How to Make the Sailor Ant Fishing Fly

Hey, the next pattern that we’re going to tie is one of that’s absolutely necessary for the Green River. Hey, it’s one of my standards that I used to pull in my box. I don’t go to the river without it. People fishing patterns wholly in the United States for trout and the ant pattern on the Green River is just, it’s keen, alright? And when you find those slow afternoons where the fish aren’t taking anything else, they’ll pick an ant and you’ll find that ramified in late next to the bank and you’ve passed about everything else or in. You might want to try an ant now.

The particular version that we’re going to use in our tie today for you is the Sailor Ant. And a number of years ago, I was out in Pennsylvania doing a little show out there. And I met a gentleman called—named Bill Skilton. And Bill had invented a lot of little foam bodies in different things like that he eats. I’m really need knick knacks. So I got to know Bill a little bit and I’ve been—since that time I’ve been using his little ant body here to tie my own my hands. So this is—this is a really special little guy. And this is really you need to get—a lot of these market ceases quick sites. So if you’re going to an order in a store, you don’t know what you’re talking about if you asked them for a quick site ant body. And they come in about a dozen in a pack or so. And here’s what stays in a value, you could basically got your foam body—you know the black. And well it’s got a nice little indicator on the top and so it kind of—kind of reminded us of a little sailor. And you know black, you know foam white have so therefore it needs the things that you’re in and so that’s what we’ve used them as Bill ties a number of different versions and you can tie this a lot of different ways.

But I’m just going to show you the Green River way, okay? And show how we tie it and how it’s been effective. And again you know we’re talking about something that you can tie variations of—using different colors or thread and different things you get the different highlights like what we did before. But we’ve just basically covered the shank of the hook with the thread and then get unused with some nice strong thread that I can synch into the body well.

And what I’m going to do here is I’m going to stick the foam so that the Sailor Ant portion of—or the Sailor portion of the body is thick than outside of the eye. So we can go ahead and make our first segmentation right here. And what we’re going to end up was just a little bit sticking out the shank of the hook. This hook that I’m using is a twitch short, okay?

Instead of using a standard really the long one, what we’re looking for it here is the maintainer gap. So we got good hooking ability and a little short of shank so that it fits and matches well with the—the fly bodies that we’re trying to tie. And again what we can do here is just make a couple of wraps and really kind of synch it down and really secure it right there. Then we can lift the body and move forward just about a halfway between which you have left and we can synch it again right in there, alright? And at this point in time, what we’re going to do is lift and pull back and we’re going to build enough thread back in here and kind of build the tip or underneath to make this portion of the Ant body stand up. And this is where we probably different a little bit than maybe Bill’s standard Sailor Ant that he ties on a regular basis or with other people tying. And that we try to make this stand up a little bit and make it more visible, alright?

But we can do a number of different things. You know we’ve used the rubber legs in the past and that works well. You could at this junction point right here you could put in a pair of rubber legs of with each side. And that’d be one version. One of the ones that versions that I liked to tie is just to go ahead and tie a standard ant hackle on them. And just like you would in any other ant, I’ve got a nice, long hackle here. And that really makes it nice so you don’t have to use hackle pliers and all the other things. And I’ve varied a fair amount of this thin here so that you can get in there and tie it in reel usually. And I’m just going to make a couple of winds here and go ahead and move my thread forward. And all I’m going to do is just kind of hackle this just like you would in any other standard rye fly, and by making a few winds here and in crossing over. And then I’ll just go ahead and bring that forward and tie it off.

And what we’re going to do after we’re done here is to go ahead and clip the bottom so that it rides nice and flat, that kind of helps orientate the fly. And we’ll little of trim this hackle out of here. And when we get closer and I got it right there that time but we’ll go ahead and tie this down and tie it off. And that’s what we want to do. Let’s go ahead and trim up this a little bit. There we go, we got them. Alright, we’ll go ahead tightly ant body off here. Do it with a finish on it—one of the scissors in there and nip the thread. And again what I wanted to do finish this fly is to come in the cup to fire result the bottom.

So what I’m going to do is just come in with the scissors in this way and clip one time. And that basically takes all of the fibers that are pointing straight down off of the fly. And it kind of helps to balance kind of gives little outriggers if you will and we will balance the fly. This is very visible. It’s a productive pattern that floats extremely well. I mean you can’t hardly - and that’s what really a need aspect of it. Basically the fish love it so, have fun.