The Lady Becomes a Bug

Back in the early 1950's, the late Don Leyden of Connecticut and the late Charles DeFeo of New York City, both avid salmon fisherman, developed the Shady Lady (Bates & Bates, Fishing Atlantic Salmon; the Flies and the Patterns, Stackpole, 1996).  As those authors note, the fly "...is essentially the familiar Black Bear Green Butt, with hackling substituted for the wing."

The pattern:  Tail:  Black hackle fibers

                    Body:  Rear third: medium green flourescent wool (or other flourescent wool colors)

                               Front two thirds: black wool

                    Ribbing:  Fine silver tinsel (more about this in a bit)

                    Hackle:  Black hackle palmered heavily over the front two thirds of the body

                    Head:  Black

Photo from page 194 of Bates and Bates; my ties of the fly on the left, Leyden's ties on right:

                                          CLICK ON THE PICS FOR THE BIG PICTURE

Interestingly, the ribbing, as described in Bates and Bates, is only applied to the black wool (forward two thirds) of the body.  However, my salmon camp pal Bill Tomiello knew Leyden well, and sent me a couple Shady Ladies Don tied and gave to him.  On these Ladies, Don started the ribbing all the way at the back of the fly, going over the flourescent wool as well as the black.  Probably a good way to keep the butt tied down (an interesting - well, to me, anyway - side note:  the method of locking in the butt, be it wool, floss or whatever, by bringing a piece of the material back over itself is commonly referred to as "Dunc's (Warren Duncan's) method.  My friend Brian Cuming of Fredricton, NB actually showed the method to Dunc at a fly tying gathering years ago in Fredricton; Dunc just popularized it.)

Bill's note to me and the flies Leyden tied for him:

The traditional Shady Lady remains a very effective atlantic salmon fly.  But what's up with having to describe it as traditional ?  Well, I bet if you ask most salmon fly anglers today if they have a Shady Lady in their fly box, they're going to dig around and hand you one of these - AKA a buck bug:

Lots of similarities of course, to Leyden's creation...the main difference is the spun deer hair body (hence, buck bug).  Often, as in the case of this fly, the tail has gone from being a bit of chicken feather to the tyer's flash du jour; krystal flash in this instance.

Where did bugs come from?  As with many things fly fishing, depends on who ya ask.  If you want to have some fun, get a bunch of old fly anglers together and ask questions like, "Who gets paternity for the dry fly in America ?" or "Who invented the streamer ?"  The discussion can get ugly quickly, trust me.  But I digress.

The good Reverend Elmer Smith (he of Bomber fame) is given credit in several sources for the development of the buck bug.  Dick Stewart and Farrow Allen, in their Flies for Atlantic Salmon (Northland Press, 1991) reported that "It is generally believed that the idea for the buck bug came from Father Elmer Smith...and is essentially a direct descendant of the highly successful Bomber that was introduced on the Miramichi during the early '60's."

Michael Brislain, in his Bugging the Atlantic Salmon (Goose Lane Editions, 1995) comes right out and says it: "...in 1970, Father Smith developed and used the first bug patterns, supposedly on New Brunswick's Nashwaak River."

But...but...but what about Bill Carter and his Carter's Bug???  It's 1961, and Bill (long story short)  is watching salmon in a pool, tosses a little piece of moss into the pool from his rock ledge vantage point, and watches big salmon attack it.  Goes home and ties what becomes Carter's Bug with loosely packed deer hair to imitate that piece of moss (paraphrased from Dewey Gillespie and Walter Kitchen's Where the Rivers Meet; The Fly Tyers of New Brunswick the 2nd Time Around. Their great bio's of New Brunswick tyers can be found at www.flyfishingnb.com .

Here's a Carter's Bug, tied by none other than Bryant Freeman, the man to see for a Carter's Bug since Bill stopped tying.  Bryant has a great fly shop, Eskape Angler in Riverview, New Brunswick, and lots of history and beautiful flies on his site: www.eskapeanglers.com .  You can learn the correct way to tie and fish the Carter's Bug there - if you don't have some in your fly box, you should.  It has always been a very effective fly.

