Behind The Vise

It's been a few months since I have been behind the vise. Today was new pattern day for me. I tied up a few different patterns with high hopes of hooking into a few big carp down at the LA River. The LA River is a pretty interesting place to fly fish, you have one of the busiest freeways, the 5 frwy, running parallel to the river. The place is just a short drive from my house, about ten minutes on a good day.



The cool thing is you have these huge carp that call this river home. I get broken off often on this river, the carp can get pretty big, and pull like a mini freight train.

Earlier today I was thinking I had not fly fished for carp in quite some time, I thought I should tie up some new patterns to try out. Nothing to special in terms of carp patterns, I tied a variant of an Egan Headstand, a new worm cluster pattern, and a bunny strip pattern. I took a few photos, 'cause we all love to see what the patterns look like, well I do anyhow.


Here is the variant of the Headstand, I have never used this pattern but there are many local fly folk who swear by them.


This here is what I called the Foxy Brown, she's so sexy looking isn't she... It's just brown rust colored bunny strips, sort of mimics the small crayfish.





These last two are worm clusters, as I was browsing online, I happened to come up on a blog with a guy with a similar pattern, and on the end of the hook was this nice fat carp with the fly in it's mouth.

Hopefully these pattern will work out for me on my next trip to the LA River.

Cheers!
The SoCal Fly Fisher


Edit: Let me give credit where credit is due, the worm cluster was inspired by the Worm Ball aka Great White Hope. I have Barry from the prairieoceanflyfisher.blogspot to thank for the nice up close photo of the fly. I would also like to say thanks to Gregg who reminded me of the name of the blog.