BONUS: The Science of Streamers (Pt I): Kirk Klingensmith on Jigging and Wrecking Flies

Hey folks, it's Marvin Cash, the host of The Butcher Shop where the Meat Meets the Water. On this episode, I'm joined by Kirk Klingensmith.Kirk is a lifelong angler and retired engineer who brings a scientific perspective to the vice in the water. Kirk helps us understand why our favorite streamers do what they do and how we can use that knowledge at the vise and on the water.In part one of this interview, we tackle jig flies and wrecking or kicking flies and saved swim flies for next time.I think you're really going to enjoy this one, but before we get to the interview, just a couple of housekeeping items to make sure you don't miss a single episode of the Butcher Shop. Be sure to subscribe in the podcast app of your choice.We're only distributing episodes on The Articulate Fly for a limited time and if you like the podcast, please tell a friend and subscribe and leave us a rating review in the podcast app of your choice. In the age of AI, it's more important than ever and it really helps us out. And finally, a shout out to our sponsor. TroutRoutes.For many of us, it's hard to find fishable trout water during the dog days of summer. Don't let the trout and TroutRoutes fool you. This time of year, I use trout routes to fish my favorite bass and panfish ponds.Find your favorite pond or lake in the app and drop pens and take notes like you usually do. Recent updates in the app have added high res satellite imagery, making TroutRoutes more useful than ever. Check it out today.Use code artfly20 artfly20 all one word for 20% off of your TroutRoutes Pro membership at maps.troutroutes.com now on to our interview. Well, Kirk, welcome to The Butcher Shop.

It's good to be here. Thanks for having me.

Absolutely. I'm looking forward to it. And we have a tradition on The Articulate Fly. We like to ask all of our guests to share their earliest fishing memory.

You know, I can almost not remember what I didn't fish. I fished with my grandfather, I fished with my father.They all took times take me out fishing and honestly it's from as early as I could remember with you know, a worm in a pole and all that stuff. And, and my, my grandfather was my best friend and my dad was like right there as well and they always had time to go fishing with me.

That's fantastic. So when did you come to the dark side of fly fishing?

Well, that's an interesting story. So I was really into fishing And I was, I was very much into scouting. I was a Cub Scout and I got the Boys Life magazine.And in 1969, I was 10 years old, there was an article, it was a photo shoot about how to tie a fan wing royal Coachman. I still have the article. And so I didn't have all that fancy tools. And you know, it was 1969.There was not a whole lot of people that fly fished and not a lot of information. So I used my dad's machinist vise, I used my mom's sewing thread, and my dad had some pheasant feathers from hunting.And I tied my rendition of a fan wing royal Coachman, which I still have. And I, I show at all my fly tying classes because it doesn't look anything like that.But one of the advantages of not having anybody around to mentor me was nobody could tell me that fly wouldn't catch fish. So I went out and I caught loads of fish with that fly. And it was, it was quite some time that went by that I realized these flies were pretty ugly.But I was catching fish. And so I entered through fly tying, through scouts, and I was largely self taught then all through my teenage years.

Yeah. And you know, there's been a fair amount of water under the bridge since then.And you live, I guess, you know, up in kind of upstate, kind of Finger Lakes region in New York. And so that probably influences what you like to chase now, right?

Yeah. Yeah. So I, I grew up in western Pennsylvania and I grew up as a trout fly fisher and, and all the things that you do in western Pennsylvania.But these days I really like to fish for smallmouth. Takes the majority of my time. I have a drift boat. I fish the Chemung river, which is a, is a feeder stream to the Susquehanna.And I've, I've, I've traveled all around for smallmouth. But I, you know, of course I love trout fishing. I love the tributary fishing, saltwater fishing. I, I love all aspects of fly fishing.

Yeah, very, very neat. And so, you know, you have a really interesting professional background.You're retired now, but, you know, we always, you know, bring our life off the water, onto the water. So I'm kind of curious, you know, you're an engineer by training. You know, how does that affect the way you approach your fishing and your tying?

