Rickard Gustafsson | Saturday, 11 January 2025
A fly that doesn’t look like much but is a popular fly for coastal fishing after seatrout on the Swedish west coast. It looks like a woolly bugger that has been robbed. In all it simplicity it has some interesting features.
It is a really simple fly with tail of Marabou, the body is made of dubbed Marabou and sometimes ribbed with nylon. This gives a really tough fly that stands up to a lot of abuse. Searching for seatrout is most of the time just about blind fishing so a fly that can handle a lot of casts without breaking helps. Hitting the fly on rocks happens so that’s why some reinforce a simple fly like this with ribbing and the trout isn’t the most toothy critter it still does have teeth.
In all its simpleness it is actually an imitation. It is intended as an imitation of a clam worm, also called summer worm. These clam worms do swarm during summer nights in the ocean, one of the few times where fishing for seatrout isn’t about blind fishing. You can find swarms and feeding seatrout so you can actually know that you are casting against feeding fish.
And of course it works as an attractor fly also the rest of the season. In the start of the season it works great because then the fish seem to be very attracted to orange and pink flies, in the end of the season orange flies are really popular with the fish. As you probably have guessed it is a great fly for stocked rainbow trout also.
Here on the Swedish west coast the fly is credited to Tellis Katsogiannos to making it popular and as the inventor. I find it hard to believe that such a simple fly wasn’t created before that.
Last season if I remember correctly I didn’t tie on the killer worm a single time. A mistake I don’t intend to repeat this season.
A good hook to tie this fly is Partridge CS54hook.
Cheers, Rickard