IF YOU ONLY HAD ONE FLY FOR SALTWATER!!!

 When we first got into fly fishing, everyone had a view on which fly was the best, and the way to tie it.  So probably, like a lot of people, we got every conceivable type of material to tie all these fancy flies, and some were fancy, and very colourful.  However with a bit of experience and advice from blokes like Dave Bowring, Wayne Hinton and Graeme Williams, our flies came down to the basics AND we seemed to catch more fish.  Dave wrote a bit of a story before one of the old competitions and said that if  you had one fly in the box, it should be a clouser, because 90 percent or more fish were caught on clousers (or variation of the same).   Dave tied a clouser like a crazy charlie, with only the top wing, but we have continued to tie with both the bottom and top wing as demonstrated in the video below by the inventor of the fly, Bob Clouser.

We tie very simple clousers now, usually with both natural and synthetic material.   The Boss likes the long limerick hooks in her flies, with either the eyes well down the hook so you have a longer nose, or the eyes near the eye of the hook.  Both work. (see below...same hook, eyes just placed differently for the whims of the fisher..don't think the fish care!)

We tie ours with a bottom wing of bucktail, then turn it over and put in some 'special' aluminium flash with a thin tail of DNA (or similar) then tie on the top wing. The reason for these materials is simple....because the fish chew the bucktail off, and not so much the synthetic, your fly keeps working for quite a while even with most the bucktail chewed off (sometimes seems to work better).  The synthetics can tail wrap too, so the bucktail keeps them from doing that a bit, and the bucktail is usually a lot more buoyant than synthetics.

Here are the simple ingredients for the fly, you can miss the synthetic if you wish, we like the light coloured centre (another whim) but the aluminum flash is the secret, not sure what you call it, but it is about $5 a square metre at spotlight and you just pull the stands out.

I have this theory that it makes a signal in the saltwater...probably crazy (we won't go into that) but as I have said before, long long ago when I did physics at Monaro High, we made electricity by putting aluminium foil into saltwater and created a type of electrolysis or something like that.  

Pull the flash out of the material on the left and add to the bucktail and synthetic. The top fly here is on an C70SD mustad hook and has mono weed guards, blue and white, the smaller barra seem to love it.

Dave with a Tea Leaf Trevally

What fish does the clouser catch???  In his 1994 book The Professionals’ Favorite Flies, Lefty Kreh wrote about the Clouser Deep Minnow: “I believe that this pattern is the most important and effective underwater fly developed in the past 20 years. During the past three years I have been able to catch 63 species of fish in fresh and saltwaters around the world with this pattern!”

Here are some of them from up here...

Cathies' first metery on fly 1.03m on a Cameron Briscoe clouser

We all love the idea of catching a big fish, and the clouser seems to catch big and small...imagine your first metery on fly, and it was on a clouser, back in 2004, and tied by a teenage Cameron Briscoe for Cathie to try down on the Robinson River.  First cast...first metery.   Here are some other beauties too....

 Duggie with a 155 spaniard caught on an anemic clouser with no wire only a week ago off Turtle Island.

 July/August can see the big baitballs  around, so have a clouser ready to run through them.


Here are a few more fish on clousers, the photo in the centre top was a 92 queenie that was hooked in the dorsal fin.

As you can see the good old clouser can hook anything....this video below is a bit long, but it is actually Bob Clouser, the inventor, tying the fly so I have included it, rather than some of the shorter ones..