It's, it's just embedded in who I am, my background in engineering, I, I see the physics. I, I'm looking for connections between the science and, and how things work constantly. That's what motivates me.And my career at Corning was all about innovation. I was really blessed to be able to work in some tremendous innovations in glass melting, in glass forming, optical fiber making.It was really an amazing career as an engineer, it was a dream career.But I'm completely enthralled about innovation and I love to learn new things so that we can, and show how those new things can be helpful in our, in, in our world. And, and so I bring that kind of approach to problem solving to what I do in fly fishing.So I have a real ear on the rail to what's going on as far as innovations in our sport, especially with the young voices in our sport. They're really. There's a lot of exciting innovation. That's what connected me to Blaine Chocolate.And I think the last part I'd want to point out is that in Corning, the technical work that I was doing, often the world didn't know how to do. Sometimes we had to develop the physics to do what we wanted to do. And there, the largest team that I led had 55 people working on it.And so to solve these kind of problems, it was a collaborative problem solving process that worked well. And I was really blessed to be able to coordinate between research centers in Russia, in France, in Asia, and we really solved amazing problems.So I love that whole aspect of problem solving, to share perspectives, listen to others, with the belief that as a community, we can learn and get better together.

Yeah, very neat. So were you always a tinkerer and that. So basically then, your.Your engineering life was just basically an extension of kind of who you were as a young man and a kid?

Yeah, you're probably right about that. You know, my, My dad would any. Anything that wasn't working right, I was allowed free rein to take it apart, see if I could make it work.And most of the time I didn't. Most of the time I was. I was kind of understanding how it worked, but, you know, it was broke in some way. So, yeah, I was always a tinkerer.Yeah, I'm guilty.

Yeah, it's funny you say that.So I can remember one time, gosh, I was probably in elementary school, maybe early middle school, and I got a Radio Shack computer kit for a birthday present and I put together it, put it together that evening and my parents were so disappointed. They thought they had gotten a project to keep me busy for weeks.But, you know, it's interesting you'd mentioned Blane and, you know, people, you know, obviously a lot of our listeners know about the book, the Game changer. But what they probably don't know is that you wrote a chapter for it.And I was really kind of curious, you know, how you met Blane and kind of how it came to be that you wrote a chapter on, like, fly physics for his book.

So I'm a fly fishing show junkie. I've been going to fly fishing shows for 25, 30 years. And I first met Blaine back when he was doing the Gummy Minnow. And.And we connected then and started talking. I got all the stuff to make the Gummy Minnow. He sent me all the patterns. I still have those, what he sent me.And for years we would meet at the Fly Tying show in Somerset. We would get together and I was so excited to see him, he was excited to see me, and he would just abandon his booth and we'd head out.There's a pond in front of the hotel there, and we would be casting his latest prototypes. And he's talking about what he's thinking, and I would talk about the physics and how what he was doing would. Would.Was working and then how to make it work better. And it was just fun. We were just two guys talking about phishing problems. And it turns out my daughter went to Roanoke College for her undergrad.She's now a dentist. And while she was there, had occasion to fish with Blane. And then there was.There was a day when we couldn't fish, the weather was bad, and we were in a. A Mexican restaurant sitting there having lunch and drinking a few beers. And finally Blane says to me, he says, he says, can I trust you? And.And I said, sure. He pulls out the Game Changer. And this is like five years before the book. And we. We kept the conversation going about how. How the flight worked and.And there was several other prototypes that he was showing me that he was experimenting. And you know, Blane is. Is a genius innovator, and it was so fun to kind of help him with the background behind it.So it was another time at the Somerset show, at the Fly tying show, that Blane and I are talking. We're the physics thing.And he was in the midst of writing the Game Changer book, and Jay Nichols was there, and Jay's like, listening to our conversation, and Jay said, hey, would you write a chapter for the book? So I said, I would. I was just in the process of. Of. Of. Of retiring. So I said, get a little free time. I'll do it.And Bob Popovics was right there and it was really funny. So as soon as I said yes, he grabs me by the ear. And we go over to his boots and he starts showing me videos of. Of.Of these flies that he had prototyped. And he's asking me, why does this move different than this?And we must have spent an hour or two together and there was a line of people who wanted to talk to him and he completely, like, ignored them. He wanted to. To kind of tell me everything he knew and get me on the right start for, for this, this chapter.Well, the, the chapter ended up to be about 15 pages long. And, and honestly, I think calling it the physics of fly motion was probably the, the death wish there.And I don't remember if I put any equations in there, but if I did, that was probably the nail in the coffin. So, of course, when the book came out, there's.There's a couple page summary that's edited out to seem like a conversation between Blaine and me on some of the basics of the fly motion. And so that part made it in the book, but I guess this talk is going to kind of let me fill in the rest of it.

