Micro Tubes for Atlantic Salmon & Steelhead
While waiting in Murmansk’s forlorn terminal for my flight to Moscow, a German fly fisherman and I were chatting about Kola salmon and the flies we’d cast for them. I really didn’t know my way around the subject, and my Wheatley box reflected that, dozens of clips that held an eclectic mix of flies for Scotland’s salmon and for West Coast steelhead. I’d tied Ally’s Shrimp lookalikes, the bright wings of matching golden pheasant tippets giving my box a salmon look. Our group’s fishing had begun at the new and quite luxurious camp on the White Sea’s Varzuga River. Entire log cabins had been constructed elsewhere and then helicoptered to the site using one of the many huge MI-8 helicopters in service throughout Russia’s vast Arctic lands. The camp gained overnight fame for the river’s abundant free-rising grilse, the one-salt salmon of four to seven pounds that would help me transition from steelhead to Atlantic Salmon. My success was quite modest and not nearly what my friends from the United Kingdom had experienced. Our group was then helicoptered to the Varzina camp, handsome log cabins perched on the river’s skyway along its canyon rim far above rapids thundering far below. In front of the dining hall was a large gong shield hung on ropes and I easily imagined its sound signaling the monks for prayer to the dining hall that looked every bit the centerpiece of a Tibetan monastery. The fishing remained dismal as our party endlessly pounded Picnic Pool, the camp water where we began each day. Late on the third day I saw a small splash from what I thought was from salmon—or a salmon—perhaps marking their exuberant departure from the Barents Sea. This day’s high tide was both pushing hard against the river and then sliding over it. The salmon had shown several hundred feet away and no one in our party had shown any interest in my sighting. I waited several minutes for the salmon to reach me, time used to tie on a General Practitioner that was honest to the classic original in every detail; no Mylar flash lit up the already bright fly. I led the fly, a move that gave the fly time to sink. When the fly came under tension, the soft take gave no hint of a good fish, or that the hen had sucked the fly through her gills, the most dramatic difference between how Atlantic salmon and steelhead may rise to the fly. When the 10-kg fish was netted and lifted free of the river, the net pulled the hook into the salmon’s gills even as I dropped my rod tip. There was a cloud of blood, and the fish went into shock and in a minute was dead. While disappointed the salmon was accidentally killed, I was blessed to have caught such a magnificent hen. She displayed a small, almost delicate strongly tapered head that led to the most massive shoulders I’d ever seen on any salmonid; she measured a fraction under 40 inches in length and would be only the second salmon our party would get from the Varzina that week.
My choice of what fly to fish had been successfully made and I would forevermore see the General Practitioner as something of an antique, but one with supernatural powers.
When our group’s charter flight to Moscow was called, my new friend from Germany handed me a tiny fly and told me to fish it when I returned. I stuffed the fly in the bottom of a pocket in my heavy jacket. When I returned home in early July, the jacket disappeared in the back of the closet and was forgotten until the following winter. The fly was discovered when I jammed my hand in the pocket and stuck myself on the tiny hook; I needed a razor blade to cut the fly free of the pocket. For the first time, the little inch-and-a-half-long fly could be studied, an exquisite tube armed with a #12 treble hook. I hadn’t a clue what it was about. Of particular interest were the several strands of pearl Krystal Flash under the black wing, while the super-short hard plastic tube body was dressed with a few turns of Pearl Flashabou. There was no tail, and no hackle. But the simplicity of the dressing had nevertheless melded together to produce a handsome little fly.
Nearly a year passed before I realized the fly was a micro version of the famous Sunray Shadow, a fly granted mythical powers by the most experienced and discriminating salmon fly fishers who lived to hunt giant salmon on Norwegian rivers. (See Chapter 13, Sunray Shadow, written by guest author Øystein Aas, in my book, Flies for Atlantic Salmon & Steelhead.)
In a sport with thousands of named dressings, it’s all but impossible to come up with a fly that is both effective and unique. But the history of the Sunray Shadow describes just such a fly.
British fly fisher Ray Brooks tied the first Sunray Shadow tube fly in the early 1960s for the Atlantic Salmon in Norway’s Laerdal River. More than a half-century later, the fly remains the longest salmon fly ever developed, a black over yellow or white, a six- to nine-inch snake in the water, a Scandinavian version of our far cruder String Leech, a long strip of black rabbit tied to a string with a lead cannonball split-shot sinker clamped at the head. More importantly, the Sunray Shadow was fished with a downstream mend to increase the fly’s speed across the river. Furthermore, the fly could be fished with fast strips, to increase still further its speed across the river, a technique unlike anything practiced in steelhead fly fishing.
