The Gurgler is a foam bodied top water pattern that has been producing for me very well lately. This fly can be tied in various sizes and colors. I have found that lighter colors work well during the daytime and at night larger darker patterns produce well for trout. This step by step shows the pattern tied in a dark brown and it has been slaying the bass for me both during the daytime and late evening.
What ya need: For this one I used a Gamakatsu size one hook, dark brown craft foam, some dark brown flashabou, red neck hackles and rust colored thread.
First, as always, ya have to get the thread on the hook. I like to wrap it a little looser, leaving room between wraps, to help the flashabou to grab the thread and hook better. Wrap about the middle ¾ to 1 inch of the hook leaving the thread back to tie in the tail.
Next, tie in your flashabou. I use about 2 inches and give it a nice tail. This can be a thick busy tail or a sparse tail. I like a medium thick tail.
The next step is tying in your neck hackles to add to the tail. I have tied this without the hackle tail but the longer bulkier tail seems to get bit more. Match up your feathers in size and I like to put them so they splay out from each other. They should be about as long as the flashabou.
Next grab a strip of foam. For this size hook I use about ½ to ¾ inch wide and about 4 inches long. Bend it around the tip leaving about 1.8 inch near the eye of the hook.
Wrap the thread around the foam and secure it to your hook leaving about 4-5 segments to make the body. Don’t wrap it too tight. You don’t want to cut the foam. Leave the end of the foam stuck off the end, we’ll use this in a second to make the shell.
Then tie in your hackle on the end. When you wrap it forward keep the thread in the segments so these stay as segments and maintains the shape of the body. I try to use a big hackle and make it really bushy. Once this is wrapped it’ll look like legs on a big bug or fins on a baitfish.
Wrap the hackle forward in the segments in the foam ala wooly bugger. The big hackle will be pressed downward to look like legs/fins as it lay on the water…
Now bring the trailing end of the foam over the top of the hackle making a beetle looking shell. The foam that is wrapped around the hook traps air and helps it float, the shell traps more air and provides more surface area to help keep it up on top. Once it’s down and secure, trim off the foam leaving about ½ inch or so as a “head”. Whip finish; apply head cement and yer set.
Some patterns call for more flash tied in the tail and pulled forward over the shell and tied in so feel free to do this but I don’t see a difference to the fish… they hit it both ways.
Here you can see the shape of the “head”, this allows the water to pop in there and “gurgle” as you strip the fly in.
To fish this fly you want to strip it in using short hard strips. Make the strips about 6-inches at a time. This will pop along and gurgle, sounding like a wounded bait fish or a struggling large bug. As always use colors that work for you and match the hatch. I know guys who tie them in Green and yellow and the bass seem to love them. I am sure that adding some silli legs might make this look tastier to the fish but I’ll leave that up to you. I also tie this fly in size 6 hooks and at the smaller size the foam sometimes does not actually float the fly but it gives you a sub-surface suspending fly that is D-E-A-D-L-Y on pan fish. I caught probably 30-40 fins in about 30 minutes before they chewed the fly apart and all I had was a hook and shredded foam left. Try different sizes and colors and fine tune in to the fish near you. Good luck, tight lines and screamin drags!!!
