The wild trout’s wish list

Drive trout wild with NEIL PATTERSON’s unique Funnelspinner

The Funnelspinner
In which we consider artificials with less hook – or even better, no hook at all that the trout can see.

The story
July is the month I like to lie in bed watching anglers drive down the track, past my house, to the river.

On my beat of the River Kennet, July is the first month you’re allowed to throw your dries to the wind and dig deep into your nymph tin, so anglers drive a lot faster.

In the evening, I enjoy it even more. Sitting in the garden with a glass of wine, I watch them storm back up again. Their wives were expecting them three hours ago. They have a long drive home. When the last car is gone, I take my rod off the rack and head for the river. The best is yet to come.

The sun is low, the air cool. All around me is an explosion in the Entomological Department of the Natural History Museum. I need a machete to cut my way through. But I don’t need nymphs to enjoy this time of the day - even though, wild or otherwise, the trout can drive you wild. Especially when spinner wings cover the river like a sheet of cooking foil and the rumbling of trout stomachs keep the neighbours awake.

The field is filled with male spinners bouncing up and down on a springy trampoline of warm summer evening air. But this doesn’t mean I’ll find spinners on the water. Not unless I see females zig-zagging through the males forming a rave house of mixed-sex spinners. Then I know females will be coming back to the river, where I’ll be waiting. Surely a time anglers on homeward-bound motorways everywhere wished they were enjoying. Well worth divorce. If, that is, you have a pattern designed to overcome the biggest challenge of any spinner evening. Otherwise, at home with the wife is a less frustrating option.

The Funnelspinner is a fly designed to answer the first question you need ask yourself if there’s a fall of spinner and your pattern falls short of your expectations. When it is unceremoniously refused and the game is up.

Too big? The wrong shape? The wrong colour? Why worry if, in the first place, your spinner is lying belly-down on the surface with a great hook hanging under the water, alerting fish that something fishy’s going on?

Think of the Funnelspinner as a sort of base camp. It is designed to eliminate the problem of whether or not your slip of a hook is showing. Only when you know this is not the case can you start looking for faults in the pattern. But a ‘pattern’ is what the Funnelspinner is not. It’s a design. A method of tying a spinner: any spinner. Any pattern, or colour you like. And when you tie it, you put to right all manner of design faults that afflict the traditional dry-fly tying method. Two of which I am going to mention here. Both important in the tying of flawless, jaw-snapping spinner artificials.
Firstly, in his window, a trout sees a highly distinctive thorax. This is clearly visible from an underwater vantage – and notably absent on the traditional spinners. When tying the Funnelspinner, the first thing you do is to add that thorax behind the eye – and one behind the wing where it won’t be missed.

Now, that hook. Because the finished hackle protrudes in front of the Funnelspinner making it longer in profile than if you were to tie it by the conventional method, if I want to tie a #14 fly, I tie it on a #16. A #16, I tie on a #18, and so on. This is a bonus, because the hook is smaller in proportion to the fly size. And with less iron, Funnelspinners float like balsa wood.

So less weight – and less hook – for the trout to see. But why show trout the hook at all?

To tie the whole caboodle upside-down, hook out of the water and out of view, you need only do two things. At the whip-finish at the tail, tie the tail in a little way round the bend. And while still in the vice, clip the top off the hackle. This will be the underside of the fly when you chuck it on a saucer of water and it flips upside down, making the same imprint on the surface as a spinner’s outspread wings.
To conclude: remember, to imitate all manner of spinner types to great success, the Funnelspinner isn’t a pattern. It’s a design that can be copied.

To prove it, I’ll copy you on the correspondence I get from wild trout fly-fishermen who aren’t half so wild any more.

Read the crucial stage in the tying process in the July 2008 issue of Fly Fishing & Fly Tying magazine.