Yeah. And so, you know, I thought it would be interesting, folks, that, you know, we've got Kirk, a tremendous resource.And so I just wanted to, you know, tonight what we wanted to do is to kind of take, you know, a handful of basic streamer styles and kind of talk about the science behind why they do what they do and how we can play with that so that we can make better decisions, you know, at the vice and on the water. And so I thought, you know, we're going to walk through jig flies flies that kick swim flies.But I thought we'd start tonight with like a jig fly and you know, talk about like, say something like the clouds or minnow. You know, what's the bite trigger that people have, you know, kind of they like to use a jig fly for?I mean, what is it that it does that it makes fish want to eat it?

So I think that's a great place to start. And, and, and, and jig fly, it drops when it's paused so that it dives downward at the pause. And often that can be a lethal visual trigger for fish.And so I think it's important to think about the action of a streamer in, in two ways. One is, is how does it move when it's retrieved and then how does it move when it. When it's paused?And, and another aspect of this is what does the, the fly? What. What does it look like when it's both retrieved and paused and, and so jigging in general means it drops when I pause it.Okay, but what I mean by the, the attitude of the fly or the, the, the, the motion of the fly. If we think about a crayfish fly, for example, when that fly drops, it drops with the tail first and the claws up. Right.And, and so that is a very important trigger for smallmouth, of course. But if we were thinking about a Clouser minnow, if the, if the fly would just do a nose dive every time you stopped it, that wouldn't be natural.It wouldn't even be a trigger that fish would look for.So in getting into the discussion about jigging streamers, which is a pretty big topic, there's a lot of different things we can do to engineer how the streamer acts when it's retrieved, how it acts when it's paused, and then how it appears to the fish.

And so if we kind of start at a very basic level, let's just take a clause of minnow, because I think everyone kind of has that in their mind's eye, you know, what is it that we're actually doing at the vise to achieve that jigging action?

So the Clouser Minnow, first of all, where the weight is like super important to how it, it's going to dip in on the pods. So Bob likes to have his lead eye about a third of the way down the hook shank, it's not right at the eye, it's a third of the way down.And so that weight placement can be really, really important to how the fly is going to move and how it's going to move when it stops. Okay. The other thing that's really, really helpful to understand with the Clouser minnow is it's made with bucktail.It's got some flash in the middle, but the bucktail is a stiffer material. And so when that fly stops, it's not going to nose dive on us. The whole stiff material is going to tend to, to have it levitate a little less.Okay, so you're going to dip, not dive. Contrast that with, let's say a Kreelex. Okay, so we've got a Kreelex. It's really flimsy flash material.And when you stop that Kreelex, it's going to go straight down, or more or less straight down with the flash, kind of like a parachute, a flimsy parachute, if you will, as it dives. So this, these are kind of different ways we can engineer these jigging flies.Now, of course, if, if, if the desire is to get it sunk quickly, the Kreelex with the limp material is going to go. It sink a lot faster than the, the, the deep minnow with the bucktail.

Yeah. And so if you. Because it's almost like, you know, conventional anglers with skirts Right. On jig flies. Right. So they get kind of a nice drop.

Right? Yeah.

Kind of float gently, kind of like a feather, but also too, I guess, you know, so we've got, you know, kind of, I guess, drag in the material, so you know that all of that Kreinik flash collapses. Right. So it's much less drag, much smoother than bucktail.But I would also imagine too, that one of the reasons Bob likes the weight on the Clouser where it is, is because the more you move it away from the hook eye, the flatter the drop is. Right. Compared to it, basically nose dipping. So if you wanted a fly to jig and nose dip, you would want to put that weight closer to the hook eye.

Right? Right, right, right, right. And, and nowadays we have a lot of innovative jig flies that are coming out and they use different kinds of jig hooks.Some use a 90 degree jig hook, some use a 60 degree, some use a 15. And, and so all those affect the balance point of the weight at.Which affects how the fly transitions, if you will, between the retrieve motion and the, the motion without retrieve, the pause.

And so if I think about that, if you had a 90 degree jig hook, I would imagine it would drop more severely than say a 60 degree jig hook.

Right, right. You're pulling it more in a straight line, if you will. Yes. So you're gonna get a more of an abrupt change in motion between the two. Yes, absolutely.

Because it's really almost like on the 60 degree, it's almost like the weight is like almost tipping something over and then it starts to fall. Right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And what's you. You started talking about it. It's really important to understand that the, the drag of the fly itself.So if we have a thin, narrow fly like the Clouser Deep Minnow, or let's say we have an Estaz body that's big and bushy, that is going to tend to mitigate this, this, this jigging action. So that fly is going to present with less motion. Yes. But that, that could be really helpful in certain fishing situations. Yes.