So here we have two "sets", if you will, of essentially brown bugs being developed at approximately the same time in New Brunswick.  That happens.  I bet Aelian wasn't the only guy on the planet dapping some kind of fly into his home stream/river/lake/pond/whatever back around 200 A.D.   Oh, wait, that's right, Dame Julianna invented fly fishing....ok, I won't go there (lol, see above, dry fly paternity.  gets ugly fast).

But we're still not up to the buck bug Shady Lady, are we?  We need to explore some more, shall we say, divergent opinions first.  To get to the Shady Lady, somebody had to start using dyed deer hair for the body.

Enter THE GREEN MACHINE, the fly, to use my buddy and ridiculously good New Brunswick fly tyer Rob Feeney's description of it, the fly I love to hate.

On Gillespie and Kitchen's site (wwww.flyfishingnb.com), there's a biography of Emerson Underhill, wherein Emerson tells the story of how he was experimenting with deer hair, to tie, of all things, the Shady Lady.  He dyed a lot of different colors, epecially green, and was spinning a hook with it when a young fella, who had been watching (this was at the farmer's market in Doaktown, NB in the early 1980's) named it the Green Machine for Emerson.

At the same time - and this is related in an article that Jerry Doak, proprietor of the famous W.W. Doak Fly Shop in Doaktown, NB (www.doak.com) wrote for American Fly Tyer magazine in 1987 as well as in Steve Raymond's Blue Upright; The Flies of a Lifetime (The Lyons Press, 2004) - an uncle of Miramichi guide, name of Evelock Gilks, was with a sport in Labrador where they saw an "unidentified, green clipped deer hair flies" in use.  He relayed the intel to Evelock, and he and some others played around with colors. They didn't have a lot of white deer hair to dye, so the brown they dyed green came out kind of olive. Eventually the fly got greener, and was known locally as the Green Gobbler.  I'm pretty sure it was Bryant Freeman who, after a great day with the bug, named it the Green Machine.  Jerry Doak did a heck of a job promoting the fly, and it's likely the most used fly on the Miramichi these days (he said with a sigh.)

So once again a fly may have evolved in two locations (albeit very close locations at the same time.  It happens.

The only Green Machine I'll ever tie (unless of course, someone orders them from me, then I'll be more than happy to tie 'em):

If you want to learn to tie one, my bud Howie Gould is the best there is at buck bugs, and you can watch his step by step video on tying one at his blog:  http://thewulffden.blogspot.com/2014/01/a-wulff-den-style-buck-bug.html

Ugh, sidetracked by the Green Machine.  Where were we?  Ah, yes, the Shady Lady.  This one appears to only have one possible answer:  the Shady Lady became a buck bug the day, back in the early '80's, that Emerson Underhill was having trouble making the hackle behave on some chenille-bodied Ladies he was tying.  He reasoned he'd have less trouble with a spun deer hair body, and he did.  The bug buck Shady Lady was born (read more on nbflyfishing.com).  It was about 1980.

I've fished a buck bug Shady Lady once...and hooked and landed a grilse on the first cast with it.  So I of course promptly switched back to a hairwing.

Well, yes, I know the bug version works, but I still like the original flavor better:

Fulsher, Krom and Warren

I've been blessed to have fished with, and been mentored in my fly tying, by three of the finest gentlemen and salmon anglers of their generation:  Keith Fulsher, Charlie Krom and Bob Warren.  Many of my favorite memories of fishing the Miramichi include these men...learning experience after learning experience, and laugh after laugh.

I can't even fathom the fly tying knowledge represented in this photo, taken at a fly tying expo at Ramsey Outdoors in New Jersey some years ago:

Click on the pics for enlarged photos!

Left to right: Ted Patlen, Bob Warren, Keith Fulsher, the late Warren Duncan, and Charlie Krom

I first fished with Bob at what was then Vin Swazey's Tuckaway Cabins (now Bullock's Lodge) in 1998. He netted my first fish, a grilse, hooked on a Black Bear Green Butt tied by Keith Fulsher; Renate Bullock captured the moment (Bob no longer smokes):

A year later, salmon camp became quite a place for a neophyte salmon angler like me.  Here's coffee time with the group:

Left to right: Bob Warren, the late Dr. Dick Jogodnik, Vin Swayze, Charlie Krom, Pam Bates Richards, Keith Fulsher, and the camp lightweight, yours truly.

