The Mother of All Stoneflies: The Morningwood Special

Designing a fly pattern rarely starts at the tying bench. For me, it most often starts with a vague idea, a spark, that glows and gets kicked around a fair bit in my head before I ever even sit down to try it. Sometimes, that spark turns out to be a complete dud, and thankfully, those make themselves apparent pretty quickly. Other times, the prototypes show a bit of promise and through some technique tweaks and material replacements I can come up with something that is, very often, much better than what I originally imagined. The Morningwood Special is one of those flies that traveled a lot of miles through my head before ever coming to fruition, but (knock on wood) it turned out to be one of my best fly designs ever.

The premise for a new foam stonefly came when my good friend and former colleague at Umpqua Feather Merchants, Brian Schmidt, mentioned developing a Charlie Boy stonefly pattern based on my Charlie Boy Hopper. I liked his idea, and brazenly thought to myself, "Well, this ought to be easy!"

The Charlie Boy Hopper was one of my first commercial patterns and frankly, is one of those flies that took too long to develop into the simple, effective pattern it is today. My brain has a way of complicating things and that dang fly took me a whole summer, fall, and winter to polish up. Reasoning that so much of that hard work was already done, I foolishly thought that I could just sit down and tweak a few parts and have a killer stonefly adult pattern magically fall from my vise. Wrong again, Craven.

I now have a rather large fly box overflowing with about 75 prototype flies showing the progression of what has turned into a pretty craftily designed fly pattern. A change here, a tweak there, a discovery of a new material, and suddenly one day I woke up, and there it was. Arranging all those prototypes in a timeline shows me how far off I was at the start, and how much has changed since its conception.

It also showed how far removed this is from the Charlie Boy Hopper.

Far from just an adaptation, this stonefly is so different that I am now thinking of designing a new hopper pattern using some of these techniques and materials just to come full circle.

I love to sit down at the vise with an end in sight and a solid idea in my head, but the design process isn't often pretty, and this box of junk sitting here is a testament to that. I won't bore you (or ruin my reputation) with the ugly missteps along the way, but just focus here on how all those pieces came together.

All adult stoneflies have robust bodies, and Salmonflies are probably the largest aquatic insects most of us will ever encounter. The Salmonfly version of this fly is on a size 4 hook, while the smallest Skwala version is on a size 12. That's a pretty wide size range, and creating a pattern that would scale down to smaller sizes was a pretty big bump in the road.

In the beta versions of the Charlie Boy Hopper, I toyed with foam extended bodies built on a needle and as it turned out, I needed to come back around to that idea for this fly.

Moving to the wings, I have noted over the years that so many fly patterns are tied to match a happy little hopper or stonefly with the wings neatly folded over its back like it's posing for a glamour shot. The reality is, these critters always seem unhappy and ill-prepared for any crash landing on the water, and they are often bent, broken, and splayed while trying to extricate themselves. I wanted to create a fly with splayed wings to match the foul mood and panic of the naturals when they find themselves struggling to get back to dry ground.

I originally used 3-D EP Fibers in gray for the wing, then Brian Schmidt showed me a new proprietary mix of fibers called Umpqua Stonefly Wing. The material stands out with just a bit of UV Flash, and is something the fish (and fishermen) haven't seen before. I knew it would be perfect. As of right now, this material is unavailable, but will be soon.

The legs started off so simply, tying them in the same way as the Charlie Boy Hopper but I wasn't happy with the fact that a real stone has six legs, and my prototypes only had four. I stayed awake a few nights trying to solve this one, but I'm happy to say I woke up with an epiphany that solved the problem.

In a fit of "looking out for the other guy," I added a bright pink hot spot to make the fly a little easier to find on the water, but in the process I created a hurdle. The short tuft of cerise McFlylon was visible from the top and served the purpose wonderfully, but as it turns out, was also completely visible from the bottom of the fly as well. A bit of tinkering resulted in a pink-over-black staggered indicator that hides the pink from the bottom view, and from above does double duty as a contrasting indicator for flat-light situations. Sometimes these things really do work out for the best.

And finally, I opted to get a little artistic for the coloration on this fly to better match the natural. While the belly of the fly remains somewhat monochromatic, I do mottle it a bit with a few smears of marker and then use a black marker to add the variegation to the top and sides of the body, as well as eyes.

Someone asked me just the other day why I bother to marker up the top of a fly, and the simple answer is "I do it because it makes me happy." I love the finished look of this fly, it gives me confidence in the pattern, and it makes me happy. If plain, drab, and boring make you happy, go ahead and skip the marker. And I add the eyes because it's just the right thing to do if you're trying to make a critter that looks like it might crawl away on you.

As an explanation of the name of this fly, it's kind of a funny alliteration of an old stonefly pattern called the Norm Wood Special. Norm Wood was a guide on the Deschutes for 30 years, and the Norm Wood Special was a hackled but closely trimmed dry fly that sat flush in the surface film. Norm Wood's bushy fly came before the popularization of modern materials like foam and rubber, but he had it right: Stonefly patterns need to land with a belly flop and ride flush in the surface film. I didn't know Norm Wood, but I think he would have admired this Morningwood Special.