Yeah. Interesting. And so, you know, I think maybe for jigging flies it's not as important. Kind of.Not that terminal tackle is not important, but I think maybe there's. There are Less levers to pull kind of with the line leader in the rigging. But you know, tell me if you agree or disagree with that.You know, I think you would probably time on with a loop knot.You know, it's not a swim fly necessarily because so you don't, you're not looking to create slack on the, on the, on the pause or anything like that. But you know, what can we kind of play with on the rigging side on a jig fly to kind of alter the action?

Well, there, there's an awful lot of innovation that's going on in jigging flies at the moment. So let's just start with something I learned in Alaska.And in that case, the silver salmon, chum salmon react to the straight drop pink fly, right, the jig fly, but they like to see it drop. So I was in Alaska the last several years and in that case they advised us to use a leader that was made of tippet the whole length. Okay.So in our case we're using a floating line, a nine foot leader, but it's all tippet. So you have less impedance to that fly and what you get is a stronger pull.So when the fly drops, you get a stronger pull and so it tends to make more of a scissor action to that fly. So that's an example how we can engineer the leader system to affect the jigging action of the fly.Perhaps the more obvious way this occurs is we have loads of people who are doing euro nymphing with jig streamers. Right. And, and this has become a pretty big innovation in our sport. People are using even ned rig jig streamers that really go down.Okay, so what are they doing? They're using a long tippet right on Europe. So they're playing the same game. What does that do?That allows the fly to sink very rapidly, so you get the maximum benefit to the weight. But it also gives me a more profound jigging motion. Yes.And so we can, and in fact, we're approaching what the gear guys are doing with their net flies and jig flies that way. Now, I do understand that the whole Euro thing is maybe not everybody's cup of tea, but I'm just coming at it from a physics point of view.And if we're trying to get the maximum drop, the maximum movement on the pause, then these are some tools that fly fishers can use. So that makes sense.

Yeah, it does. And I mean, and the other thing too is, and this is the same sort of thing you see with the euro nymphing Guys.Is by being able to be very efficient with the impact of the weight that you use, you can actually fish lighter, more lifelike flies. So you get all these ancillary benefits.So, you know, you might get current movement off material and things like that, and you're able to get down and actually have a fly that looks like something a fish wants to eat. Right.

That's a really important point. Yes. Is like a lot of things in fly fishing, we're kind of optimizing it for the lightest weight possible.And these techniques that the euro folks have taught us, by using the thinnest tippet possible, that can help us on normal jig flies. Okay. No matter what kind of rod you have is throttle down the tippet, and you're going to amplify the jigging motion.You'll be able to get deeper, let's say, with a floating line with a long leader. And now you can reach some depths where maybe you couldn't reach before. But. But taking your. Your realizing that.That your tippet, your leader, is a tool in your box to help you is what I'm hoping people can take away from that.

Yeah, absolutely. And then, you know, there's kind of a corollary that builds off of that.And, you know, we've talked in many of our previous conversations about how on the engineering side, there's been an absolute explosion in fly lines. Right.And one of the things that I've seen, and particularly talking to people that have streamer patterns that had been around for a while, you start to see almost a blurring between jig flies and swim flies, because you now have the ability to take so much weight out of the fly that, you know. So, for example, you know, I think of, like a circus peanut, originally tied was a pretty heavy fly that had a pretty pronounced jigging action.

Right, right.

But, you know, talking to Russ now with the various lines that he can fish from sa, he can literally start to back the weight and literally run a progression to where he's fishing. Bead chain and plastic eyes on a circus peanut. So it's.It's a much less of a jig jig fly fly, and it's able to be targeted kind of at particular depths and behaviors. And I thought that was kind of an interesting thing. And so I know you and I have talked about it because you've got a protege who does that.Not at SA, but at Rio. You know, how. How should we think about that as an angler to basically start to look at the.The fly line system and being able to adjust kind of the fly parameters.

