Terrestrials

“What is this”
“A fly!”
“What kind of fly”
“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?”
“Because I am an old man, I can not see well”

The common housefly is indeed... eh.... common, and an obvious insect to imitate. Bulgarian Radoslav Kiskinov has made a simple but very efficient pattern imitating Musca domestica using foam, raffia and peacock herl, which will catch several species when fished dry.

One day, while fishing my favourite water, Barnsfold in Lancashire, which is surrounded on one large side with a good head of pine trees round the reservoir, I noticed quite a few terrestrials being blown on to the water. The trout were going crazy for them.

The tendency is, that flies become smaller and smaller trying to fool the fish. We end up using 7X, size 24 hooks and stealth moves on the river banks. Sometimes you need to go the opposite way, if you want a big fish at end of your tippet.

A nice thing about this Bibio is that it's versatile. Play with it, use lighter of heavier hooks, fish it with or without floatant, wrap a thinner or denser hackle, and so on. But make sure you have some Bibios in your flybox spring suddenly is here.

A bunch of quite realistic flies by a bunch of well known and unknown international tiers. These fantastic flies are not super realistic imitations, but they certainly look real and convincing enough to fool both men and fish!

Harrison Steeve's story about a brand new foam material for terrestrials and many other flies. "You guys are crazy to spend so much time messing around with that loco foam." Needless to say the name stuck. Read the whole story here.

I'll warn you now; the hopper is my favorite pattern. It's big, I can see it, it's fun to cast and present it with a plop, I have fun tying them and the fish just adore the big, juicy, summer delight.

"...once they broke the surface film, the butts would tilt down and the head and shoulders would be the only part of the grasshopper above water. They neither rode high in the water, nor lay in a horizontal plane. My thought was to design a hopper that would duplicate that presentation."