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Bass Flies

There will be days when the bass will hit everything and nothing. The key is experimentation. Keep changing patterns and probing different levels of the water column and you will connect. Remember conditions can change drastically in short order, throughout the day. Check here for information on basic fly tying techniques and tips.

Smallmouth Fly Selection

Every smallmouth fisherman should consider these Flies in their fly box. You can easily get by with one fly box full of a variety of Flies. Your choices can be straight forward. In any given situation you should have Flies from the following categories:

• Surface poppers
• Surface to subsurface sliders or divers
• Hackle-bodied streamers
• Sleek-bodied streamers
• Nymphs
• Weighted deep "jig" Flies

Tying Specific Smallmouth Flies

Selected Seasonal Patterns

Surface Poppers: Without a doubt, these are everyone's favorites! Nothing beats the visual excitement of a fish exploding on the surface. At other times poppers will quietly disappear in a small dimple. Either way the visible aspect of fishing the poppers makes it the top tactic when fish are "lookin' up". There are largely three classes of poppers. Deer hair poppers are famous for their lifelike action and feel when taken by the fish.

Hard bodies, in two face contours (flat and cupped), are a mainstay for a number of reasons. Hard bodied poppers are generally balsa wood, plastic and more recently, Styrofoam. Hard styro-like synthetics are getting great reviews and are a bit softer and lighter than wood. If you look around your home or work, you'll see a lot of potential styro materials you can use sitting in the garbage. This material is used in packing and other applications and comes in a wide array of colors. Grab some and play with it, you'll like it.

The Good, The Bad, The Ugly
The key to hard bodies is to make sure the hook extends well beyond the rear of the body like the fly on the left. If you shop for poppers and note they appear to be tied on a short shaft hook, look elsewhere. This is a bad design sold all over the place. Pay careful attention to this. The popper on the lower right here is a typical culprit. You will repeatedly miss fish on these short shanked hooks. Also beware of poppers with excessive hackle splayed behind the butt of the body. Such designs are difficult to throw and, in conjunction with heavy bulky tails, make the rear of the fly ride up. This makes it more difficult for the fish to grab it. Don't be afraid to throw in a long pencil-type popper, just in case. These do imitate injured baitfish and are dynamite in saltwater as well.
Hard Bodied Poppers
Flat faced hard bodied - Some believe the flat faced popper is the best all around choice in the way it displaces water with light action and floats forever.
Cupped faced hard bodied - This is the fly you'll see in every bait shop and discount store in the North America. Some feel they push too much water. But the work very well and, with rubber legs sticking out the sides, are simply too much for bass to refuse.
Bullet Head - The Bullet-Head is another versatile popper to carry that is the happy medium between a flat faced and a slider. They can be moved very subtly making little water disturbance or shucked hard to create a ruckus! Learn to tie...

Hair poppers - These take special time and effort to learn to tie. You can buy some awesome patterns online. Hair poppers can imitate prey perfectly such as the popular mouse and frog patterns. Other patterns push water and imitate other surface dwelling creatures. They work and imitate smallmouth food very well. The negative on hair poppers: they waterlog relatively quickly and require drying or changing. Anyone with a good way to fish a hair popper hard for more than ten minutes, without it sinking, let me know. Yes, one can treat the finished hair popper with laquer spray and other waterproofing agents. The Flies then become quite hard and lose the natural action for which they are favored. If I must make a hair popper that stiff, I prefer to simply go to hard-bodied bugs.

Soft or Hard Poly or Foam Poppers - Closed cell hard foam poppers are taking the fly fishing world by storm. Softer and lighter than wood or hard plastic, these are easier to cast, move water, and catch big fish. They are also easy to tie, once you get them cut to shape. Check here for tying information.


Sliders or Divers: These also come as deer-hair Flies and hard bodied cork or synthetic. The common trait is either style's slanted face dives under water a couple inches upon stripping of the fly. This causes a very alluring disturbance and resultant bubble line which imparts life to the offering. The Dahlberg diver is the most famous hair bug slider and a number of excellent hard bodies are available from a variety of sources. 

Nymphs: When the going gets tough or when a fish has rolled and refused your surface bait, that's the time for nymphing. Typical trout tactics work well with any kind of dead drift technique you are comfortable with. The easiest is nymphing under a float. Simply tie on the fly and add weight if necessary. Use a float big enough to stay afloat and set it at least the same depth as the deepest part of the run and usually deeper if possible. Work the run as a matrix starting close and working out a couple feet at a time. Start at the top of the run and step your way down continually working in to out. Learn to tie...

Streamers: Probably the most effective all around fly - period - for bass and northern and a lot of other fish is the streamer. Streamers are great as they allow one to work a lot of water relatively quickly. They will trigger fish since they can easily imitate an injured minnow or other prey item. Streamers come in a wide variety of shapes and colors and we name some of the most notorious below on the hit list. Learn to tie...

Weighted Flies: One of the deadliest Flies ever created is the Clouser Minnow from the legendary smallmouth expert Bob Clouser of Pennsylvania. The big advantage is the weighted dumbbell eye pattern that can be changed in size allowing for different depths to be probed. Also these Flies can be used with a floating fly line, if quick changing is in order. It is not uncommon for Clousers to be fished ten to fifteen feet down off a sinking tip fly line. This is a standard lake fishing approach when deep water is the norm. Nearly everyone has a couple of these in their box. They are difficult to cast and fall into the "jig" category according to some fly fisherman. Nonetheless, they are extremely important when deep water fly fishing conditions present themselves. Learn the Clouser...

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Ssshhhh! Don’t tell anybody, but if I have to fish quite deep with sinking line, I'll sometimes lay down the fly rod and pick up my handy spinning outfit with a jig and twister tail. This is mainly true if I am in the stern or operating the watercraft. I believe life is too short to spend ten minutes pulling fly line out of the depths only to false cast and get hit in head by a ball of feathered lead. I know this won’t go over well with the purists, but if your operating a boat, heavy sinking line is impractical unless anchored.
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