I'm really glad for this question, and I think I'll just start here. As fly fishers, we tend to see our methods as the sporting way to catch fish.And sometimes we project that we would be catching more fish if we just used gear. We just let ourselves do that, and we can kind of get into this bucket that would say, well, this is more challenging, so we're giving up fish. Fish.And. And by fishing with the flies and we. We sometimes imply that our sport is really complicating. And.And I really think this impression is not very helpful to others and. And often to ourselves because we. We often miss that. Fly fishing has tremendous advantages.And just take for an example, you're in a midge hatch on the west branch, and there's fish rising everywhere, and you've got a fly rod versus you got a Rapala. It sucks to be the guy that has the rapala. So where am I leading with all this? Is in fly fishing, we have tremendous advantage with fly lines.The gear guys are limited by the weight of the lure and its action. But we. With. With the fly, we can now bring the fly lines into the equation. And so now we have choices. So we.Yes, everybody uses a floating line, but we've got intermediate lines and we've got sinking lines. If you were to come on my drift boat, we're going to have six rods and. And two of those rods are going to be sinking lines.So that gives us options to present the fly. So if we want to retrieve the fly and keep it close to the surface, now we got a floating line.If we want to be mid column and we want to come in, let's say it's a jigging fly, we want to present that fly on a retrieve and then drop. We can present it really well mid current, and the. The gear guys can't touch that. Right.And so it's a really tremendous advantage that we have with fly fishing to be able to manipulate the fly line to favor the action of the fly on the retrieve on the pause. So, you know, Russ's example. Perfect right now. That doesn't really give you the news you can use about.Okay, smart boy, tell me when I need a sinking line. That. That's a little more complicated, but not so much is. Is that the sinking line really gives us an opportunity. When the fish are low, they're.They're pressured. It's. It's low and clear. We need to be where the fish are. They're. They're hunkered on the bottom. Okay. So the. The.The sinking lines now become our friend. Yes.

Yeah. And the interesting thing, too, is, you know, now with the, like, triple density lines and things like that, we're able to, not.We're able to fish, if we want to, on plane, a little bit more because we have a much more general drop in some of the newer sinking lines as opposed to having that, you know, absolute hinge, which, if you wanted that kind of up, down action. Right. Great.But if you wanted to say, I need to be down at 6 or 8ft and I want to stay on plane as long as possible, we now have sinking lines that will let us do that.

Yes. So last summer, I had a chance to fish with Chris Korketa. He's a guide. He's a striped bass guide on the Cape. Right.And so he's fishing these saltwater flats, and he's fishing with a weighted crab fly and a weighted fly line. It was tremendously innovative. And when you did the retrieve, he wanted the fly, the rod tip on the bottom.And his thought was that you keep the fly line out of the visual plane of the fish. And. And that his thought was that the lateral line is a lot less likely to pick that up. Okay. Now, I'm. I'm not saying. I'm just.I'm enthralled with the innovation. I caught a really nice striped bass with him, so I have data.But it's one more way we can use the tools in the box in this case in a very pressured fishery. Yes. And all our fisheries are getting more pressured, and these tools then become more and more helpful.

Yeah, it's interesting. And I mean, you and I have talked about this before.You know, if you really open the aperture, you know, what we're really saying is if you kind of step back and say, you know, what do we want the food to do? We now have more levers to pull to do that. Right.Because we've got the fly lever, we've got the leader terminal tackle lever, and now we have this really powerful fly line lever. And so if you think about, like, well, what does the food look like? And then you can also solve some of these kind of ancillary issues.Like, you know, the striped bass, you know, don't know. You know, they don't see.They may feel the line, and all they feel is something is different and wrong, and that's why they don't eat, and that's why they go away. And so you have these ways to kind of mitigate some of those other Issues as well.

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

All super cool stuff. If we kind of shift gears to, you know, kind of the wrecking, kicking style fly, and we'll kind of stay in the family of Blane Chocklett.So we'll talk about the T bone, right? Which I think is probably one of his early kind of wrecking style flies. It was really influential with the muskie guys.You know, if we kind of do the same process we did for the jig flies, you know, what is the bite trigger that's so attractive in that wrecking behavior?

