I've had many successful days with the Crystal Butt Hopper, and I am not the only one for whom this pattern has worked well. Consider the following from Dave Lewis, a well-known rod builder from Harrisonburg, Virginia. Dave spends the summer out west and often has occasion to fish hopper patterns.

It was late July or early August on one of the upper meadows of the Gallatin that I seemed to see that Harrison Steeves's foam hopper for the first time. Harry and I had been fishing Mossy Creek together the previous spring, and as we watched a brown rise to some sulfurs, he dropped two of his big ruddy brown foam hoppers into the big compartment of my fly box. Over time they had shifted about and sunk beneath the Madam Xs and the Sofa Pillows and disappeared.

A very picky cutbow was working a sparse emergence of mahogany duns along a deep-cut bank. I floated several sizes of Sparkle Duns over him and never got a nod. Most of the late morning I had been using the Madam X and had taken several wonderful strong fish. It looked like I needed to return to the big fly. I tied on the traditional one with white legs in a size 10 long shank hook. A nice hooking cast put the fly a couple feet above the big boy at just about the right time for him to come up for another mahogany dun. He slowly rose under the big fly and drifted back beneath it for about 3 feet before drifting away and back to his hold deep along the bank. Twice more he followed but never took, finally giving up on my offerings altogether.

Knowing trout will often come to a different pattern after a good long look at an unacceptable one, I reached for a smaller Madam X with brown legs. As I rummaged through the big end compartment for the smaller fly, one of the two foam hoppers Harry had given me way back in the spring crept in amongst the bunch. It was as if I saw it for the first time. Something sort of lit up in my mind's eye, and I went for it. The same cast got the fly in a perfect position, and the trout came to it as if the world had just come crashing down. The take was an explosion. None of that careful scrutiny the other flies had been subjected to. I thought at the time that the trout's reaction at that moment was much the same as mine just moments before. We both seemed to see the fly for the first time, and it was right.

I continued to use the same fly several more times that summer for those picky, difficult trout. Many times I found fish that would ignore careful, precise offerings of hatch-matching accuracy and throw all caution to the gravels for the big foam hopper. I can tell you, like the trout, it made me a believer.

Dave Lewis

1. Wrap the hook shank with thread to the bend of the hook, and then wrap the thread forward about 1/8 inch. Tie in about twelve strands of the Krystal Flash butt material, and wrap the thread back to the bend of the hook. Trim the butt to about 3/8 inch in length.

2. Wrap the thread forward about two-thirds the length of the hook shank. Tie in the body foam at this point, and tie it in rearward to the bend of the hook.

3. Tie in about a 10-inch strand of the ribbing material.

4. Trim the stretched underbody foam to a point, and tie it in. Wrap the tying thread forward about two-thirds the length of the hook shank.

5. Wrap the underbody foam forward, and tie it off at this point.

6. Fold the body foam forward, and tie it down at the same point at which the underbody wrap was tied down. Trim the forward-projecting excess body foam.

7. Rib the body with five or six turns of the ribbing thread, tie it off, and trim the excess.

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