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I ran across the crackleback fly pattern and decided to tie a few to try out this summer. The tying was easy and the fly looks like it will work for trout in a creek and warm water critters as well. I tied it using a #12 long shank hook, a yellow body and a furnace hackle. I would like to tie a few more and would like to know if any members have a preference other than yellow for the body.
Thanks
Tim
Tim - Stick with the yellow body. You can use other colors and even dubbing for the body but the yellow really turns the fish on for some reason. The crackleback is my favorite dry fly and it does produce fish.
Ron
the crackleback is a great fly. the variations are limitless. i fish them dry, wet and stripped like a streamer. as small as 16 if i am fishing dry and as big as an 8 if i am fishing wet and i want to strip it. alot of times i plan only fishing wet, so i tie several of them with lead tape on the shank to weight them a bit or i fish them on a sink tip line. i have fished the original version, but the most productive for me is a green flashabou body with furnace hackle. badger, grizzly and dun hackle are great alternatives as well. blue flashabou, red flashabou and orange holographic tinsel bodies are some others that have worked for me, but the green has been far and away the best in the waters i fish. have also thought of, but not tried yet, using wire for the body to eliminate the lead tape for fishing them wet. let us know what you come up with and post a pic or two of anything you think is particularly innovative.
The crackleback was invented by Ed Story of Feather-Craft back in the 1950's.
The original color was a light olive color.
Yellow of course has been very popular as well.
Dpenrod gives a lot of good advice about colors. The green flashabou body can work very well.
A white body has worked well for me at times. Try various colors and various hackle until you find what works best for your home water.
A great bluegill fly. I've been tying mine with Uni-stretch bodies in yellow, orange, red and chartreuse with peacock shellback. May give some of the spandex products a try, too; great color selection.
Regards
Scott
A green body and red thread head works really good for trout also, been using this fly for some time now.
http://swittersb.files.wordpress.com...weilenmann.jpg
It's a Woolly Worm. Call it what you want, in whatever colors and materials you want, but it's a Woolly Worm or simply a "Hackle" fly as they were called long ago. Possibly one of the very first styles of flies made in antiquity. No offense to Feather Craft but it's just a variation of a fly which has been around ever since there have been flies.
I have often thought that same thing (of course most flies are simple variations on others). It will be interesting to see how folks repond to your opinion.Quote:
Originally Posted by jszymczyk
David
tomato, tomatoe. who cares really? i have always thought of the crackleback as a dry fly that can be fished a variety of ways and the woolly worm as a nymph. have never fished the woolly worm as a dry and never intend to. i am sure you could fish it as a dry if you wanted. for that matter, how different is a woolly worm from a woolly bugger? i always tie my woolly worms with a red yarn tail. is a woolly worm without a tail a griffith's gnat?Quote:
Originally Posted by djo
Maybe this will help: According to Woolly Wisdom written by Gary Soucie, it is called a Crackle-back Dry Woolly. Here is what Ed Story says: "I tie them with a special neck hackle with a thin stem and a more 'sparse' dry-fly hackle than is normally found. The reason for the sparse hackle is to allow the size, shape and color of the fly body to show through the hackle. I want just enough hackle to float the fly body. I use 4 1/2 evenly spaced hackle wraps on a size 12. A few years ago, we had Whiting Farms grow us 500 furnace 'saddles' with these features. The sold out in no time. The reason for the thin stem and sparse hackle is that I designed the pattern to float on top as a dry-fly terrestrial. No need to wait for a hatch."
Feather-Craft sells them in pale-yellow, brown-spider, lime and sulphur-orange versions. To fish the Crackleback as a dry fly, dress the hackle with floatant and fish it dead-drift or skitter it across the surface in the manner of an emerging caddis. Most anglers prefer to fish it both ways, as well as wet, on a single cast. As Ed Story explains, "Allow the fly to dead drift on top. If no hit on top after a few yards of drift, pull the fly under. Then 'skip' it with your rod tip as it goes downstream: a steady skip-skip-skip with your rod tip. To go really deep in off-color water, use a full-sinking line, a four-foot 4X or 5X tippet, and again skip-skip-skip the fly really deep for great success."
I use this fly and it is a go-to fly for me. It usually will always produce fish for me and when I tie it, I try to make sure to only put 4 1/2 evenly spaced hackle wraps. I use Punch Yarn for the body on most or will use floss. Make sure to put the skip-skip-skip into the retrieve because this is when this pattern is the most productive for me.
