Guilty Pleasure Flies

What comes to your mind when you imagine a “guilty pleasure” fly? Are you picturing a squirmy worm, a glo-bug, a mop fly? Maybe a perdigon, frenchie, or articulated streamer. Most of us own flies that reek of shame, as if using them might erode our vision or make our palms furry.

This isn’t a question of legality. Fish a multi-hooked streamer on single-point water, or peg a bead where it’s banned, and you’re breaking the law. There should be no pleasure in that, just guilt.

It’s also not necessarily a question of effectiveness, that certain flies make catching fish too easy. I’d argue that a well-presented pheasant tail will equal most of the bugs listed above most of the time on most trout streams.  

Flyfishing culture loves hierarchies. We rank rods, rivers, books, films, hatches, fishing styles, and, of course, flies. Wrap a hook one way and it’s noble; dress that same hook in different materials and it becomes morally compromised. Let’s look at some of the flies we love to hate.  

Eggs

Spawn patterns are held in contempt by the greatest percentage of fly anglers. This makes sense. Eggs are reasonably associated with spawning fish, which hints at dubious practice. Yanking spawners off redds is bad behavior, but that has nothing to do with the fly. Drift the aforementioned pheasant tail over spawning fish, and they’ll eat it almost as readily as a glo bug.

No, the problem is that we associate egg imitations with redd raiding. In any deep run below a stretch of active spawning gravel, you’ll likely find non-spawning fish chowing down on passing eggs. You could rack up fish on a glo-bug without touching a single spawner, and plenty of anglers would call it dirty. If, however, you fish that same water, at the same time, and experience that same success with a different fly pattern, most anglers would consider that acceptable.  

This is guilt by association. There’s nothing inherently worse about glo bugs, pink soft-hackles, slush jellies, nuke eggs, or crystal meth (the fly, not the amphetamine) than any other subsurface fly. If and where you fish during spawning times matters a whole lot more than what you have on. Regardless of how the hook is dressed, pulling a fish off of a redd causes the same potentially negative impacts to reproduction. That’s not the fly’s fault. 

Worms

Dirt snakes make anglers squirm just slightly less than eggs. The worm fly taboo has nothing to do with spawning fish and everything to do with our insistence on superiority. Fly anglers define ourselves as not bait fishermen. Just look at the cover of The Drake Magazine. 

Our snobbery predates contemporary flyfishing culture. If we have a canonical text, it’s A River Runs Through It. “The Movie” and the novella on which it’s based, have defined our sport as a meditative, contemplative, literary, and extremely self-important. For example, “In our family there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.” We've all read or heard that line so many times we've stopped paying attention, but take a second now and really think about it. Religion, the core ideologies on which people define themselves and for which they kill and die, is a far cry from fly fishing. Let's not conflate Joan Wulff with Joan of Arc.

Now consider how Norman Maclean depicted worm fishing. “‘Izaak Walton,’ [my father] told us when my brother was thirteen or fourteen, ‘is not a respectable writer. He was an Episcopalian and a bait fisherman.’”  

Later, Paul tells his brother, “When [bait fishermen] come back home they don’t even kiss their mothers on the front porch before they’re in the back garden with a red Hills Bros. coffee can digging for angleworms.” 

Then there’s Neal, Norman’s brother-in-law—the drunk, bumbling mama’s boy who shows up late, can’t fish, and passes out naked streamside. Neal, of course, arrives carrying bait rod and a Hills Bros. coffee can full of worms, just as Paul predicted he would. That scene sums up fly anglers’ aversion to worm flies. We see ourselves as better than conventional fishermen, especially bait fishermen. They’re Neal: vulgar, weak, lazy, lesser. We’re the Maclean brothers. But we're not talking about worms, we're talking about worm flies! All flies imitate some kind of bait.

Worms are a natural food source for trout, just like insects, crayfish, or baitfish. “But wait,” you might argue, “those other prey species are aquatic, worms come from land!” That’s true, but so do grasshoppers, ants, beetles, and mice, and I don’t see anybody hiding those flies when they show off their boxes.  

