Viking Lars | Saturday, 25 December 2021
That fly - the Squirmy Wormy (I’ll refrain from referring to it as such from now on) is an immensely popular fly and it catches lots and lots of fish all over the World. As a fly tier, it offends me - along with a few others, which I’ll leave out here. Why? Because it’s ugly and because a piece of fat rubber tied to a hook is not a fly. I know - it’s puritan, it’s elitist, it’s all sorts of wrong, I know it, but I can't help it.
There was a thread on the Sexyloops Facebook page a while back, where we ended up “exchanging words” on the fly and I might have been a little direct. Then Ronan came in with a left hook as I was covering my right, so I didn’t see it coming. “Lars, what if trout were regurgitating worms, would you fish it then?” I haden’t really seen that coming, for some odd reason. I’ve caught hundreds of trout on worms when I was a kid, so I know that they’ll feed on worms.
“Ronan, in that case, I might consider reevaluating my standpoint, but does that really happen to any certain extent?” That was my left jab that I thought I him cornered. “Lars, that happens a lot here in NZ, especially when water levels are high.” Well, I’ll spare you more details and accept that one knee went to the canvas.
I happily fish worm imitations in the salt, especially in the spring, when the big ragworms hatch (there’s an FP on that here), which only makes it even more irrational. So why?
- I’ve never really seen brown trout stuffed with earth worms.
- It’s a terribly ugly fly.
- The fly offends my fly tier’s aesthetics.
- It’s a terribly ugly fly (it’s so ugly that in this case there is a 4).
Most seem to think it’s a relatively new fly and compared to a Red Tag, it certainly is. Just to prove something I’ve said in ages - there’s is nothing new in fly tying: Some time in the early 1990s, Danish fly tier and fly fisher, Steen Larsen, tied what I believe is the first SW-fly. A hook with a heavy, square rubber band on, to imitate ragworms. The paradox is that Steen Larsen is a excellent fly tier and he has written that the fly was sort of an “anti-fly” a reply to hysterics (like myself, maybe :-) that anything goes. With this - that the SW is also old, much older than most seem to think, and in fact Danish, I’ve risen from the canvas, swayed right and delivered a left uppercut that didn’t really connect, but pushed back Ronan. Let’s see what happens in the next round :-).
I hope you all had a great Christmas,
Have a great weekend!
Lars
PoD: Photo of Steen Larsen’s The Anti Worm, from a book from 1994.
PS: For some reason, I can’t find the conversation on Facebook.