How to Make Zack's Zemerger Fishing Fly

Now we’re going to tie Zack's Zemerger. And this is a fly I used to imitate an emerging Caddis. I do it in three different colors, black, brown and olive. And the hook I like to use is a fly shop 3769 and I’ll tie it in size 12 to 16 mostly. Before you put the hook in the vice you want to slide on a glass bead and what you want to do is just match the color of the bead to the color of the fly you're trying to tie. And I like to use the root beer on the brown, olive for the olive and black on the black.

So what I'm doing now is tying in super floss body material. And this is what I'm going to wrap for almost the entire body of this fly. The nice thing, the cool thing about this material is when you tie this in you can use different color threads and different color super flosses and you can get some really unique colors that you can’t find if your just to have like a thread body or a dubbing body. And the tighter you pull the or looser you pull on the material when you're wrapping it changes the color. So if you have an insect that’s unique to your water try playing around with different thread colors and different body materials and I'm sure it will work well for you.

Okay, once I got that tied in I'm going to take a strand of ostrich herl and I'm going to use the brown on this one and I'm just going to tie this in behind the glass bead first and I take my thread and move it in front and we’re going to take this herl and do several wraps behind the bead. And I try to pick some of the once that have the longer fibers because it just gives the fly a buggier appearance. And you could see I've kind trapped that glass bead in with the ostrich herl.

We cut that out and the last step is taking—just like you would to soft tackle instead of using partridge for the color I'm actually going to ice dubbing. And on the brown one I like to use UV brown. And what I do is I take a clump of dubbing, I tie it on the top of the fly. This access right here, I'm going to actually take and fold under and we tie that off and now you’ve got the same thing you would with the part if you got to go to soft cut well that’s going to imitate the caddis.

And the last step is just a few whip finished or two. And this fly is done, really simple fly to tie. And the times I've used this it’s been very effective during the Caddis hatches. When fishing this, usually I like to strip this with real short slow strips about four or five inch strip and pause it. Sometimes you can strip it really fast but I found that the slower strips have been little more effective before we went fishing this during the Caddis hatches. And this one I've used to imitate the emerging Caddis, it’s much like a lot your soft tackle flies that you'll find in the fly shops that instead of having partridge this actually has a color of ice dubbing and I think it gives it a unique appearance if this shows up really well in the water. And I think it has a—it moves a lot more than a partridge does.

Now this fly, I’ll usually fish in the, you know top three or four feet. And I didn’t even have a really good luck on this so on spring creeks as well. Swinging it and strip it in. Again usually go slower retrieves about four or five inches, you know, strip it in and then pause it between each pull and they will pick this up with the hand twister retrieve as well. And just getting that fly, you'll see a trout, your taking your emerging caddis and just kind of cast it to that general area and they start bringing it back in and it has work really well.