When I asked him “What is this”, he looked straight at my eyes and told me with his hoarse voice: “A fly!”. “What kind of fly” I Kept on with my questions, not thinking clearly. I had never seen artificial flies before. “Well, this is a fly that imitates a beetle”.
Well, the story of this fly begins somewhere in the 1980's, when I didn't know what fly tying nor fly fishing was.
In Sandanski, the town where I was born, most of the fishermen used to fish with floats and natural bait.
It was a hot august afternoon, a fishing day on the Struma river - my home river. I was still a young boy who was walking by the river bank with a telescopic rod and a box of worms in his pocket looking to catch something.
Then for first time I saw him, the old man with the strange “walking stick”. He was about seventy years old, standing in the shallows besides the river bank and was fishing with his short rod looking much like a walking stick.
I was highly impressed with the way he was fishing. His fishing rod was nothing else but a short bamboo rod, not longer than 1,5 meters or 5 feet quite thin and light but very strong. He had tied a few meters of monofilament line to the top of the rod and on the end of the line was the fly.
The fishing method that he used was very quick and effective. He looked like a conductor who was leading the orchestra. He was waving with his baton and the fly fished in very quick and short casts.
The first second or so the fly was just bumping the surface of the water and in the next second the chub was on the grass behind his back. This old man was like a machine. Till that day I had never seen such fisherman catching fish after fish.
When I came closer, I asked him very kindly to show me the bait he used, I was impressed by the simplicity of the creation that I saw. It was just a piece of a burned cork on a treble hook.
Nothing else.
When I asked him “What is this”, he looked straight at my eyes and told me with his hoarse voice:
“A fly!”.
“What kind of fly” I Kept on with my questions, not thinking clearly. I had never seen artificial flies before.
“Well, this is a fly that imitates a beetle”.
The fly that he showed me then was really huge one, may be about 2 - 2,5 centimeters or almost and inch in diameter.
“Wow, why is it so big?” - was my next question.
“Because I am an old man, I can not see well”
He was laughing...
In fact, as he told me after that, the point was the bigger the fly, the bigger the chub that will chase it.
Now let me show you the way it is “tied”.
You do not need any vice, tread or tying tools. You can make this fly while sitting around the table with friends and drinking wine. All you need is a treble hook, a knife, aneedle, a piece of cork (you may use the cork from a bottle of wine) and a lighter.
Use it like a dry fly for big chub fishing.
Cheers!
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