Sea Run Cutties

[ConeHeadMuddler]

Fishboy, better make out your last will and testimony. Here's a shot of the one that I saw splash and fooled last thursday:
I have Les Johnson's original book on cutthroat fishing, as well as his latest one. The newer one is outstanding, and I highly recommend it! Has lots of great patterns.

"Fly Fishing Coastal Cutthroat Trout (Flies, Techniques, and Conservation)" by Les Johnson.


I'm not sure of the title, but Pat Trotter has written an outstanding book about cutthroat trout, too. Ok dug it up "Cutthroat: Native Trout of the West." This book also has received good reviews.

[Fishboy]

Must .. fish ... cutts ....

[Fishboy]

Picked up some Tiemco 200R no. 6 and 8 hooks today, and some flashy shrimp-colored chenille. Reversed spiders on the way, baby  ...

[ConeHeadMuddler]

I like those hooks. Those have a straight eye on them and a sproat bend, no?
I also use any 3x long streamer hooks I have lying around, and sometimes even 2x long nymph hooks.  
Whichever hooks I use, I make sure that the body of the fly doesn't extend back any further than just above the point of the hook.  

Lately a white Reversed Spider has been working well for me:
Thread:  hot orange flat waxed nylon (hot orange any kind you have)
Hackle: Natural Mallard Flank
Body: White New Age Chenille
Tail: some red hackle fibers under some natural Mallard Flank fibers
Adding 4 turns of silver tinsel ribbing over the body is optional. I sometimes do this.

I like hot orange bodies with lemon yellow dyed Mallard Flank, and some red in the tail, too.

I use rust-orange dyed Mallard Flank with some body colors.

You can use expensive stuff like Amhearst Pheasant tippets for the hackle and tail, especially with a black body, or Golden Pheasant tippets with other colors. Their fibers don't cling together (mallard flank fibers seem to want to zip together, but I just separate them when they look clumped).  Those are expensive materials, though.

i'm going to try some more variations and color combos. Fun to keep experimenting.

Golden Pheasant tippets seem to work pretty well in tails. You can hardly go wrong using this material for the tails of some of your cutthroat patterns. Wets, streamers, reversed spiders.  I use those for the tail on my Montana Bucktail dry, which has proven to be an effective pattern for surface feeding cutts.  One of my best days of dry action was on a size 12. The cutts were bustin' caddis on the surface. Anything similar would have worked that day.

Last week, I still saw large schools of anchovies swirling around in the upper estuary. I managed to snag one. It was not quite 3" long. I checked it against the saltwater flies in my box. I found a perfect match! It was a "Shock 'n Awe" tube fly, a pattern developed by Anil Srivastava of Puget Sound Fly Co.
But I didn't tie it on, since I'm lazy, and it was the only one I had (store-bought), and I wanted to use it for an example to tie some up. Besides, I had misplaced my tube-fly hooks, and the fly I was already using (#6 trolling streamer based on White Knudsen Spider) seemed to be doing all right, and I didn't want to mess with my lucky juju I had going. (Same fly in the pic above).