Hello all,
In our look at the development of CDC patterns we are going to take a look at the "shuttlecock" family of patterns by tying Peter Hayes and Don Stazicker's Pop Up Emerger.
Before getting into the Pop up, the shuttlecock type of pattern Leon Links credits to Clive Perkins a UK still water angler and competitor. Perkins was a big fan of dry flies and at the time the most successful top water still water patterns were buzzers...often with foam. The challenge is that the best ones were almost all below the surface and very hard to see. CDC was in the early 90s beginning to take the dry fly world by storm, so he began to work on a pattern that was buzzer like but with CDC. He settled on the "shuttlecock" look. Lots of experimenting with different hook weights and amounts of CDC led him to realize that to get the fly to hang in the film he needed less CDC and more hook weight...that balance was the key more than the "shape" of the fly.
Fast forward and Hayes and Stazicker use this concept with wire as a weight to not only create a fly that hangs right...but also one that drops completely down into the water a few inches with a good tuck cast and then "pops up" like an emerging insect.
Here I tie a sulphur color version with the edition of a little Fluro fiber for visibility - an idea from another famous shuttlecock pattern called the Mole Fly by Charlie Craven.
Link to that pattern here:
https://youtu.be/Xo3oxHBLz4c?si=1u9SIJrvyfYK963c
Enjoy!
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