The Woolly Bugger is a remarkable fly for fooling freshwater trout and largemouth bass, and it does double duty in the salt as a shrimpy-wormy-looking pattern to fool striped bass and weakfish. It began its fish-catching career known as the Woolly Worm, a simple pattern many flyrodders remember as the first fly they ever learned to tie. It was originally intended to imitate a nymph, an immature insect that lives underwater until it rises to the surface and hatches or gets eaten by a predator. Its history goes back to England as a popular trout fly, when somewhere in the mid-1800s, it eventually made the cross-Atlantic journey to be embraced by American fly fishers.
Early Woolly Worms are described as having a darker-color dubbed body wrapped with a palmered hackle feather, usually with a small tuft of red wool for a butt (hence the “Woolly” name) at the hook bend and finished with a dab of red lacquer at the hook eye. Over time, numerous variations appeared, and the fly was widely used to make impressions of leeches, larval insects, and freshwater shrimp-like crustaceans.
Fast-forwarding to the early 1960s, Russell Blessing of Pennsylvania began tying an updated version of the ancient fly with a long and puffy marabou tail. The result seemed magical and the fish-catching powers of the fly, now known as the Woolly Bugger, quickly gained notoriety. By the 1980s, well-known fly fisher and author/photographer Barry Beck was tying the fly commercially for Orvis, and the fly’s fame continued to spread. Many variations followed for fresh and salt use as local fly-tyers added their own unique tweaks to this enormously versatile pattern.
While primarily created as an impressionistic imitation of the many nymph-style insects like hellgrammites, found in streams and ponds, it’s ironic that the pattern gets walloping strikes from trout that are thought of as having very discriminating dry-fly preferences. A picky, cranky brown trout might reject a well-tied dry fly, yet that same trout will aggressively whack a Woolly Bugger as if it’s been starving to death.
Ray Szulczewski of Cape May, New Jersey, is a big fan of the Woolly Bugger and says, “It’s a great pattern, very easy to tie in different sizes and colors, and can be fished several ways. I always make sure I have some with me at all times when freshwater fishing. My go-to colors are all-black or olive, and I like to make them in sizes from 2¾ inches down to ½ inch. I tie them plain or with a small bead head, usually in chartreuse, red, black, bronze, or gold.”
Tiny hook sizes are best for trout, but Buggers meant for bluegills, crappie, and perch will typically run from size 10 up to about size 6 or so. Larger hooks of size 4 to 2/0 are more suitable for largemouth bass. In bigger hook sizes, the larger fly is often referred to as a leech-type pattern.
The fly also has its saltwater fans who spin up variations that include not only shrimp-like imitations, but also worm-like patterns that look very much like cinder worms, blood, and sand worms, and even simple baitfish like killies in hook sizes that vary from 4 to 2/0. Saltwater tyers should be credited with introducing much brighter colors like all-white, pink and chartreuse. In particular, weakfish prefer a pink or pink-and-tan offering, and school striped bass readily pounce on chartreuse-and-white or an electric chicken pink-and-chartreuse color scheme.
The fly’s original appearance is simple and pure, and perhaps that’s why it catches fish so reliably. From a tyer’s viewpoint, its simplicity requires so few tying steps that the job of stocking or replenishing one’s fly box can be accomplished quickly and without spending too much time at the vise. The fly’s basic profile, with its bulky, fuzzy body and pulsing tail, is a reliable pattern, but there’s plenty of room for modifications.
For example, the appeal of a “rubber” worm for largemouth bass is legendary, so for fly fishing, a Bugger with a very long tail, similar to a New England flatwing striper fly, can be deadly. I tie mine with a 2- to 4-inch tail in all-purple, dark green, or brown with a chartreuse tail, which seem to be favorites for largemouth and stripers. To minimize feather tangles, use a loop of stiff mono at the hook bend or build up a “bump” thread platform of stiff nylon or bucktail before tying in the tail material. Polar Fibre, SF Blend, and long bucktail have all been used for tail material, and some tyers use pre-cut soft-plastic curly-style tails that add a lot of motion. The long-tail versions also imitate sand worms and bloodworms for the salt. I first started using them around the bridges of the Manasquan River, where they proved to be very effective in spring and summer.
Some tyers like to create Woolly Buggers with splayed tail hackles that are meant to look like a pulsing frog’s legs, and I’ve also seen them tied in Bob Popovic’s Semper Fleye-style with tails that swim with an amazing action. Rubber legs like those you see on bass bugs are often added at the front of the Bugger to look like pincers or claws, and at the rear of the fly to add leg-like motion.
