Martyn White | Thursday, 4 April 2024
Recently I keep seeing an awful lot of untested crap masquerading as flies getting promoted, shared or otherwise published online. Some people at least have the decency to say it's experimental, but others don't.
What's worse is that anyone who points out obvious flaws is lambasted by all and sundry. I don't bother commenting on it most of the time, but sometimes I do ask if they've caught fish. It's innocuous enough to avoid the hard of thinking magpies who' re captivated by a picture, but can still be useful for those who are looking for patterns for their own boxes.
Experiments are great, and we need them to drive things forward. But they're not complete when the first fly comes off the vice. One of the downsides of social media is that it lets people skip the actual testing phase. One that particularly sticks in my mind is the fly in the POD, the insider crab by Insider Flyfishing Denmark. It was put out repeatedly over a week and is supposedly ideal for permit, triggers and parrotfish. When I asked if he'd caught fish on it he told me it would be going for testing in Venezuela soon i.e. No.
Now you can probably get away with this kind of thing when tying a "new" nymph or dry - it's harder to get it wrong than right. When it comes to crabs for permit, triggers and parrots this isn't true. Aside from getting an eat (which I'd be, sceptical about with this) but there's also spin, weight, sink orientation and hook choice to consider. Starting with the hook, this insider is tied on a Tiemco 800s, which is a heap of shite of a hook. While it might be passable for Danish seatrout or bass, but that's its limit. So it's immediately unsuitable for triggers and parrotfish that will bite through it, and it's pretty likely to break on any hot fish in the tropical salt. I'd be pretty suspicious about how the fly is going to sink too, it looks like the crab legs used are being pushed down by the pearly back (why is that even there?) which will cause the drag to push the fly to sink hook down. The most common mistake I see with crabs is miss placed drag which is more important than weight when it comes to flipping a hook. So all in all it's rubbish and anyone who knows what they're about should see that.
The problem is that less experienced people might have a trip ruined because they read and believe his nonsense. I don't care if that guy goes and gets disappointed, but I really think it's garbage if someone going on their first tropical saltwater trip , which might be a once in a lifetime trip get taken in and copy the dressing, or worse use their hard earned to buy flies from him. Then they have those flies spinning, catching coral and ultimately breaking on fish. That's a disaster.
This is just one example, there are sadly tonnes of them.