Damn Brandon, great looking stuff (as usual)!

More shrimp for The Atlantic Croaker, a fish seldom caught on anything artificial and one of the better ones for the table.

The shrimp pattern also gets Speckled trout, flounder and redfish, but it’s the pickier fish like croaker, whiting and sheepshead that measure how good a searching pattern really is. If it fools those fish, it will work on the others.

I have to sort of comb and rearrange the fibers after a fish gets hold of one, but that's alright, the fly can almost always be put back into shape. It's not a pattern that fouls much. Eyes get ripped off by fish sometimes, but I can usually repair that with melting in a new one when I get back home. The rattles do eventually break if I hit the shell with them enough times and that does seem to lessen the attraction the fish have for the fly.

Live shrimp have lots of things going on underneath them with legs and other protrusions and things moving around constantly so that's what I was trying to duplicate with the shrimp, a smoother, relatively clean back and a busy front and underside. Shrimp tend to disappear in the water being somewhat translucent, but the eyes always pop and are visible from a distance. That characteristic lead me to the glass seed bead eyes that really show up in the water even if the EP fiber tends to blend in. Live Shrimp often swiftly swim backwards, with tail pulses, when fleeing a predator and this shrimp I do also can be made to swim and does swim backwards and rise up swiftly with a little sharp strip. The nature of the weighting (with the glass bead eyes counteracting the tungsten bead) causes the shrimp to rise up somewhat erratically which is also like the real deal. It settles back down after the strip in a mostly horizontal aspect, also like live shrimp. I pool test patterns to see how they move.

In my experience with these saltwater fish, the movement of the pattern counts for more than exactly resembling the static look of some critter like a crab or shrimp. Some shrimp and crabs flies out there look incredibly realistic, but do they move anything like the real deal might be the more important thing to determine. If I'm strictly sight fishing, I usually use something else like redfish crack or a Borski slider. The shrimp gets into action mainly when I see fish sign and especially if I see wild shrimp present and the water may not be particularly clear. It's a prospecting type of pattern that a lot of the local fish find appealing.

sweet looking fly...I've done a few winter steelhead flies like that....man, they fish good!

I've started incorporating bucktail into more than just my musky flies...

Here's a trouty streamer without a ton of material but when wet has the impression of that bulk. Plus, they're super easy to cast...

Dry:

Wet:


Cheers!

More of these. Fish like them, but they don’t last forever.

This came off of my vise yesterday in hopes of finding the corner of a Bull Trout's mouth tomorrow...or that of an overly ambitious 'Bow. I'm not picky.

Nicely done!

Chew toy stimulator, thinking about the October Caddis



Snowshoe hare dubbing, midge krystal flash, #12 Firehole 718 hooks

Good to know ! I hope you enjoyed it and had a good trip. (heading out early this morning, over the pass)

I think that'll catch just about anything that swims. I fish those for surf perch, salmon, steelhead...sometimes the colors change a little, but it just flat out works...kinda like the ubiquitous woolly bugger.

This is basically an articulated Buford, but with a dubbed head instead of spun bucktail (guess that means it's not a Buford....but everything else is tied the same)...

Different color combo than I normally fish. I played around with how I (un)weighted this one to make it walk the dog even more than my other iterations of it. I also tied in the majority of the bucktail in reverse to give it a little more bulk when wet....always tinkering.