So this wrecking behavior is. You were describing a fly that kicks when it pauses or it turns sideways when it pauses. Often we put flash in a fly so that it.Not only is it a visual motion, but it often throws flash. True for jigging flies as well, by the way.So that bite trigger, that kicking sideways can be really an important trigger for predatory fish, especially muskies. But smallmouths react to it. Brown trout react to it. This kick on the paws, okay?So in this case, we're imparting action to the fly and then we're stopping it. And what's occurring is when. When the fly is going to kick, because the tail of the fly has more momentum than the front. So it runs into the head.It's. It's the jackknife trailer truck that, you know, the front stops and the back hits it.Okay, so let me just point out that this kick we think of as a visual trigger. Yes.And we describe it often as a visual trigger, but I'm not so convinced that all the time it's solely a visual trigger because the fly is also sending a pressure wave out that the fish can feel vibrations and noise that the fish can detect and all those. It's really hard to know. Nobody's interviewed a muskie, how, which are. Which are important. But in fact, it does all that. We get it all for free.So from a physics point of view, it really becomes helpful to think about what's going on here. So the momentum change, the moment is what is causing the wreck.So by momentum, when we pull the fly, the fly, that aspect of the fly, let's say it's the head, has a certain weight, right? And I think everybody knows that the momentum of the fly is 1/2 MV squared. So the faster it's going, that's the most important thing.But when we think about, we're driving down with our Mini Cooper and there's a trailer truck coming the other way, we know that the trailer truck has more mass, more Momentum. If there's a wreck, they win. Right. Now, it's important to understand in this analogy that the effective momentum has to subtract the effect of drag.So when we pull it, that the parachute, if you will, is taking away from the momentum in that mass. And we're manipulating both these things in our fly designs. Yes. So, example is we want the. The head to stall, and we want the tail to kick it. Right.So sometimes we want to put some weight in the fly, some lead eyes, for example, on a dungeon to get it down a little bit. It probably changes the action somewhat. And so it's. It's going to have a. The.The momentum of all that mass in there, but it's also going to have the drag of the head. So often with. With the wrecking fly, it's helpful to have something with a lot of. Of. Of a drag on the. On the front. Yes.And then the tail, we engineer that momentum. So we. We want typically a little more weight, gives us the speed, that momentum, and less drag.So often we'll put a mop in the back that'll really amplify the kick. Okay. But, you know, and when. When we do this, we need to be mindful. If you put a lead weight in the back, yeah. It's going to have a lot of momentum.But when that thing stops, you know, this tail is going to drop first, and that's not very fishy. So this whole position of the fly when it's paused and when it's swimming becomes something that we need to not lose track of.

Yeah. It's almost like a saloon door opening. You want it to open kind of parallel.You don't want it to, like, have the tail drop and swing under the head on the stall.

Right, right.

Yeah. Yeah.And so if we kind of talk about this, like, if you take the T bone, for example, so what we talk about is we have like a big head, and you can do a lot of different ways. You can do it with material, you can do it with scoops. Right.I think one of the things we've talked about is, like, on a reverse tied fly, you get kind of this benefit because you get compression, and then you get almost like someone opening an umbrella, because when you pause the fly, it takes the. Takes the drag off of the bucktail, and the bucktail opens up and kind of accentuates the stall. Right?

Exactly. Yeah. So it was really important that the reverse tied flies. A lot of times use that to the advantage that the front springs forward on the stall.It puts the Brakes on. Right. And then the back end hits it. Yeah. Often the back end is tapered. It's less drag. Boom. It gets it. So that's an advance.That's an example of how we can use like a bucktail, a springy material that when we retrieve it, it closes down. I like the analogy. Umbrella opens up. Boom. Okay. And it's a really clever way that we as fly fishers can make a lure that you can cast a hundred feet.Yes. But it's still really light.Uh, you had Mark Sedotti on a little while ago, and he talks about casting a, a fly that's over 2ft long with a 5 weight line is like, well, that's a pretty innovative design. And you know, our lure friends, our, our gear friends, you know, try delivering a lure that's two feet long. How are you going to do that?

Yeah, they probably would have to use a potato cannon or something.

Yeah, something like that.

So if we kind of come back to the skeleton, and so we know that we want a big head that creates a lot of drag when you get the pause. And so how can you tweak the action of a wrecking fly? Either by adjusting the density, so restricting flow through the head.Or talk about like the, the smoothness, kind of almost like the difference between like the, the Clauser minnow example versus the Kreelex minnow. You know, how if you play around with like density and size of the head, how can you kind of tweak the wreck, for lack of a better word.

So there was. There's a couple points you made.First of all, you talked about a skeleton, and I really liked that term, is we've witnessed the innovation of articulated flies to make bigger flies. We use multiple hooks, wire in between. And now we have the plane's tremendous innovation of using shanks. Okay.And Bob Popovic's used mono to make extended body. So there's different ways to make this skeleton that have emerged in the last few decades, which is really, kind of is really amazing.But so, so just to say the obvious, the hinging effects of the. These skeletons then become really helpful in amplifying the motion. So it's a good time to be a fly fisher.Now to answer your second question is that we have a lot of design choices in how we engineer those materials. And ahead, we see a lot of different styles of head. We have the deer hair packed deer hair, head of the dungeon. This is an example.And so you've wedged together a composite of material that's rather stiff. It doesn't Change its shape when it's retrieved. It's static, and water can't flow through it. So let's contrast that. We have wool heads.There's flies there. Wool heads. We have synthetic fibers. They're real popular these days.And so all those materials, the wool and the synthetics, they mat together, and they may compress a little bit, more or less. So why would we want to leverage one or the other? If we think about what does that fly do when it's at rest, when. How does it present itself? Is.Is if. If we want to fly that suspends. Yeah. Then we don't. We want to stay away from the wool. We want to stay away from. From materials that. That will sink.Yeah. And so the synthetics get it. Get a nod. Yes. And in. And the bucktail, of course. And now. And we have flies that feature foam faces.

