GYMF

GYMF and GYMBH

Martin Joergensen

My wife has always liked to knit. Every few years she gets into a period where she produces mittens, socks, sweaters and other garments. The garments are interesting enough. Some of them are even for me. But more interesting are the scraps of yarn that remain when she's done. She always buys too much, and that leaves quite a selection of different yarns. She mostly uses wool and cotton, but other types of yarn sneak in now and then, and I have a constant supply of new and interesting materials for flies. I never have too look far for tag material for Red Tags or wool yarn for bodies of almost any brown or gray hue.

Green, long haired

But just recently she bought something quite different. While most yarns are round threads, some a little more fluffy than others, this a braided thread with hairs sticking out almost perpendicular to the main thread.

Mullet green

Martin Joergensen

It simply screams "fly tying!" so loud and clear.

Since it's a perfect chartreuse or lime green, I thought of a mullet fly right away. Many Danes tie a fly for mullet using bright green marabou. The fly was originated by Danish mullet pioneer Brian Kjaer and he dubbed it The Green Avenger AKA The Green Revenger.
Since the mullet are mainly vegetarians some people fantasize that it might look like a piece of sea weed or whatnot. I personally doubt that the sea weed swims along happily chased by mullets, but whatever... the mullet like the fly. Even I hooked mullet on it a couple of times.

It simply screams "fly tying!" so loud and clear.

The GYMTF

Martin Joergensen

Too simple

Since the yarn is literally a "yarn hackle", there's very little to tying the fly: tie in the yarn, wrap it, tie it down and cut. Varnish and it's a ready to fish!
If it wasn't for the somewhat special material, which might be hard to get a hold of for some, this would be Martin's Mundane GYMF. It's more than mundane, and so simple that I had to make some variations to satisfy my own urge to do more than simply wrap yarn on hook.
So from there The GYMP grew into The GYMBH and The GYMTF - the Green Yarn Mullet Bead Head and the Green Yarn Mullet Tube Fly.

The yarn

The yarn comes from a Swedish company called Järbo Garn - Jaerbo Yarn. They have a ton of different yarns with cute IKEA-like names such as PingPong, Baby Pascal, Saga and Fuga. But they also have Tindra, which is the yarn my wife bought. Great stuff for fly tying!

There's a neat product page and even an online shop (Update October 2019: these are unfortunately both shut down), so it should be possible to order. There's a whopping 36 colors to choose from, among them some really funky ones. My green yarn is the color 61227, but if you want pink, purple, blue or something slightly more subdued like white, different shades of gray or black, that's available too.

Yarn flies

Martin Joergensen

The mullet feast

I actually landed my first mullet on a tube fly. I had tied the Green Avenger on a Bidoz tube, and had a few in my box.
Back in August 2007 we were fishing for sea trout on a beautiful peninsula where we often spent the summer evenings. This particular day was in every way special as I already told in our blog back then.
But let me go a bit more into depth with the mullet. The weather was fine with one of those perfect winds that raise the water a bit, creating chops but not waves as such. The direction was perfect for casting and since we were in August, the temperature was nice, even as the sun was getting lower on the horizon.

This place offers a lot of fishing, and I was always the type who liked to walk (not so much any more), so I left the others as the sun was setting and walked a few kilometers along the coast. At one point my eye caught some commotion in the water, and as always I immediately cast my fly out in the belief that it was a sea tout.
The fish didn't take, so I cast a few more times. I was still standing on the beach, elevated a bit above the water surface, and now I started seeing nervous water all over the place, and I realized that I had bumped into one of those famed schools of mullet that are sometimes seen in the shallows close to our coasts.
This is mostly a very frustrating experience, because mullet are very spooky and also very reluctant to take a fly.

Mullet!

Martin Joergensen - Henning Eskol - Nils Folmer Jørgensen

But I was seeing mullet by the hundreds, so I tied my mullet tube fly on the tippet and started fishing for them.

And lo and behold!

Within 10 minutes I had hooked and lost two fish and even had a few tugs! The mullet didn't seem to spook at all, and I had several takes on the fly as it was passing through the school.
I phoned the others and summoned them, and in the following hour or so we had the most amazing mullet fishing. I managed to positively hook four and land one and had so many contacts that I lost count. Henning also landed one fish while Nils didn't manage to persuade one to stick to his fly.
This was in every way a special day. Never before or after have I experienced so many mullet at once, and never have they been so willing to go for the fly.

And I landed my first mullet! On a tube fly!

This is five years ago, and we haven't seen mullet in such numbers since...
Maybe this summer? I'll be ready with GYMF's, GYMBH's and GYMTF's!

And I landed my first mullet! On a tube fly!

Mullet country!

Martin Joergensen

Poppy time is mullet time...

Martin Joergensen