and although it's showing some wear, it's still perfectly useable. I'm hoping to get it past 200 before I stop seabassing in March. Just need to not lose it on a bit of structure.
So it is durable, admittedly a toothier species would likely destroy the silicon setion faster than the epoxy on a surf candy, but you'd still lose the tail fibres anyway.
The other thing I did was what I called the concrete test; a lot of the fishing around here involves casting very tight to walls, pilings and other hard structure. Almost always, the closer the better which means you're going to hit the structure sometimes. So I went down the river and cast a rubber candy and a surf candy at a concrete wall intentionally hitting it with the fly to replicate what happens while fishing. It didn't take long to break the surf candy, it cracked after 3 bounces and shattered more or less completely by 7; only the hair was holding it together. The rubber candy on the other hand outlived my persistence after 40 impacts with the wall, I could only see a little damage round the front end near the eye and the leader was severely abraded. It was obvious that was what would happen, silicon is soft and springy so it can handle the impact. So although resin is harder than silicon it's not necessarily tougher. Of course in open water fishing for something like skipjack or albacore then a superhair surf candy will last longer, but it think the durability difference is not really that important.
I think just catching fish isn't enough to make a fly a great fly and we need to consider tying time, durability and some other factors depending on the fishing situation, but we shouldn't get too hung up on just one of them, espeially when it may be more of a perception than an actual real world performance issue.