Summertime is bass time. The largemouth (black) and smallmouth bass (bronzeback).
I’m tying bass poppers again. I noticed in June that I didn’t have any good bass poppers. And I didn’t have any of my own.
I tied some a couple years ago, but they didn’t sell. And I didn’t keep any for myself. I went back to the fly shop that I had provided them to, and I bought them back. There was a new kid at the counter.
“Six at four-ninety-nine each,” I said.
It’s probably for the best. My bass poppers are unproven. I use wine corks (cut in half diagonally), and glue them in a cut slit to the hook shank. I use whatever hooks I can find in the largest (1/0 give or take) sizes: bait holder, plain shank, Aberdeen, streamer. I paint the cork green (frog), gray (mouse), brown (duckling), black (nondescript) or white (pretty).
Behind the cork on the popper, one ties in a hard chicken hackle to give buoyancy or body or extra movement. Then trails a tail: two long hackles like legs for a frog, one piece of floss for a mouse tail, maybe sparkle or tinself for flash.
Note the many different types of anima fur that James Egan uses to make his bass poppers. Whether or not they actually catch fish is debatable. They do, however, rate high on the adorably cute side of fish lures. Photos submitted by James Egan
My father was all about panfish when I was a kid, and we made small poppers for the territorial sunnies and crappies on their beds. We even tied tiny ice jigs to imitate the water bugs we found down the ice holes or in the stomachs of our keepers.
The ice jigs had a body made of muskrat dubbing. Dubbing is the very fine hairs wrapped around the tying thread and then wrapped around the shank of the fly to give it body and the approximation of tiny legs and gills and fins of the nymphs and freshwater shrimps and mayflies.
That was when we only had one fur specimen hanging over the workbench in the basement – a muskrat pelt dried green (without tanning). We had found it in late summer on the trail at the rim of the pond laying dead and beginning to bloat, and we skun it and stretched it.
Now I have more specimens.
This week I took down some of my display furs from the wall to care for them. Everything in our trapper’s shack is dusted with wood ashes and grimed with bacon grease. I had considered taking the furs to the laundromat in town, but didn’t want the attention.
So I washed my mink, coon and marten, and my father’s fisher and skunk in Woolite in a five-gallon bucket, and rinsed them. Not a single hair slipped off, except some white guardhairs along the skunk’s tail, so this meant I had done a very good job of tanning.
All my life I have case skun my furbearers, which means to pull the pelt inside out up the carcass to the ears, eyes and nose. And then dry them on a board up the inside, skin-side out for selling, or fur-side out for displaying.
I decided to open up the furs to show all the fur on display, not just the back. So I slit them with a sharp scissor up the belly, throat and chin.
After splitting to open up, washing and rinsing, I hung them out to dry for twenty-four hours. Then I softened up each hide with a good amount of Neat’s foot oil.
Gib Carpenter’s cousin, Jim Van Dusen of Minneapolis, was jigging with a leech when he caught and released this 26” walleye in Caribou Lake on August 2. Photo courtesy of Gib Carpenter
And they’ve turned out beautiful, soft and thick and brown-leather smelling.
Now I have more specimens and more poppers, but it seems I display them and tie them for my looking at only.
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