Never Underestimate The Power of The Dark Side

Egg sucking leeches are great flies.  They are just a variation on a Woolly Bugger, which is arguably the most effective streamer of all time.  There is, however, one variation that drives me crazy, and that is the bead head egg sucking leech.  Whether it happens or not, I can picture a leech creeping up through the river bed and latching onto a salmon egg; and I can picture how enticing this two course combo meal would be to a steelhead.  Like getting orange chicken and beef and broccoli at Panda Express!  But then if you throw a bead in there, I can't wrap my imagination around that.

I'm sure it works, but...

Enter my contribution to the fly tying world:  The Force Choking Leech!  I found some black cone head beads and got the idea to tie the egg onto the hook first with red thread, then whip finish it.  Then add a bead, but I put the bead on backwards.  

Next, I tie on black thread, tie in black marabou for the tail , black chenille and a black hackle feather for the body.

Wrap the chenille and the hackle forward towards the bead as you would a Woolly Bugger, and tie them off.  I wrap a lot of thread to build up a smooth taper onto the head, but I do that before tying in the extra stuff.

Whip finish the black thread just behind the bead and you're done.  Welcome to the Dark Side, now go choke some fish!

I came up with the name in that haze between sleep and consciousness, before the alarm goes off, but you know it's going to go off soon--  The black bead reminded me of Darth Vader's helmet.  From there, the "egg" is red, like Vader's lightsaber, and, the body is black, like the Sith Lord himself.

I haven't really tied a lot of these.  I'm going to experiment with some other bead colors, but I like the look of the all black and red.  Maybe olive with a gold bead and a black egg, who knows?

If you've never tied flies before, I'll discuss what is absolutely needed and what you can do without in a later post.  I also have a few flies that I will try to teach you to tie.  some are so easy, you probably won't even believe they catch fish.