Florida Ties….the Clouser Minnow
Today is rainy and windy in the Sunshine State, and because I’ve been tying up a few flies for a possible outing tomorrow (weather permitting) I thought I’d share some pics of how I’ve evolved my tying of this well-known fly created by Bob Clouser.
This fly is basically the go-to fly for many saltwater fly fishermen. It’s simple to tie, it rides hook up because of the lead dumbell eyes being tied on the top of the hook shank and it catches fish of all species under virtually all conditions…..ranging from crashing surf to placid flats a foot deep. It is tied in a wide variety of colours, and hook sizes can range from 6 to 2/0. Mine shown below are all #4’s.
Traditionally it is tied with two colours of bucktail, with the lighter colour (usually white) on the bottom as the fly rides when retreived. A bunch of flashabou or some type of sparkle flash material is sandwiched in between. I’ve started to use a black or dark green flash there because many baitfish seem to have a dark lateral stripe.
I won’t detail the pattern because it can easily be found many places on the web.
Fishing the Clouser is simple, cast it out, and retreive in jerky strips so it bobs up and down like a jig. I often let it sit for a few seconds in between strips, and then give it a big strip. That makes it really move up/down in the water column, just like real baitfish. Down here strikes are usually sudden and hard, and line is often immediately on it’s way into the backing.
I’m now tying my Clousers very sparsely compared to when I started a year ago. That’s because I’ve been amazed at how much action I’ve had on flies that were very chewed up after a number of toothy critters have had at them. At times we’ve caught fish when there was only a couple of strands of dressing left. I’ve also taken to tying on three different colours of bucktail instead of two, and adding a second and different layer of flash on top of the bucktail. Seems to work very well too.
We all use stainless hooks here because of the salt. One minor hassle is that they have to be sharpened before you use them, as they don’t come very sharp out of the box.
This is one of my newer colours, with the Fl Blue combined with white and black. I just put it on for the first time the other day as I wasn’t getting much, and had strikes on 3 of my first four casts ! Who says fish don’t respond to colour !
This is just a variation, using Chartreuse with the Black and White.
This one is a standard down here, ugly as it looks. It catches trout like crazy.
This Yellow and Red one also is great for trout, particularly in the cooler winter months
This is a new combo I haven’t tried yet. We’ll see how it does tomorrow.
