QUICK’n’EZ EGGS

Egg patterns aren’t much to look at, but they catch a lot of trout and steelhead all over the world. Fish eggs are the highest-quality food source juvenile fish can get into their mouths. A 6-inch steelhead or trout would have to chase dozens of midges to equal the protein equivalent of a single egg, so the urge to eat them is imprinted strongly when the fish are young. This seems the only plausible explanation for Lake Erie steelhead—for instance—to crush the first egg pattern they see when they are fresh from the lake in October and haven’t seen a real egg in two years or more.

Not only is an egg a juicy morsel for trout, but the colors and shapes of egg patterns stand out strongly along the streambed, making them effective attractors even if the fish do not recognize them as food.

Trout don’t have hands to examine potential food items—if they are curious about something they pick it up with their mouths and “taste” it, and either swallow or reject it. Many anglers have observed this onstream, but you can see it in much greater detail in Wendell Ozefovich’s video presentation The Underwater World of Trout. Watching Ozefovich’s video, you’ll see that trout pick up many nonfood items and then eject them. A bright egg may pique this curiosity more than any other type of fly because trout and steelhead often eat them in the last places you’d expect to see a real egg.

To be successful with eggs, you have to fish them right on the bottom—sometimes with two or more BB-size split-shots—and you have to get a natural dead-drift, so you often fish them on 3X or 4X and lighter tippets. This combination of weight and fine tippets causes you to lose many more flies than you would with dry flies, or streamers on 0X tippet. If you fish eggs, you’re going to need a lot of them, so here are a few quick and easy ways to stock your boxes with the best patterns.

Dubbed Egg

This simple egg solution is best suited for small (#16-18) hooks. If you are imitating the eggs of trout or whitefish, many other techniques result in flies that are too large to be realistic. To create a round profile, move the dubbed thread repeatedly in “X” patterns around the center of the hook shank. Add a drop of cyanoacrylate glue (Zap-A-Gap, Super Glue, or Krazy Glue) just before your final wraps to prevent the top wraps from sliding off the shoulders of the fly. If this happens, the whole thing unravels.

Sucker Spawn

Whether real sucker eggs (or any eggs for that matter) cling to each other in clumps is open to debate, but there’s no arguing that steelhead and brown trout in the Great Lakes area—and in the Rockies—gobble this fly up. In searching the Internet for various ways to tie this pattern, I even read reports of anglers successfully using the humble Sucker Spawn on New Zealand rainbows.

It’s easy to create a large profile with this technique, and the Sucker Spawn seems to work best in high, off-color water when it’s more important to grab a trout’s attention than to imitate a specific food item. There are no chartreuse fish eggs of any type but in high, off-color water, chartreuse Sucker Spawn finds many more fish than natural egg colors.

Easy Egg Tool

A traditional Glo-Bug uses two strands of yarn on top of the hook shank and two on the bottom for a full, round profile. The drawback is its densely packed fibers. This looks attractive to consumers, but it slows the fly’s sink rate, looks opaque and unnatural in the water, and the egg partially obstructs the hook gap, making it more difficult to hook fish, or hold them once they are hooked.

Many anglers favor flies with the material tied only on top of the hook shank to keep the hook gap as open as possible. You can do this using a single strand (or less) of egg-yarn on top of the hook shank, or by using an egg yarn dispenser made from a drinking straw or empty ballpoint pen tube, or the Glo-Bug Dispenser sold by TCO Fly Shop www.tcoflyfishing.com and distributed nationwide by Hareline Dubbin. The dispenser comes with three tube sizes for different-sized egg patterns, and a yarn threader. Using a dispenser is quicker and results in less material waste. For video on how to use the dispenser, see community.flyfisherman.com/videos.

Beadhead Cactus Chenille Egg

This is a quick and easy way to make an attractor for steelhead and salmon that also resembles an egg. Unlike more realistic eggs, it looks best with a bead, and you can also easily hide a few wraps of .035" lead-free wire under the chenille. This gets the fly into the deep lies where the biggest fish often hold, possibly explaining why the pattern has become so popular for Chinook salmon in New York and elsewhere.