Right.

There's different. The swinging D, for example. But there's a number of flies that have popper heads that. And they all can. They have this wrecking behavior.Some of them have a little bit more swim behavior than others. But these are different ways. As fly tires, we can engineer the. The drag in the front.And one of the ways it does is we're changing the momentum of the front. Yes. But we're also changing how that fly looks when it's stalled. Okay.And that is really, really an important aspect of fishing the fly is how does it look when it's. When it stopped?

Got it. And I guess one more question before we kind of move to the rigging stuff. You know, you know, I think of, like, a T bone.That's a style fly that has a relatively long front shank. Right.And so, you know, you and I have talked, you know, offline before about, like, small rail cars and big rail cars, but can we talk a little bit about how playing with the size of the front shank and the shank hook configuration, kind of how that affects the wrecking action of the fly.

Yeah. Yeah, let's talk a little bit about that. And. And. And we. We will probably like the. The. The jerk changer is an example of.Of a fly that has a long front end designed that way to amplify the kicking motion. Why. Why does that work? Well, we need to think about the drag of that front end if we want to stall that quick.The two design levers that we have is the length and the diameter. Right. And in the drag equations, the length is an important term. So the longer it is, the more drag. Now that the bigger it is, the More drag.And in fact, in the equations, they don't scale linearly, but the diameter is more important.So in a fly design like this, one of the reasons to increase the length of that first section is to increase its drag so that it stops when we stop the retrieve. The second is that the back is what's going to kick around. So we want that to be able to move freely.So by keeping the front inch long and the back hinging easy, we can amplify the train wreck.

Yeah. And then it's also interesting too, because, you know, you can, you can kind of walk a jerk changer.

Right.

Which you. Obviously the. The T bone's a different fly, but there's a kind of a variation of like, you know, do you want it to crumple once and sit and hover?Are you walking it back and forth?

Right.

Getting that kind of jerk bait action?

Yes, yes, yes.

Yeah.

And so we have the emergence also of very innovative styles that, that walk the dog, that simulate some of the effects that our gear brothers have had. The way that these slides generally work is that they're naturally unbalanced. And so, for example, the spiral spook is naturally unbalanced.So every time we apply a retrieve in wants to, it's hard to know which way it's going to go because it's unstable. Okay. In fact, in reality, to an engineer, it's impossible to hand tie a fly with all the materials and have it perfectly symmetrical.There's no way you could convince an engineer that that's going to be perfect. Perfectly symmetrical. And all the spring forces on the front of the head are symmetrical. So as.As flying tires, we, we have this natural asymmetry that, that's playing on our fly designs that I believe is really important to how the jerk changer walks the dog.

Yeah. And so on. On the wrecking style flies. You know, just like we talked about some things you can do with jigging flies.And we'll talk about swim flies here in a minute.You know, what are things that you can do kind of on the line leader, terminal tackle, front to, you know, magnify or adjust the way the fly swims and wrecks.

So of course, the loop not really, really important. What we don't want to. We want that fly to be able to hinge and move. So there's loads of really, really good loop knots.And if, if you're a fly fisher and you, you're not using a loop knot, this is, this is a time to reconsider One of the things we haven't talked a lot about yet is how. How important the retrieve action is on the fly motion. I've had a chance to. To fish with with Blaine, and, And one of the fortunate parts of.Of fishing with Blane is, is we got in a situation where the fishing got really stingy, and he was really eager to get me hooked up on fish, and I wasn't doing it well. I. I can row a drift boat, and so I jumped on the oars. He gets up on the front, and for maybe 45 minutes, I watched him fish.And frankly, that was worth everything. It was worth writing this article because the way he cast and the way he retrieved and moved these flies, I still think is not well described in. In.In our literature. The retrieve and casting is so super important. I had an opportunity to fish with Bob Clouser.He came up, our club sponsored him for a day, like, 15 years ago, and I offered to take him out fishing. So I literally guided Bob Clouser for a day and a half. I was three feet away from Bob Clouser for a day and a half.And what I can tell you is the way he retrieves is like magic. Same with Blake. Magic. The retrieve is so super important to how these flies behave. And I think we. We as fly fishers, we get enamored with the fly.But in watching these fly fishermen, I think we. We should get enamored with the retrieve. So in. In the.In the same way that, that that we talked about for jigging flies, the fly lines give us levers so that if we want to fish a kicking fly low, we can have it presented horizontally with a sinking line, sink tip, for example. So these are not to be forgotten with kicking fly.Although I have to admit, is when you're fishing a kicking fly, it's a lot easier to get the action if you can see it. I have an advantage. Being in a drift boat is a lot of times when I'm retrieving, I can see the fly, and when it's super fun is I can see the fish.