Mop Flies

The mop fly was invented in the late 1990s by a fella named Jim Estes. Estes saw a green microfiber mop head and thought, “I could tie a pretty cool fly with that.” Estes initially used mop flies to imitate Sourwood worms (a common summer food source in certain parts of the country) but he found them to be both adaptable and effective. What does a pink, red, or chartreuse mop fly imitate? I don’t know, but they catch the hell out of trout sometimes.

Right from the beginning, people threw shade at mops. When Estes first submitted the pattern, Umpqua turned him down. Its results, however, could not be denied. Anglers around the world started using mop flies with great success. The mop fly helped Lance Egan win the US Fly Fishing Championship in 2016. Eventually, Umpqua bought the pattern. But look it up online and you’ll see hate for this bug pouring out of anglers’ souls, through their fingers, and into their keyboards. 

Why? It’s not a spawn pattern, and though it can imitate a small worm, they also work as crane flies, stoneflies, cased caddis, October caddis, and other large insects. How are they different from Walt’s worms, woolly worms, or green weenies? 

I think the answer stems from the mop fly’s blue-collar simplicity. Mop flies were conceived in a North Carolina Dollar Store by repurposing cheap cleaning products. It doesn’t get more blue-collar than that. For all the progress flyfishing culture has made away from British noble elitism, our collars still skew bleached and starchy. We think that what we do is harder than other fishing, and therefore more elevated, so we’re skeptical of anything too “easy.” And, despite their effectiveness, mop flies are dead simple to tie.  

Tying-ease connects all the flies we’ve listed so far. Egg patterns, worms, and mop flies are all simple to make. Maybe that’s the defining feature of guilty pleasure flies—they’re easy to tie but still catch lots of fish . . . 

Actually, no, that doesn’t hold up either. 

Modern Streamers

Contemporary streamers are probably the most complicated and difficult patterns being tied today. A single fly might take a skilled tyer more than a half hour to construct. And yet, these streamers also get shoved into the guilty pleasure category.

Perhaps ironically, purists embrace traditional streamers and wet flies (which are relatively simple to tie) but look askance at the big, heavy, articulated patterns popular today. “If you’re going to use a weighted, six-inch monstrosity,” the argument goes, “why not just cast a spinning rod?” What they’re really saying is that modern streamer fishing lacks the elegance and delicacy Reverend McClean drilled into his sons. 

Streamer fishing requires a different set of skills. You don’t need stack mends or S-curves. You’re not working for a perfect drift with reach and pile casts. Most of the time you’re chucking it out and stripping it back. Streamer fishing demands precision and skill, but it doesn’t fit the aesthetic: long, slow loops unrolling into fine leaders and soft landings.

Perdigons, Bombs, and Frenchies

That preference for traditional casting leads us into the final category of bugs you might hide under your mattress. All of these flies should pass the purity tests we’ve established so far. They imitate aquatic insects, require some skill to tie, and can be fished with classic techniques like dry droppers and light indicators. 

All these flies were developed for European style, tight line nymphing. Euro nymphing makes chucking articulated streamers on sink tips look downright traditional. No fly line, no mending, no long loops or casts; it’s flyfishing broken down into its most utilitarian pieces to achieve precision presentations and perfect drifts in moving water. 

Each of the above patterns is a model of efficiency, designed to maximize sink rate, durability, and hook up percentage. All of them work on a conventional fly setup—perdigons and Frenchies make exceptional droppers under dry flies—but they’re associated with Euro nymphing. Because some anglers do not consider that “real” flyfishing, the flies carry a whiff of shame. 

Flies Are Inanimate Objects

So where does that leave us? Why is a fish caught on a glo-bug, squirmy worm, mop fly, zoo cougar, or perdigon considered a lesser achievement than an identical fish caught on an Adams or hare’s ear?  

The dominant fly culture associates each of the flies discussed above with “lesser” angling behavior. Adopting norms, attitudes, and assumptions is part of joining any group, and there’s nothing wrong with that. All subcultures define themselves as much by who they aren’t as who they are. But let's be honest; we're just using the flies as signifiers. Hating the "right" flies lets you feel superior to the "wrong" kind of anglers.