It is a great pattern for catching fish no matter what you want to call it.
Agree totally!! I suppose if you tied in a couple of turns of white hackle at the eye you would have a bivisible......a what??Quote:
Originally Posted by dpenrod
WarrenP: Thanks for the input. I had just finished tying a dozen of them with various colored bodies when I read your comments. I had to smile as my creations were tied with the same amount of turns of hackle and the bodies were constructed from punch yarn. I jumped on that punch yarn some years back and have about 30 spools of different colors. While I still use dubbing now and then I much prefer punch for body material.Tim
Panman,
I use a yellow or green Punch Yarn for the body and a strip of black Punch Yarn across the back instead of Peacock and it works great. Like, you, I have many, many spools of different colored Punch Yarn. I have picked up most of mine at Yard Sales!
In crackleback form it might be a Crackleback And Forth...Quote:
Originally Posted by bobbyg
Ed
the origin of the name Woolly WORM might be lost in the past. Most folks agree that the Bugger was first credited to Russell Blessing, a fisherman from here in the Harrisburg area, as a suggestion of a Helgrammite (very common in the Susquehanna basin). The Worm was around for a long time before the Bugger, and it's the accepted convention to have a short red yarn tail on a Woolly Worm.Quote:
Originally Posted by dpenrod
And no, a Woolly Worm without a tail is not a Griffith's Gnat, but a Griffith's Gnat IS a small Woolly Worm without a tail!
Not all birds are ducks, but all ducks are birds.
I started my fly fishing in St. Louis and bought my first tying stuff at Feather-Craft (and have been a customer ever since, through four moves to different states). I had the good fortune to have Ed and Bob Story teach me to tie the Crackleback as one of my first flies. I now tie it in over a half dozen body colors (usually using turkey rounds as the body), with and without beads, from sizes 8 to 18. I still use their recommended Dai-Riki 300 hook (a 1XL dry fly hook) for both bead and non-bead versions. It's an easy fly to teach and learn, and very versatile in how it can be fished and in how many different species it attracts. It's the prototypical simple attractor fly and is often used around here in one fly competitions. And it doesn't matter to me how you classify it -- it still catches lots of fish!
I love threads like this. I used Wooly Worms over 50 years ago and now there are so many variations you cannot simply call it a Wooly Variant anymore. I think the term Crackleback does definte a particular pattern and when you make major alterations to it, it is no longer a Crackleback. When you deviate from a distinct tie then, IMO, you no longer are doing that tie. You have your own agenda and are just using the Crackleback as a basic concept versus a true tie. Before you start thinking...oh, another one of those dang purists...heck no. I also tie many variations of standard patterns. If I tie a Mickey Finn and layer white, red and white, it's not a Mickey Finn but a streamer tied in MF style. It does just provide good entertainment and lively conversation around the old wood stove when patterns are altered and argued, and it helps keep fresh styles in development.
A good example of the change of a pattern is using punch yarn for the Crackleback. I use dubbing because it creates a more buggy look IMO. I do use embroidery yarn to weave a lot of patterns of nymphs and flymphs but there are just too many places dubbing is necessary, whether rolled onto thread or in a dubbing loop. Recently finishing up a series of spey flies only a dubbing loop really work for them. I would happily use any of your Crackleback versions you've developed for your rivers, or let you have mine. If you want real Cracklebacks, I have them. If you want any of the many variants, I usually have row of those also.
Thinking about it, maybe I don't have "real" Cracklebacks since I usually use more than 4 turns, and usually go one size larger in hackle, i.e. 14 hackle on #16 hook.
Fly patterns are a lot like different body styles in cars.....Same beginning frame with a diferent body style and shape over it.
Ed Story designed the Crackleback as a sparsely hackled emerger and even suggested putting floatant on only the top half of the fly.
My favorite personal Crackleback story came several years after learning to tie it. One spring I was back visiting St. Louis on business and had been told by a friend of a place I could find fish in a collection pond on a nearby college campus. That evening, fish were rising under a small grove of trees. When I edged close enough to see what was going on, I saw that a small school of grass carp was feeding on some buds falling from those trees. Searching my meager travel fly box, the only fly that came close to "matching the hatch" was a size 14 beadhead Crackleback. In the next half hour, I landed three grass carp that averaged about 30" in length, then had the hook straighten on another fish. Alas, no more Cracklebacks in my box, nothing even close, so my evening was over. But what an evening it was.
Thanks, Ed!