I was not tying salmon flies yet, but watching Keith and Charlie at the vise surely piqued my interest!
(photo by Pam Bates Richards)

Among hairwing salmon fly tyers, the phrase "Fulsher and Krom" is synonymous with what has become a classic salmon fly tying book, Hairwing Atlantic Salmon Flies, published in 1981 by Fly Tyer, Inc.  My copy is well worn!

A beautiful sampling of their original creations is pictured in Joseph D. Bates, Jr. and Pamela Bates Richards' Fishing Atlantic Salmon; the Flies and the Patterns published by Stackpole in 1996 (more about this book later):

The best part of doing the Yale Angler's Club fundraising auction back in the late '90's or thereabouts was hanging out with Keith and Charlie.  They always sat way in the back of the room; it was fun making eye contact with them as I went through the auction and seeing if I could make them laugh.  I think I did.

Keith Fulsher's first book centered on Thunder Creek streamers, named for a Wisconsin stream.  Tying and Fishing the Thunder Creek Series was published in 1973 by Freshet Press.  My copy has survived moves from New York to South Carolina to Vermont (and looks it).

The last time I fished with Keith was a few years back down in New Jersey.  He gave me this little Thunder Creek treasure at the end of a fine day.  What a memento!

In 2008, Atlantic Salmon Fly Tyer; A Memoir, by Keith, was published.  My cherished copy:

I always enjoyed receiving, out of nowhere, one of Keith's flies in the mail:

Charlie Krom is still busy cooking up new flies at his home in Tennessee.  Last year he sent me a copy of the notebook he put together on his Three Hackle Holographic Spey Fly series.

I told Charlie that I was going to give the Three Hackle a try in the colors of my Celtic Beauty (claret and dark green.)  I had dyed up a batch of silver pheasant, teal and pintail in dark green; I thought they'd make a nice front hackle over a smaller dark green rooster saddle feather underhackle.  I sent Charlie a batch of them, and wouldn't you know, not long later I received this letter:

Up close and personal, fly number 2:

Couldn't resist making a stab at it myself:

I'm very anxious to swing Charlie's Three Hackle Holographic flies in the Miramichi this summer!

Like Keith, over the years, Charlie sent me some beautiful flies:

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, Bob Warren netted my first atlantic salmon.  2014 will mark the 16th year we've been in salmon camp together.  These days his way better half Linda comes along, too (and usually out-fishes at least me!)

Bob edited the inspirational (that's the only way I can describe it) Fishing Atlantic Salmon; the Flies and the Patterns, mentioned earlier in this post.

A few of his creations are included in the book:

If you click on the photo above, you'll see a key to the flies on the page.  Bob's Cutty Sark is number 5, his After Eight is number 2, his Green Prawn is number 4 and his Bullock's Bar is number 10.

Bob also did the hairwing conversions of classic featherwings in Dick Stewart and Farrow Allen's Flies for Atlantic Salmon (Northland Press, Inc., 1991).

I would not venture out onto a salmon river without two of his creations:  the Cutty Sark in the Summer, and the Golden Pheasant Spey in the autumn.

A Cutty tied by Bob:

He spent an awful lot of time with me, teaching me how to get the teal feather to behave (its the tented wing on the Cutty).  Slowly, I think I'm getting it...but I don't think I'll ever get my heads to look like his...or Charlie's or Keith's for that matter!

Then there's the Golden Pheasant Spey.  Ask my bud's Howie Gould and Paul Elson if its an effective fly.  Heh heh, I hooked fish in front of them and behind them last October on the Northwest.  Did I mention they got blanked? Sorry guys...couldn't resist - they smoked me over the next couple days, anyway.

I no longer have one of Bob's ties of the GPS; mine will have to do for the up close and personal:

It is featured, along with several other of Bob's creations, in Bob Veverka's richly done Spey Flies; How to Tie Them (Stackpole 2004):

Do these two flies work?  If one picture is worth a thousand words, here's three thousand words on the subject:

I've been profoundly fortunate to meet and learn from these three men.  Would that we could all bend feathers and fur around a hook the way they can.  I'm very proud to call them friend.