Cheap Lazy Bastard

I came up with the pattern as a lazy and cheap way of tying a variation of the bead head sparkle caddis emerger. I named it the Cheap Lazy Bastard because I use cheap materials whenever possible, take shortcuts (because I'm lazy) and the fly is a bastard – the original pattern mated illicitly with the body of any number of famous nymphs (zug-bug, pheasant tail or even hare's ear) – Gary LaFontaine might have liked to think of it in those terms, I don't know. I dislike the abusive application of acronyms and alphabet soup in our language, so I prefer calling it the Cheap Lazy Bastard to the CLB, with the understanding that it is ok, if not desirable to use slightly profane names for flies like the Bitch Creek (named for a real creek near Ashton, ID) and the Green Peter (named for an Irishman named Peter Green – not the founding member of Fleetwood Mac, nor for the color of a particular part of the inventor's anatomy after he expressed his preference for fly fishing over domestic responsibilities.) It is not elegant, beautiful or dainty, but it works.

Cheap Lazy Bastard

Joe Kissane

Variations

I tie several variations. Of the most use, one is brown the other green. The cheap part is the use of craft-shop fake plastic pearl beads in the smallest of sizes for #14-#16 flies. They go for about $1.99 for over 100 of them, as opposed to $5 or so for 25 of the Orvis variety, hence the "cheap" aspect. For the body I use peacock herl or green Antron yarn for the green variety and pheasant tail, natural wild turkey biots, brown ostrich herl or a hare's ear colored yarn body for the brown variety - as a lazy man's alternative to dubbing I'll always use yarn or herl. I use a fine silver wire rib, or recently have been taken with a product called "Sulky Holoshimmer" an accent thread that I found at a sewing shop for $3 for a spool of 250 yards – and it comes in a wide variety of metallic colors. I wrap the ribbing counter to the body to add durability and keep it from getting buried in the body material wraps. I use Antron yarn, sparsely lapped (light olive or bright green for the green variety and tan for the brown/pheasant tail variety) as the overbody - loose, sparse sheath with some fibers trailing as a shuck. I use a few strands of dyed (imitation) wood duck on either side of the fly as "wings" or hackles or legs. If I want it greener, a felt tip is used to color the feathers, but I'm not sold on whether that makes any difference. That's it.

Oliver Edwards recently made a convincing case for the prominence of the middle set of legs on such patterns, so I am experimenting with small diameter rubber legs at about the thorax (see Miscellanea Emerger).

Fishing the fly

The fly is fished either by itself or below an elk hair caddis or similar high-floater. I will chastise anyone I see using it with a bobber ("strike indicator"), and may the fish take their yarn indicators over their flies forever (I say that now, but in 3 years when I can't even see my line, I'll sing a different tune.) I have caught more than half the fish that have succumbed to this pattern as it rises in the water column in the old Leisenring Lift technique or my poor imitation of it. On a particularly calm day in a clear Ozark stream I watched several times as it appeared trout would mouth the fly, and it looked like they may have actually caught their teeth on the Antron sheath, so they couldn't spit it out before they were hooked in earnest. This may be an over-analysis of things, but I wouldn't be surprised if this phenomenon didn't add to the effectiveness of flies with fibrous sheaths. When I mentioned this to Stan Bradshaw (an old friend of LaFontaine's), we discussed the possible "ethical conundrums" but I think it's one thing to snag a trout, it's quite another to prevent him from rejecting the goods once they've been in his mouth. I didn't get into the bobber versus top fly thing and don't know where Stan votes on that, but I won't debate the ethics of someone who uses Antron sheaths on flies to add to hooking ability with someone who uses bobbers, anyway (I probably would, in fact. I like a good debate.) And if it's the sheath that actually catches the trout and not the fish, then, as I told Stan, the fly is far overdressed, or the stuff is more magical than Gary ever dreamt.

Not a stickler

I'm not a stickler on hooks or recipes that say you have to use no more than 4 wraps of this and 3 wraps of that. Below is kind of a recipe if someone feels they have to have one.