Yeah, I always say, you know, there's nothing more fun than smallmouth fishing and watching a white game changer disappear. And it just, you know, the water's dark and then the, you know, and you see the fly, and then the water's dark and there's no fly.But, you know, it's interesting, too, because I. I guess I have kind of two thoughts, you know, one, because I know, for example, like with chase, with the spiral spook. I know Tommy is this way, too.And back to what you talked about on jig flies is that having slack and so maybe making more of a trade off for a lighter tippet material or something that's more supple, you know, helps the action of these flies.Because I can remember, you know, when I interviewed Chase about the spiral spook, he was like, he was telling me that the, you know, originally the lot, the terminal tackle tippet material he was using was too stiff and it was literally pulling the action out of the fly.

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank. Thanks for the reminder. And so I think that at the secondary level, these things become really, really important.A lot of streamer specialists, they favor a fast action rod so they can their tip manipulations transfer more directly to the fly. Do I think that's important? Yeah, damn it. It really is important. It. And so, so you're, you're right. The, the, the leader is an important.That whole business of how the retrieve throw slack in the fly defines how that fly is going to kick. Absolutely. So those, those are, those are important.I think it's, if, if there's anything we're, we're trying to assure folks understand is the fly is part of a system.

Yeah. And I think the other thing too, you know, because it's a little bit cryptic, like, it is amazing to watch Blaine fish.I've never fished with Bob, but I've, like, I've talked to Shumaker a lot and we'll talk, you know, what Bob does to manipulate the fly, that's just a little bit different.But I think the main thing, you know, if you, you know, people understand the focus for muskie fishing, but it's kind of true that way, you know, for a lot of streamer fishing. And I think that focusing on the retrieve and you sit back and say, well, what do we want the food to do?And you know, Blaine will always say, you have always have to believe that your fly is going to get eaten because you won't fish it well if you don't. Right. So it's just a mindset that's kind of like the final wrapper on the system.You got the fly, the line, the leader, terminal tackle, loop knot, fast action rod. But that mindset is critically important to being effective.

Yeah, yeah. And so different of the people in your podcast have pointed out that it really is important to do irregular retrieve. Yes.And that was really, really clear from fishing with Bob. Is, is he.He cast a fly out there, he'd pop it, pop it, and then he would notice something and then he would, he would just Bump it, bump it, bump it. And then he's hooked up. And it. It was. He was definitely reacting to what he saw. And. And I think it. It's important.These are important lessons if, you know, fish learn, right? So they. They learn and they see this lure is, Is. Is presented this way. Okay, that's not food. I had a bad day when I. I hit that. But.But this one is really irregular. It's really wacky. And that behavior is what attracts fish to our fly.I do a talk on triggering, and one of the questions I asked at the beginning, why does the fish butterfly in their mouth? And all the kids answer to eat it, right? Well, in fact, there's loads of reasons that fish put our fly in their mouth.And one of the reasons is, you know, fish don't have hands, so if they want to see what the heck that is, they put it in their mouth. Fish have instincts, so if they see another fish struggling, there's actually an instinct to eliminate it.Or if it's in their territory struggling, they're gonna grab it and get it the heck away from them. These are really important instincts. And it doesn't have anything to do with eating it. It doesn't look like a food.It looks like it's in their face, right? So I think it's important to understand those all can be important triggers. It doesn't just have to look like a fish.And as a matter of fact, sometimes it's really helpful if it doesn't, we don't want it to look like a great swimming minnow. What we want, we have a guy in our club as Joe Cambridge. He. He preaches. He said, your fly is to win an Oscar on vulnerability, right? I'm helpless.I'm hurt. I'm stunned. I'm vulnerable. I can't get away. All those are signals that trigger these instincts to strike.

Well, folks, we hope you enjoyed the interview as much as we enjoyed bringing it to you. Stay tuned for part two. And don't forget to check out the links to all this episode's sponsors in the show. Notes. Fish hard folks.