Martyn White | Thursday, 5 October 2023
After the calamatous failure of the rubber candy last week, I've been wondering about the flybox I take out for seabass on the bay. Except for big bait time, I essentially just fish rubber candies & siliclones for most of the season. As nice as it is to largely remove fly choice from the equation, I wonder if I've become a bit complacent.
Those two, and an occasional semper fleye or bucktail deceiver will cover most of the year pretty well for inshore fishing around here and I pretty much average out as well as or better than the other guys I fish with, but maybe I could improve things by putting the box through a proper restructuring like I do with my carp and smallmouth boxes every year. It should be a doddle really, there are a few old patterns in there that can easily be purged and maybe I don't need a dozen each of the usual two... After that I'll add a few of the flies that were confidence patterns before I developed my penchant for silicon.
I'd still like to keep myself down to maybe a dozen different patterns with room for a few experimental things in there too.
The current plan is a selection along the lines of:
Rubber candies
Surf candies
Clousers
Bendbacks
Mylar minnows
EP peanut butters
Bucktail deceivers
Siliclones
Hollow flies
Semper fleyes
Farrar baitfish
Whistlers
Flat wings
With the exception of the really big stuff (BEASTS & Sedotti Slammers) I think this should cover pretty much everything we're likely to encounter baitwise and give me a few options from a fly choice/presentation point of view. It's obvoiusly a pretty Popovics heavy list but that's no bad thing and there will be no fat in the box. I'll have to go through some old diaries to see if I can come spot some patterns in the conditions or seasons where specific flies are likely to perform best. It'll also make me a better boat partner because I'll have more range to change things up on those nights that we're struggling and need to work out what the answer is.
I'll leave room for the odd seasonal variation or additional patterns that might fit a specific need for conditions that we don't have ideal solutions for yet like a better dredging pattern for sunk line work in daylight. Other than that there are a few patterns that I used with some success in the past but never fully got to grips with, like the slumdog that I'm keen to really work out better.
I've already started and I'm quite enjoying the process so far.