How to Use Wooly Buggers

Video Transcript

"Hi! I’m Jim Dowd with Zoar Outdoor for Expert Village to talk with you about fly casting and fly fishing. In this segment, we are going to be tying what is arguably one of the best general purpose fresh water flies there is. It is known as the wooly bugger. To tie the wooly bugger, you will need hooks. I like to use bead heads, you’ll need some Marabou with I have prepackaged, and you’ll also need chicken feathers, which look a little bit like this. What we’ll do in addition to the chicken feathers you’ll need what is called Estaz, some form of body material, and a little bit of Sparkle Flash. This happens to be Midge Flash for the tail. So now we will get on to the tying of the fly. Remember I showed you earlier that I had a magnet; well my scissors have been magnetized which greatly aids in picking up hooks. So the next step in the fly tying process I like to do is to crush the barb on the hook. This makes it safer. I just slip the hook into the jaws of the vice and gently close it, very gently. Just enough so that you can see the barb is flat. By the way you will notice that this is pretty easy to see. I’ve got a piece of white mat board, and because I’m a fly tier and I’m always concerned about the size of the my prey, I’ve marked different dimensions on one edge of this so I can match up my fly. So on the wooly bugger the first thing I do is I get some weight. This is a bead head made out of tungsten, and what this will do is slip onto the hook by threading the hook onto the bead head and slipping it around to the front. What this will do on the finished fly is provide weight on the front which will make it undulate. I fix the hook onto the vice. To adjust the vice so that it will grip the hook firmly, cam it down and now I am ready to attach the thread. This part is tricky when you first begin, because what you want to do is wrap the thread around the shaft of the hook 5 o r 6 times back over itself. Notice that I am holding the end of the thread and wrapping back down the hook. After 5 or 6 turns, you can release the thread and the binding itself should hold. When you are tying, make it a practice to hold your scissors in your fingers at all times. Just make that a practice right from the outset. "