Woodchuck Hair

Fly Patterns
1

In your experience, does woodchuck hair and/or the underfur tend to have floating characteristics or does it need to have floatant applied to it to stay on top at all?

Thanks,
Joe

2

Joe, The only fly I’ve used much of that is woodchuck, is the All-chuck caddis.(it’s in the files here) It floats wonderfully, without floatant, but as with any fly, it will eventually need to be dried off. Very effective fly, too.

3

I cannot answer your question, but, I do use woodchuck hair but I use it on streamers and other below the surface flies. If I were you, I would send Peter Frailey that question and I feel he will be able to answer it because he uses woodchuck a lot. fishingwithflies.com is his web site, I think.

4

Bob Kramer’s Mossy Hopper is tied mostly with woodchuck - guard hair wing/tail and underfur body; stays on top pretty well, although floatant certainly helps

here’s the SBS if your interested:

http://www.flyanglersonline.com/bb/showthread.php?51379-Mossy-Hopper-SBS

Regards,
Scott

5

I fished a Chuck caddis many years ago, popularised by Eric Leiser. The hair is very stiff a had nice markings for a caddis wing. Basically it was a Solomon caddis (deerhiar wing) but with wood chuck. Easier to tie but yes it needs to be dressed.
Gene

6

Here is a great article by Peter Frailey about using Woodchuck. I use allot of myself. Frailey has some excellent woodchuck patterns on his site and in this article: http://globalflyfisher.com/patterns/woodchuck/

Mike

7

Eric Leiser’s Woodchuck Caddis

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sn6h_tOoN1c

[http://www.fishingwithflies.com/WoodchuckCaddis.html

http://globalflyfisher.com/patterns/woodchuck/](http://globalflyfisher.com/patterns/woodchuck/)

8

There are plenty of flies that use woodchuck hair for wings and those flies have been around a long time. Many have been already mentioned. One not is the Ausable Wulff. Therefore, I’ll opine that the hair floats well enough. Woodchuck hair is excellent for streamer wings, i.e. Llama. The fur is kind of coarse and makes nice buggy bodies but in that case the floating properties are not important.

9

I take it you mean the tail of Fran’s Ausable Wulff?

10

woodchucks do not “preen” themselves with any oil (such as water-loving mammals such as beaver, muskrat, mink, etc) and their hair is not especially hollow, so in my experience it has no special floating characteristics. 'chucks are common to the point of being pests in most areas of the east, with similar creatures across most of the other parts of the US. Would be best to go shoot one yourself and give it a try, or at least pick up a fresh road kill.