One (different) Woolly Bugger to catch them all
Scott Hood's "The Fly The Catches Everything" is not your average woolly streamer
The Woolly Bugger streamer is to the world of fly-fishing as the Mann’s Jelly Worm is to traditional bass fishing.
Both are common go-to confidence baits, American as apple pie, and have a million knock-offs that are the same but not the same, thus offering millions of different anglers of different stripes to hit the water with confidence and brag about “their” baits wherever anglers go to chug beers and shed tears.
A worm and a woolly are baits that can catch any fish anywhere.
So, for an every-so-often so-so angler like me, my staples are a grape worm on a spinning rod and an olive woolly on a fly rod. But in recent years I’ve become a disciple of a certain version of the woolly that surprised me enough times that I began expecting it to perform. It is my new confidence fly. I am unabashedly addicted to Scott Hood’s TFTCE (nicknamed “Tift-see” and an acronym for The Fly That Catches Everything).
Word is that Rainy’s Premium Flies folks have some Tift-sees to experiment with. If their testers have experiences like mine, who knows, maybe they’ll pick it up as a commercial offering.
A little history
Special things happened in the worlds of bass fishing and fly fishing in 1967.
Alabama bass pro and bait inventor Tom Mann introduced us to the Jelly Worm that year and it’s still the No. 1 selling plastic bait of all time. Earlier versions of a “plastic worm” hit the market in the 1950s but Mann’s Jelly is the trendsetter that endures.
Versions of a woolly worm streamer have been around since before Walton learned the alphabet. Talking fly design origins, and even what is a fly or isn’t, is somewhat hazardous—save those patterns that have famous angler’s names attached to them. Fly fishers rise en masse to debates about flies like trout on a mayfly hatch.
But I like the story of a Pennsylvania fly-tier by the name of Russell Blessing, who is widely credited with putting the “Bugger” behind the woolly—more technically, his 7-year-old daughter at the time.
According to a Fly Rod and Reel magazine interview with Blessing’s son by author Kirk Werner, Blessing added a black marabou tail and hackle to an olive woolly in an attempt to resemble a hellgrammite (a dobsonfly nymph) to target smallmouth bass—in 1967.
The story goes that fly-fishing author Barry Beck met Blessing on the Little Lehigh River that year and Beck, who wasn’t having any luck, approached Blessing about what he was using to catch trout. Blessing gave him one of his flies and it worked, they later became friends, Beck wrote about the fly in 1984, and the rest is history.
Fly Rod and Reel disappeared in 2017 but angler Skip Clement at FlyLife Magazine.com shared a copy of the item last year.
In his introduction to the piece, Clement describes the Woolly Bugger well.
“How many fish species have you caught on a Woolly Bugger? Well, we can list everything from carp to tarpon here. Sure, there are many variations of ties as in colors, sizes, material and hook choices. One thing is for sure – a WB catches fish.”
True enough.
A fly-tying experiment
Scott Hood, who has held every available local or national Trout Unlimited position over the past two decades (except club secretary), has a newer title as “Tift-see guy.”
A side note: I like the “Tift-see” nickname or just calling it The Fly That Catches Everything unless the acronym is standing alone. Writing, or saying, “the TFTCE fly” has an annoying redundancy right up there with “ATM machine.”
My pet peeves about acronyms aside, it is legit to ask why the Tift-see isn’t simply another tier’s olive Woolly Bugger?
I’d argue that if you look for it anywhere on the commercial market you’re not going to find a version just like it, and the combo is not the typical woolly most would pull off their home vise.
A classic Tift-see has an olive-flash chenille body, grizzly hackle, olive marabou and crystal-flash tail, copper wire wrap, and a tungsten bead head in front of a collar that is chartreuse, red or black. From hook size #1 to #12, those basics are all there.
Any given Woolly Bugger might contain any one or more of those items, but this formula is specific.
As a guy with a lot of different woollies in his fly boxes, because he is generally crappy at catching fish and needs all the crutches he can find, I can attest to the fact that this particular streamer just happens to give me some kind of advantage that others don’t.
Hood said he was just experimenting when he came up with the pattern. He had some grizzly hackle (a white and gray chicken neck feather) and tested it on a weighted woolly.
“I’d never seen that gray grizzly hackle before and most of our shad are white or gray so I just tied it over the top of what would be a green woolly with some extras,” he said.
And it just worked.
“I took four or five the first time and I was just catching fish on every cast,” he said. “The day that I caught eight different species on one fly was when I went, ‘Wow! This thing really works.’”
Why does it work?
My not-so-scientific but field-tested opinion is that the Tift-see’s two main advantages for the not-so-skilled angler (meaning a great advantage for someone who actually knows what they’re doing) are the quick-sinking tungsten head and its nebulous appearance.
Presentation is everything in fly-fishing and a fly that gives us a quick trip down to the rocks makes it easier to achieve a productive drift and requires less thought when fishing the calm waters. Just toss it and strip it in!
Woolly Buggers can mimic lots of stuff; crayfish, minnows, sculpins, leeches, hellgrammites, and many other natural foods fish love. What the Tift-see mimics are whatever fish want it to be at any given time.
The pulsing action of that grizzly hackle against the dark green body, with a little flash but not too much flash, in my opinion, gives the advantage of looking “fishy” without being so flashy that it’s not “buggy.”
The guy who ties it uses it and catches lots of fish on it almost every weekend, so there is that evidence. I don’t think the same could be said if he was just out there tossing a plain old olive woolly every week.
Hood makes it clear he uses plenty of other flies, but that Tift-see is always there to test the waters when other flies fall short.
He is so confident in the versatility of the fly that for the Trout Unlimited 15X15 species challenge this year he said he is going to use Tift-see flies only to catch 15 different species. I have no doubt he’ll finish the challenge.
After all, that fly will catch everything.