Kim McCarthy: Hi! My name is Kim McCarthy. I'm a staff here at Tight Lines and it maybe the middle of winter but it's not to really start thinking about spring creek fishing. I do spend a lot of times on spring creeks and scuds that become one of my go-to flies. Nobody should go to spring creek without having a nice variety of scuds. My favorite colors are olive, tan and orange anytime the water muddies up. But what people often times don't think about when they're thinking about scuds is that, it's good to have a variety of weights on your scuds at all the times.
Now everybody knows that scuds are fished deep but the sink rate of a scud can make a big difference in how effective the scud is. If you're fishing slack water, just about any scud will get down and do a fine job but we all run into those situations where you've got a riffle that drops off into a deep pool and you need to drop the scud very quickly right at the base of that riffle to get it down into the pool in hurry.
I'm going tie to today on a standard scud hook, 2157 and we're going to be using a size 14 today. Scuds are tied pretty much in 12's, 14's and 16's and probably the 14 is my most commonly used size. This is a barbed hook, so I'm going to start by pinching down the barb. Now the scud body that we're talking about is a Hareline product and it's simply called a ribbed tungsten body. They come in three sizes and what I found is that on a size 14 hook, the extra small seems to give me the way down the size that I'm working for. Now what I've done is I've taken a cup of different colors and colors of the Arizona scud blend. I've chosen some olive and some grayish can and I've made myself a dubbing ball by blending those two different colors. Now you'll notice that this stuff has a very translucent look to it, it sparkles very nicely. Later, when we got to pick out the legs, you'll see that it does an excellent job of that as well.
So we're simply going to start the thread, bring it back about a quarter of a shank length and trim my thread. Now we've got our thread about a quarter of a shank length back. And the first thing I'm going to add in here are some appendages on the front column, antennae column appendages.
So what I've chosen here is just some squirrel tail. I like it, it's kind of multi-colored. It's got a little white, it's got a little brown, but it seems to work very well for this application. And I use several fibers, if some get where I don't want them to be. I'll just trim those off and I do have to a couple on the bottom, so I'll just get rid of those. The number is not critical whether you have three or four or six sticking out is absolutely uncritical. Okay and I have brought my thread back just about to the barbed point on the hook.
Now holding the scud firm in my left hand, I simply bring that down and place it on top of the hook. And the only important thing here is to make sure that you don't bring it so far forward that you don't have any room to tie off on the front and you don't have to be afraid to use a good number of wraps. It takes a good number to skip, to keep that body from spinning.
Now at this point, I want to stop and explain something else about why this fly can be so effective. Some people will say, why can't I do this whole thing simply by wrapping lead on the hook and then using pliers to flatten that out? Well, if you take a lot of heavy lead wire and put it on the hook and then flatten it out. Think about what's going to happen to the gap on the hook, you're going to be closing up your gap and you're going to be loosing an awful lot of hooking power. The scud formed sits completely on top of the hook. You don't close that gap at all, so you're keeping all the hook in power in the scud pattern.
I don't want to use a lot of dubbing wax. So what I do is I'll actually just put a little bit of dubbing wax on a finger and I find that gives me just enough tackiness to do what I have to do. And I also don't want my dubbing on the thread to be very thick, so I'll just begin picking out little bits of dubbing and applying onto the thread. This is probably the most tedious part of the process and you don't have to be very real precise here; if you are dubbing and you realize that you're not going to have enough, you can add a little more dubbing and as I said quantity, you just don't want it real thick or you end up with a real bulky coating over the top of the scud form. So you're trying to cover the scud form and I can already see. I'm going to come up a little bit short, so I'm just going to add a little more dubbing and then I simply look back and if there is any place a scud form or a big lot of dubbing has built up.
I can actually go back with the thread and just think out those areas and I see one area back here that I don't like. So I'm just going to go back, smooth that out, come back on to the head. At this point, my dubbing is completed and I'm ready to whip finish. We have no shellback to pull it over, we have no ribbing to pull it over. We're actually ready to whip finish this fly with seven or eight turns on the whip finish here and that fly is now anchored.
And what you're now do is come in with a very sharp pointed bodkin and then just work either front to back or back to front, really it doesn't make any difference. Work into your dubbing and just start picking the legs out of the scud, you're done and I'm going to pause for a moment, so if the camera can pick that up, that's about the right number of legs out the bottom of the scud.
Now there is one thing that is normally done on scuds that we haven't talked a lot of about other than to say that we didn't have it and that's the shellback. And rather than trying to put a shellback on here and pull it over and tie it down, we've got a new product that we're going to show you today. This is a product from Wet A Hook , it's any epoxy type finish, a special ultra-violet light that can actually comes out of the dental industry and it's set up to cure this particular product. And I squirt just a very small amount of the resin on to a piece of plastic. And then with my bodkin, all I'm going to do is take small amounts of the resin and starting at the back of the scud, I'm just going to put a very light coating of this resin along the back edge of the scud. And at this point, I make sure that I wipe off my bodkin very well because once this cures, it's not going anywhere.
Then, all we do in this light actually does come with an electrical connection, so you're not burning up batteries all the time. Flip it on and at that point what I'll usually do, is just tap my finger and make sure that it has cured. You feel that right away, if it has not, still little bit tacky so I just come back in for a few more of seconds, and it is now fully cured.
Now in reality, it's probably taking me 10 or 15 minutes to explain this step by step. Once a person ties a couple of these, you can probably sit down and tie one of these in four or five minutes max and that is it. That scud will go straight down when it comes tumbling out of riffle into a pool. It may not be the prettiest thing in the world but it's quick, it's heavy and it does catch fish.
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