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From www.gofishaustralia.com Go Fish Australia The Pink Thing  On one of these days two of our mob turned up late. They'd been fishing another lagoon without any luck. They were hot, discouraged and....well, just angry off. One of them made a few casts without a strike; said "to the devils playground with it I'll fix the bastards" or a similar declaration of war; marched off and returned with a baitcaster. On the business end was a pearlescent white lead head jig with a long worm tail and a pink collar where the head and tail joined. He cast out, got a barra and repeated this immoral act twice more. OK, so the fish were released, but it only slightly detracted from the foulness of the deed which was compounded by him leaving early and not paying the fine! Something had to be done! That night I retrieved an identical jig from the boot of my car, and sat down at the vice. It had to be a good barra fly and my favourite at that time, the Given's Barred and Black, was the best starting point. I like the way a Deceiver tail swims so that got added in. The first couple were a bit exotic until I realised that if it was successful it had to be repeatable and easy to tie from materials available to the average tropical river rat. By about three in the morning I had a usable fly that could be tied in numbers. The original tying was this: Hook: 2/0 Seeleys No.1902 S.3040 R Stainless Thread: Coats Gossamer polyester thread, Pale Pink Tail: Six white saddle hackles, about 2 to 3 hook lengths, tied Deceiver style, ie tied 3 to a side,with their natural curves toward one another, and three strands each of Pearl Flashabou and silver from silver lame' dress material. Body: Two spun collars of white bucktail. The first one about 1 match stick thicknesses before tying and about half the length of the tail and the second slightly thicker and overlapping it. Along each side of the collars and reaching just past them to the tail were two pairs of barred rock saddle hackles which curved inward, Deceiver style. To this was added another three strands of pearl Flashabou and silver threads about the same length as the barred rock . Collar: Palmered flourescent pink rooster neck hackles up to the hook eye. Eyes: Silver bead chain. Dumbell eyes didn't exist in the early 80s. Some of the flies from that first tying session were weighted but this was done by wrapping the forward half of the hook shank with lead wire from a lead core line to within about 3mm of the eye. If I'm not feeling lazy I still do it this way. It gives the fly a milder descent angle that can fool fish which "have seen everything". It's first outing was at Shady Camp Rockbar, where the barrage is now. The barra liked it but the results were no different to those from a Given's Barred and Black. I gave Alex Julius one to try the next weekend and he had similar a experience. Alex used it at Shady a month or so later when the water had cleared a bit, and the barra climbed all over it. By that time the Daly runoff season had started and it came into its own for me at the creek mouths. It fitted neatly into my fishing system, which now became: Dirty Water - Given's Barred and Black or a Keel Bug with a slider head Stained Water - Pink Thing in either pink/white or chartreuse/white - I had previously used a heavily dressed Pearson's Bottom Bumper. Clear Water - Lefty's Deceiver, usually white with an olive or peacock herl topping and barred rock feather along the side These days I add the Clouser Deep Minnow, Gartside Gurgler and Seaducer to this kit. I think I should explain that these flies are for tidal water and runoffs. I rarely fish still water, but if I do then there will be a Dharlberg Diver or two in there. The fly still didn't have a name ,though, and the bloke who inspired its creation provided it on another outing by yelling "Hey Graham, could you give us one of those pink things to try." The name stuck. We are all creations of our own history and I guess the same applies to our own creations. It wasn't until recently when I was musing about how to improve the Pink Thing that I realised what its true roots were. I have put it in print elsewhere that the fly is a combination of a Lefty's Deceiver and a Given's Barred and Black and it fits squarely in the San Francisco Bay Striped Bass tying tradition. That's probabley a good, if simplified, starting point. What I did was ignore a good Australian variation of the Deceiver: Ron Pearson's "Bottom Bumper" and its role in the story. In 1971 Lex Sylvester, then an enthusiastic young lawyer and fanatical fly fisherman, showed me a fly he'd been using while visiting with Ron Pearson at Cape Levique in Western Australia. Ron used it for just about everything and it was spectacularly successful compared with the flies we were then using. Basically it was a Deceiver, but with a few differences: Firstly there were two wide overlapping pieces of silver flash material (Christmas decoration material or carefully cut Violet Crumble Bar wrapper were two commonly used materials) tied on each side of the fly. I've heard people say that Dan Blanton's "Whistler" got its name from