Boomerangs

[pittendrigh]

This is one of those flies that seemed like a good idea. But in practice I don't fish it much. Why?
Because to use it you need to keep a few bare hooks in your box. And I'm a space cadet. Always have been. And I all too often end up with the fly but not the bare hook.

The idea is easy enough. If you build a hopper with a small diameter tube underneath the body of the fly, you can feed the tippet through that tube and then knot it to a bare hook. If you snag they fly the tippet breaks and the fly floats back to you, like an obedient golden retriever. Or it falls down from the tree. That much really does work. Reliably too.

If you want to use the Boomerang as a hopper-dropper strike indicator you can feed the tippet through the tube, over the back of the hopper and then back through the tube again. That's just enough tippet tension to make the hopper move if a fish hits the trailing nymph (the nymph is knotted to the bend of the bare hook). But the hopper still comes back to you if you break off....although you probably will lose the nymph.

I'm going to have to remember to put bare hooks in my box.



Ah. How do you make the tube? I slip a length of thin diameter Teflon tubing over a beading needle. And pinch that into a vise. Then I wrap the Teflon tubing with thread. And then soak it in thin CA glue. Then I tie the fly around it. And then pull the Teflon tubing out of the fly. Which leaves a hard, durable and thin diameter tube on the underside of the fly. Teflon tubing is available on the net. Anything smaller than 20 guage tubing will work.