Morningwood Special Fly-Tying Recipe

• Hook: #8 Tiemco 200R.
• Thread: 6/0 Rusty Brown UNI-Thread.
• Body: Gold 2mm Fly Foam.
• Legs: Barred golden yellow MFC Sexi Floss.
• Wing: Umpqua Stonefly Wing or Gray 3-D EP Fibers.
• Indicator: Cerise over black McFlylon.
• Markers: Pale sepia and black Copic marker.

Tying the Morningwood Special

1. Begin by chucking a sewing needle in your vise with the sharp end out. Start the thread near the end of the needle with a short jam knot but leave a long tag end remaining. Cut a 2mm strip of the Thin Fly Foam to use as an underbody.

2. Bind the strip to the needle for a length of 10mm. Fold the long end of the foam forward and bind it down again to create a round double layer. Clip the foam and bind it tightly in place with cross-hatched layers of thread, ending with the bobbin hanging just short of the front end.

3. Cut a 7mm wide strip of foam with a razor blade. Poke the tip of the needle through the foam at its center and push the foam strip right up tight to the binder strip.

4. Rotate the foam strip and fold the ends back along the needle while you hold the bobbin above the hook. Make eight or ten turns of thread to create the first segment.

5. Pull the long ends of the foam forward and carefully bring the thread over the top and to the midpoint of the underbody. The thread should come directly between the two sides of the foam so it doesn’t show on the outside.

6. Make two more equal segments in the same manner, right up to just short of the end of the underbody. Whip-finish the thread over the top of the foam and clip it.

7. Grasp the extended body portion firmly and slide it off the front of the needle. Pull the slack out of the tag end of thread protruding from the end of the body, and clip it flush.

8. Pinch the barb and poke the hook point through the foam at the base of the last segment. Place the hook in the vise. Dress the hook shank with a  2mm foam strip and cross hatch it with thread. Clip the foam and add a drop of Zap-A-Gap to the underbody above the hook point.

9. Slide the extended body portion up the bend of the hook so it sticks against the underbody. Draw the thread to the near side of the hook and create another body segment using eight or ten turns of thread just above the hook point.

10. Part the foam once again and move the thread forward another equal distance and create a second segment, then move the thread forward twice the length of the other segments and create the thorax. Finally, move the thread forward to just behind the hook eye to create the head segment.

11. Pull the strip of foam along the bottom of the shank and stretch it while you trim it flush.

12. Cross the thread over the top to the far side of the hook between the head and thorax segments. Tie in a strand of Sexi Floss in the nearside joint, then cross the thread over the top of the thorax and catch that same strand with a couple more wraps at the rear. Tie in another strand of Sexi Floss in reverse order along the far side.

13. Tie a sparse clump of Umpqua Stonefly Wing in at the center of its length at the front of the thorax. I use X-wraps like I would to form a spent wing, making two wraps from the back of the near side to the front of the far side, then two more wraps going diagonally from the front of the near side to the back of the far side.

14. Brush out two strands of black McFlylon and tie them in on top of the base of the wing with a few tight turns. Tie in two brushed-out strands of cerise McFlylon on top, ending just short of the black fibers. Clip the stub ends as close as you can, and add a drop of Zap-A-Gap to the tie-down wraps at the base of the indicator.

15. Cross the thread forward to the center of the head segment. Pull the front legs and the top foam strip back and split the foam head with two tight turns of thread. Lift the foam strip and move the thread back to the wing base to create another short head segment. Whip-finish the thread and clip. Trim the long foam strip into a short stub.

16. Pull both wings back and trim them evenly with the end of the body. Chop the tips a bit so they aren’t square on the ends. Trim the rear legs even with the end of the extended body and the front legs just slightly shorter.

17. Push a wire bobbin threader through the thorax segment between the top and bottom foam strips and over the top of the hook shank. Place the end of a single strand of Sexi-Floss into the threader loop and draw the leg through the body.

18. Hold the leg taut and place a drop of Zap-A-Gap on the leg on the near side of the body. Grab both ends of the leg and stretch it just slightly as you pull the glued section into the foam body. Once the legs are stuck in place, trim them to the same length as the front legs on both sides.

19. Use a pale sepia marker to color the body on all sides. I do this haphazardly to allow some of the gold foam to show through.

20. Use a black marker to draw stripes up each top side and one down the center on the abdomen, as well as a wider dark stripe over the top of the head segments. While you’ve got that marker in your hand, add eyes to the sides of the head. Add a coat of head cement to the thread wraps under the hook at the base of the wing.

---

Charlie Craven co-owns Charlie's Fly Box in Arvada, Colorado. His latest book is Tying Nymphs: Essential Flies and Techniques for the Top Patterns, available from Stackpole Books/Headwater Books (2016).

---