the sound made by wind flowing through the bead chain eyes, and if that is so then this fly should have been called Ron Pearson's "Buzzer". You always knew where the fly was on the backcast! It had a body of silver braided gift tie wrapped around the hook shank The other feature was the collar or wing. Rather than being tied with bunches of bucktail, as in the Deceiver, it was spun then additional soft wraps were added to depress the bucktail along the hook shank. A topping of another bunch of bucktail was added to this. The topping could be any colour , but we top enders favoured blue or yellow. Do you tie your Deceivers that way? Onya mate, you're maintaining a great aussie tradition and now you know where it came from. Anyway, if you look at a Pink Think you'll see the similarity. The rest of the fly came from San Francisco Bay and the flies of Ed Givens and Dan Blanton. Although it is not a member of the Whistler group - the tail is very different and subsequently it swims differently - Dan Blanton's thoughts feature strongly. In the early 70s he went to Costa Rica chasing Snook and Tarpon, but armed with slick thin Florida clear water flies. They didn't work in the heavily brown stained water. He and his party went fishless until they used Stripe Bass flies from home. I think he invented the term "pushing water", but anyway it accurately describes what these flies do. They displace water and that makes an underwater noise. Dan wrote about it in "Double Haul" and the message wasn't lost on me. Territory rivers and billabongs are similar to those he described in Costa Rica so I bulked up my Bottom Bumpers and caught barra. The final piece in the Pink Thing geneology was contributed by Ed Givens through his "Barred and Black" fly. In 1975 Lefty Kreh's "Saltwater Fly Fishing" became available in Australia. It was a revelation. It also contained several patterns including the Given's Barred and Black. I tied a few up, but they didn't work too well in the clear waters around the Gove Penninsula, eastern Arnhemland, where I was living at the time. They had to wait for another three years and a trip to Clear Creek on the Daly to prove their worth. And how. We were drifting downstream and in the last bend before the river there was a disturbance. It didn't look much, but it was worth a cast. The fly landed on target, I stripped once and there was an explosion of water in which I glimpsed a very large back and fin. Mrs.Barra knew this place better than I did and about 100metres away she found a snag. Goodbye! The fly had realised its potential earlier, upstream where the water poured off the floodplain with 60 to 70 centimetre fish, but this was something else. I'm still waiting for a rematch incidentally. That fly became my favourite for discoloured water instantly! From what I remember from Lefty's book the tying was interesting. The fly was tied on a long shank hook wrapped with lead wire. There were a number - ten I think - of black saddle hackles tied in as a bunch, with no regard for their curvature, at the tail. Next came two collars of spun black bucktail, with black chenile between them. This added bulk. As for the Pink Thing, long barred rock saddles were next tied in reaching the tail. Finally there was a heavily palmered black hackle collar and bead chain eyes. I don't remember any silver sparkle but as you might expect that got added on mine when I was told about the lame' trick. So that's the origin of the Pink Thing. Since the first few, the design has been modified by both myself and others and in some cases is unrecognisable to my eyes. Possibly the simplest modification , beside colour, is the deletion of one of the bucktail collars. This one turns up quite often in commercial tyings. It saves on material and tying time, and yes I've done it myself when I've been in a hurry. It does decrease the underwater signature a bit, which reduces its effectiveness in dirty water, but in clearish neap tide water around the mangroves this doesn't seem to matter.  Other people have changed the fly completely when they have tied bucktail on to the rear of the hook before they've tied in the saddle hackles. It becomes a sort of Whistler, which is a good dirty or stained water fly any way. I guess this is where the mistaken idea that a Pink Thing is just another Whistler comes from. There have been other materials used. Examples are the substitution of Kinky Fiber or Near Hair for bucktail and wound zonker strip instead of palmered hackles. The first works, the second doesn't because the hair is soft and doesn't push enough water. If you want to make a Pink Thing sing use rooster neck hackles or failing that the webbiest, crudiest saddles you can get your hands on. That piece of advice also applies to the Whistler. And finally, colours. While it is called the Pink Thing, my favourite colour combination is Chartruese and White. Another good combination, at least for barramundi has a Blue Hackle collar, the front most bucktail collar in blue and everything else yellow. When I first tied this I called it "Coburn's Revenge" after a fishing friend, but that's another story. © Copyright 2005 by www.gofishaustralia.com |