Brooks originally dressed the tube with a long, thin wing of black monkey fur, the only soft organic fur available at the time. A shorter length of yellow or white fur was tied under the black, and often a topping of a few peacock sword fibers was added. Brooks tied in an underwing of stiff squirrel to keep the long wing from fouling the hook. The fly was a breakthrough dressing and became an overnight sensation. Within a few years no Atlantic salmon fly fisher would dare drive to his favorite beat without a few Sunray Shadows in his box. Endless variants materialized hard on the success of the original. The underwing of yellow or white was traded out for any color from cerise to green and orange. This was always a big-river, big-salmon fly. Other than Håkan Norling’s Templedog, many years would pass before another fly became so closely associated with giant Norwegian salmon, those fish of legend over 50 pounds and a few giants that topped over 60 pounds, fish more rare than 40-pound steelhead.
The Sunray Shadow naturally swam just under the surface but keeping the long sinuous wing in that attitude required a sink tip, a sinking leader, a metal tube, or a weight added to the head of the fly; the cones, barbell eyes, and turbo cones offering materials as light as plastic and as heavy as lead and tungsten. Weighting the fly has so grown in complexity and purpose that it has become a science unto itself. Given infinite parameters, the fly fisher can match any sink tip from slow sinking to extremely fast sinking to the Sunray Shadow. During the years since, Brooks’ original has undergone remarkably few changes. The body was originally tied on clear plastic tubing. Today’s “Shadow” more likely gets dressed on a metal tube or on a plastic tube with the addition of a tungsten turbo cone. The underwing, half the length of the black wing, may be any color. And more than likely, the Sunray Shadow will have jungle cock cheeks, and these too may be dyed, usually orange or red.
The steelhead counterpart would be the string leech, an unholy terror to cast, the long strip of rabbit streaming like the tail of a comet behind the 30-caliber—really, 30-caliber—cannonball split shot that if out of control could maintain a dive-bomb flight for the fly fisher’s brain. When these huge flies were first fished on the Skeena below its confluence with the Kispiox, powerful 16-foot two-hand rods were the norm. The current trend calls for shorter and lighter rods, with 10- to 11-foot “switch rods” especially popular, and the “big” rods are now 13- to 14-foot models, but these rods aren’t suitable to handle the weight of a long water-soaked strip of rabbit fur tucked behind a 30-caliber lead ball. At least I’m unable to integrate these huge flies into my fishing because I can no longer swing 16-foot weight 10 and 11 rods.
Using my German friend’s micro-Sunray Shadow as a model, I tied the fly on a ¾-inch length of clear plastic tubing. I first wound pearlescent Mylar from the head, down and then back over the tubing. I tied in several strands of pearl Flashabou extending just to the point of the double or treble hook secured to the tube. A very sparse black wing was tied in that extended to no more than twice the length of the tube. The fly was finished with a very sparse throat of white Arctic fox just to the length of the tube. That’s it. I didn’t add jungle cock because my old cape had been picked clean of the popular small-sized nails needed, but on a recent trip to Norway, I did tie the fly with jungle cock cheeks.
A couple years later John Randolph, publisher and editor of Fly Fisherman magazine, and I were invited to fish what we call today the Northern Rivers, the Rynda, Kharlovka, Litsa, and the Yokanga. The majority of our visit centered on the Rynda and Yokanga. During that July week, the Rynda was experiencing a heavy grilse run, at least it did for me—or my micro-tube raised only these salmon. The Yokanga was quite another matter.
