Martyn White | Thursday, 30 January 2025
Recently I was talking to a mate about boobies, and he was telling me about a club water he really fishes less in winter than other places because it has a booby ban. I thought that kind of nonsense was a thing of the past.
Of course the booby isn't the only way to catch in winter, but it is a big part of a lot of people's winter arsenal, especially on waters like the one in question, which is big, deep and has little in the way of shallower water where you can hope for a bit of winter buzzer fishing for example. The reason for the ban is that fish are often deeply hooked when boobies are fished in the old fashioned, near static presentation. Fair enough. But I feel like that's more to do with the method than the fly, in my experience if they're kept moving the fish aren't able to fully swallow them as they would a static fly. If you are killing fish it doesn't matter, but with catch & release it's obviously a problMy suggestion was to fish a razzler, softy, mouse or some other buoyant non-booby fly, but it turns out it's all foam flies. So clearly the club is trying to address the issue of the method rather than the specific fly, which means that looking for a workaround is a bit of a morally grey area, I suppose. My feeling is that if you the flies are kept moving, even quite slowly and there is tension in the system you radically reduce the risk of deep hooking fish. Definitely the risk would be less than some other winter techniques like a lure under a bung, or an egg being fished essentially static. I'll leave that decision up to the angler, but there are still ways around it. Probably the most straight forward is a fly I was pleased to remember, I'm not sure if I have the name right, but I believe it's called an Ardleigh bomb. It's basically something like a size 8 or 10 B175, a marabou tail, flash and then the rest of the hook is filled with spun deer hair. It fishes at leas as well as a booby, but you'll need a few in your box to swap them out to dry off over a fish filled day. The other options are a bit more work, but probably less likely to be picked up and complained about by others: buoyant blobs and zonkers. Obviously I'm not talking about FABs as they'd fall foul of the foam issue, but tied on a medium wire hook and trimmed close on the belly side to facilitate quick hooking, blobs can be saturated in mucilin and they will float like a booby, likewise an unweighted zonker. While both are deadly, the downside is you really need to sit an dress them with mucilin at home, sit them near a radiator to let it fully permeate and repeat until it stops being absorbed. Liquid floatant won't do the same job. A bit more work and you lose some of the water push, but they do work well. They only thing I would say is if using these patterns, it would be best not to fish them static or they'll just end up being banned too.
em, a problem with the method.