Spoon Fed

Spoon Fed

Andy Dear | Thursday, 13 August 2020

Jack and I are finally getting to the last stages of unpacking, furnishing, and arranging the new shop. It's been a fantastic experience to see it come together, and more importantly to see how useful our planned layout really turned out to be.

 While unpacking, I ran across some old fly boxes that hadn't been used in quite some time. Many of the boxes contained a multitude of experimental patterns that I had toyed with over the years. Some of which were real fish catchers, most of which exercises in sheer experimentation. Buried among the Clousers and Sliders was a faded old gold spoon fly that I acquired many years ago in south Lousiana....Houma to be exact.

  Between 2003 and 2006 I made a fair number of trips over to the Lousiana Marsh, long before the fly fishing crowds discovered what an incredible fishery that area really is. I referenced these trips in a previous front page titled Le Bon Temps Roulet. Danny Ayo who was my guide on those trips tied this spoon fly that I used for three days straight back in 2004. There's nothing special about it, except for the fact that I hadn't used a spoon fly in several years, and this was a reminder of how effective these patterns can be. When I started this game in 1995, the spoon fly game was pretty much ruled by the Cave's wobbler and the Dupre spoon fly. After a bit of internet research though, it turns out that there have been some interesting patterns developed in the spoon fly world over the last decade.

  All this focus on spoon flies subsequently led to a rekindling of the vivid memories I have of the hundreds of Redfish and Speckled Trout I have taken over the decades on a whippy, seven foot spinning rod and a Johnson Sprite Spoon. It was in fact on a silver Hot Rod spoon that I caught my first Redfish on the backside of St. Joseph Island in 1982. Not surprisingly, last weekend found me in the local sporting goods store picking up a couple of gold Johnson Sprite spoons. It is of this lure that the legendary Texas angler Rudy "Plugger" Grigar once said "If I were stranded on an island with a rod a reel and someone told me I could have only one lure with which to catch fish and feed myself, I would ask for a Johnson spoon.

So now that the shop is set up and fully operational with multiple vises, rod building lathes, and an overabundance of fly tying materials, I am exploring the spoon fly options for Redfish and Black Drum. Jack and I have multiple trips planned to a few new spots to explore with the long rod, and if the wind will ever calm down, the spoon fly is gonna be the go-to bug this fall.


Hope you all have a great week,

Andy