The Yokanga’s enormous camp water pool and prime fishing water was a couple kilometers long. The river was far too wide to cast to the opposite bank though there I saw the occasional poacher, but none of this mattered. I was casting a floating shooting head, and sometimes leaning into an overhead cast to a far-distant lane others were not reaching. The Atlantic Salmon, only hours from the Barents Sea, found the tiny dressing irresistible. Sunlight would illuminate the Mylar dot and I could easily follow the fly’s passage by this signal alone. I was fishing greased line, leading the fly that was passing downriver broadside a fraction below the surface. During the long first night, the daylight grey-light at midnight, I hooked seven salmon, not counting a grilse. One of these fish, fireplug thick and over a meter long, rose to a new “Shadow” just under two inches long that was armed with a #10 fine-wire Daiichi double. When exhausted I left it faintly flopping on a sliver of a dry, mid-river gravel bar. I put down my two-hand rod and ran a dozen feet past the rod tip to the fish. As I did so, the salmon righted itself and flopped into the shallows and with its dorsal half out of water, it struggled off the gravel and a second later it shot into a slot of dark water. As my rod and reel were clattering over the gravel, I reached out and caught the butt end of the rod as the entire outfit was permanently joining the river. Then the little double tore out when the custom reel’s water-soaked drag got sticky even as I was pulling line off the reel.
The tiny fly continued to raise salmon even during midday when an Arctic sun beat down on the pool and exposed every pebble. One of these salmon in particular will remain as memorable as any fish I’ve ever hooked anywhere, river or ocean.
No salmon were showing, and nothing tapped my fly, not juveniles, grilse, or salmon. Then well down the immense pool to where a sharp eye could discern a subtle tail-out I saw a splash, then another. I scanned the water for an otter or mink and thought that perhaps some salmon were coming my way. The lone structure in all this huge pool was from a tree midriver that had a heavy tree branch sticking up with splashes washing against its long arm that pointed downriver. The tree posed a problem with any presentation. Should the salmon park there and I hook the branch, all would be lost by my fussing to get the fly back. I made a trial cast well past the obstruction and found I could lift the running line above the branch. I then noticed the submerged tree split the currents well above the branch. I needed a couple casts to get it right, but then the little dot of fish-scale translucency was bouncing along to where I wanted the salmon to be. I watched transfixed as over 30 inches of salmon rose into view, its angle changing until it was almost 90 degrees off the bottom, and then with great delicacy, it sipped in the fly. No salmon ever rose more perfectly to a greased line presentation. The salmon was safely released, leaving me in a state of ecstasy that lasted for weeks. My experience was Greased Line Fishing for Salmon, chapter and verse, exactly as had been described by Donald Rudd, who wrote the classic book under the pen name Jock Scott.
More specifically, Rudd’s writing was based entirely on Arthur Wood’s extremely detailed daily records of his fishing on the River Dee’s Cairnton Estate water.
I have tied especially small flies for steelhead by using extra stout single #10 hooks and choose to tie a simple dressing like the Spade, one of the 10 best steelhead dressings. Small steelhead tubes are tied more practically in the round and while #12 trebles can hold a large salmon, their use in any size is illegal for steelhead, a fact I find unfortunate. When fishing for grilse steelhead such as those stunning, ocean-bright half-pounders found on California’s Klamath River, I’ll fish dark flies dressed on #10 heavy hooks, the “heavy” more to keel the fly than to prevent the hook from breaking.
The smallest fly I typically tie for summer steelhead on my home river, the Klickitat that runs behind my old house, is a SteelFlash fly tied on a small Waddington armed with a #6 heavy-gauge TUE bait hook. The lightly dressed fly in black with purple and blue highlights, is just over two and a half inches long. I’ve yet to find a better fly for both winter and summer steelhead, the flies described in detail in my recent book, Flies for Atlantic Salmon & Steelhead.
Original Sunray (Brooks): Thread/head: Black (tied larger and tapered than on normal tube flies today), Tube: Grayish transparent plastic tube one and a half inches in length. Underwing: Brown squirrel one and a half the length of tube (a variation also had a white underwing—Ray Brooks sold the original patented flies in packs of four, two with brown underwings and two with white underwings). Middle wing: Three to five peacock herls slightly longer than the underwing. Top wing: Long five-inch black wing of colobus monkey hairs.
Øystein’s Sunray Variation: Thread/head: Black. Tube: Grayish transparent plastic tube one to two inches in length. Underwing: White, olive or chartreuse bucktail of good quality or CITES- approved polar bear tied in slightly longer than the tube. If hairs are not too thick, can also be tied in pointing forward and then folded back and secured. Other colors can also be used. Blue is popular in Norwegian west coast rivers as well as in Iceland. Middle wing: Two to six strands of flash in gold colors. Main wing: Black goat or colobus monkey two and a half times the length of the tube. The wing should be well tapered and tied in quite wide, with the underwing as support. The main wing can be tied in two or three rounds. Sides: Artificial or natural jungle cock (CITES approved).
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