How to Make the Sauk River Grub Fishing Fly

The brother fly to this is the Sauk River Shrimp. The Sauk River Shrimp has a tail where this fly doesn’t. So if you want to tie the shrimp which is something akin to a GP type pattern, you just put the tail on. And it’s a very simple process and very repetitive. Its alternating sections are ostrich hair and hackle and you can have the change the colors at will.

And here I’m just going to use red ostrich and yellow hackle. There’s nothing magic about this but you can tie them all black. And we’d reinforce and this tinsel and we get a little flush as an additional benefit. Tie it in on the underside of the hook. And this is a big fly so I'm tying it on the bigger shook. It’s a fly I used principally in the winter, but there’s another fly that you can use as a change of fish fly in the summer, if you tie it in the smaller sizes. Grasping the hackle pliers and twist it upwardly with a shepherd’s crook, and here what we want to do is attempt to get these sections of ostrich, all about the same size. And we want to get four of them into this fly if we can. I think four is the minimum.

If we can’t get them all even, we’ll just cheat with them a little bigger as we go further forward. And as I say, it is alternating ostrich and hackle. Now I prepared the yellow hackle. I like the yellow hackle over the red ostrich and this is the smallest one, I want the hackle fibers to get longer as we go forward and we’re going to use about a half an inch or a little more of this -- I think we’ve got about three quarter inches here. We’ll tie in by the tip again. We’re going to double -- we get this out of the way and then we’ll double it as we go forward.

I had some hackle fibers trapped there so I was just getting them released from under that turn of the hackle stem. Okay. And it’s just a case of repeating this process as we go forward. And then, twist it up like we did before. There’s nothing difficult about this. But to remember to stroke that half bridge back each turn so as we get the fullness out of it. That’s why we’re not using the rotary feet or the vice-like we do when we use peacock. You see, that section is just a hair longer than the other end. It may enable us to come out right. Just half a dozen wraps to hold it. Then we want to take -- this is the second longest hackle that I have prepared there. We use about the same half am inch to three quarters of an inch. Tie it in by the tip again. Then, the good side is up the top pushing over with the thumb stroking back with the index finger and doubling it was we go. And wrap back to the hackle.

Turn the hook over again and back to the ostrich. It’s just the case of repeating the process four times, and the last hackle which is hopefully the largest. We have some broken fibers there so we’ll get rid of them. And one of the hair is about half an inch of this -- yeah, half an inch will do it. And we can hopefully avoid crowding the head too badly. One of the good side of the feather too is, I will fold it very nice like -- wrap it, take another turn around the base shank of the hook or the base stem, finish the head on top of that, we’re done.

For a good finisher, all that remains is the head cement. And that should well wrap it up. See how the hackles are increasing in length as we go forward. This is the shape I want. And there’s the sauk or the grub and you can change the colors to suit your own fancy.