Martyn White | Thursday, 30 October 2025
Crabs are great. I love crabs, they’re everywhere in some shape or size, they’re delicious and full of protein which means, despite the difficulty they are worth the trouble for a fish to tackle.
There are loads of crab patterns nowadays, from merkin types to flexos, even the old epoxy jobs, but a favourite of mine is the Velcro crab. It’s fairly realistic and when tied properly it behaves like a crab, it’s also relatively tough so will get you through several of most species before it needs replacing. It always lands right way up and will track true when stripped at a crab appropriate speed- they’re not baitfish so as with all crabs flies the retrieve needs to be slower than more pully flies. It might even be dead static. As a plus they’re made from materials that are readily available even if you don’t have handy access to a fly shop, and are very easy to make in a range of sizes and weights. The only weakness of this fly is that there is a possibility of a fish crushing it and masking the hook point in the Velcro carapace, but this is vanishingly rare in my experience. In fact, it’s only happened to me once in many years of fishing and hundreds of fish on the Velcro crab, unfortunately that fish was a permit, so there is that. You need to decide on how you fancy the odds for yourself.
Here's the material list
Hook: Standard SW of your choice. You don’t want too long a shank
Thread:140 or 210 denier, I generally use flat waxed nylon but it’s not important what you use as long as it’s not slippery GSP.
Weight: a few options here, from bead chain or dumbbells to lead or tungsten putty I suggest picking one and sticking with it for consistency.
Carapace: the soft side of velcro- get this from an army surplus they’ve got all the colours you need by the yard. You want fuzzy rather than loops. You could buy crab coins, but crabs aren’t usually circles and they’re pretty limiting in the sizes you can tie without cutting them anyway.
Eyes: If you want them- burnt nylon/epoxy eyes.
Legs/claws: rubber or suede chenille depending on size. I’m increasingly going to chenille for everything but the very smallest of crabs.
Mouthparts: Totally optional but a wee bit of crystal flash and/or feather fibre or even rabbit fur can set things off and add a little subtle movement at rest.
Adhesive: 5 min epoxy on the whole belly of the crab to hold everything together- use epoxy not UV resin as you need an actual adhesive.
Some people don’t think they’re proper flies or that making them is really fly tying, but I don’t have time for that luddite nonsense, you could just as easily draw another other imaginary line and say we shouldn’t be using graphite rods or some other form of arbitrary nonsense.