Body weight is an important factor and not just for controlling how deep the fly sinks. Just the weight of the hook is sufficient to get a Woolly Bugger down a foot or two in very shallow water. In a shallow cove I’ve found that’s loaded with bluegills, I let the Bugger float naturally on the surface for a moment after the cast before beginning the retrieve, which gently pulls the fly beneath the surface. When the ‘gills and bass are spawning, this technique can be awesome. It also works in salty marshes and salt ponds for school stripers.
Weight is usually added by making a few wraps of lead around the hook shank, which is then hidden by the body overwraps. I met a guy at a fly club who was pretty scientific about how he weighted his Buggers and relied on a color code so he could quickly tell the weight of each one. His Buggers were tied with black thread at the head, signifying three turns of wire on the hook shank, red thread for six turns, and chartreuse for 10 turns. It was then easy for him to select the fly with the right weight fly for the depth where he fished.
Bead or cone heads are another popular way to add weight. There are many sizes, colors, shapes, and weights to select from, including brass and tungsten beads, round or tapered, slotted and unslotted, and painted or unpainted. For salt water, some tyers use dumbbell or bead chain eyes like those used for a Clouser Minnow.
Woolly Buggers are generally fished at a lazy retrieve speed with frequent pauses so that the fly hops along erratically, rising with each pull on the fly line, sinking on the pause. For pond fishing, Szulczewski fishes them at a slow pace with either a floating or sinking line. “During the cold winter months in the Northeast, if there is no ice on a lake or pond, I use a sinking line and a bugger with no bead head. The sinking line slowly drops the fly through the water column. With the water so cold, slow and short strips give it enough action to attract a reaction strike. I use a bead-head Bugger if I want to work it down on the bottom to look like a leech. The key is to find the depth where the fish are holding. Once I get strikes at a certain level, I count down the drop time on my next cast to try to duplicate the same depth zone where the fish are feeding.
“When the water warms, I use a floating line and strip the fly a bit faster to look like a baitfish. A bead head gets the fly a little deeper. Largemouth and crappies love Woolly Buggers and I occasionally get decent-sized sunfish to take one, although their small mouths make them difficult to hook. I tie my Woolly Buggers with a marabou tail to give the fly a little more action, and I have even had good success with marabou in the fly body. These are especially good for crappies—some of my largest ones have been caught on Woolly Buggers. Marabou won’t twist as much around the bend of the hook, and this is important when you may have only a few shots at fish and you want every presentation to be perfect as can be.”
One June morning while wading the Barnegat Bay side of Island Beach State Park, I met a fly guy who was a big fan of shrimp-looking Woolly Buggers. This was back when weakfish invaded the bay in huge numbers and ravenously fed on grass shrimp. Later, while stowing our waders and tackle, he showed me a tan-and-brown Bugger with a pink marabou tail that had taken the nice-size weakie he was sliding off a stringer and stowing in his cooler. It was a typical Bugger fly except it had a few turns of chartreuse yarn at the head just behind the hook eye and bead-chain eyes nearly hidden in the wraps. He said he used a Duncan loop to attach the 12-pound-test tippet direct to the fly, claiming the slight weight and the tippet loop gave the fly a nice jigging action.
He also offered a tying tip for saltwater Woolly Buggers: saddle hackles are a tad more flexible than neck hackles and are easier to tie around the chenille body wraps. For his freshwater trout fishing, he said he preferred the soft hackle fibers for their flexibility and added motion, but for Barnegat Bay stripers and weakfish, he preferredthe stiffer neck hackles. Stiffer hackles also seem to work well for largemouth bass and panfish.
Woolly Buggers have become one of those unique flies almost veryone, salt or fresh water, is sure to have in their fly box. They re enjoyable to tie and deadly for a wide range of game fish. Catch ‘em up!
THANK YOU!
“That’s all I have to say about that,” said Forrest Gump, which just about sums it up for me, too. After nearly 60 years of writing, editing, and talking about fishing, it’s time to close the lid on my laptop, spend more time relaxing with Linda, and go fishing with my only purpose being to enjoy the day and (hopefully) to feel the tug of a fish. No deadlines, no tapping the keyboard—just fishing for the pure fun of it.
Writing this column for the past 17 years has been an inspiration, and the support from On The Water readers has also been a source of great joy. It’s been a wonderful ride. Thank you!
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