This fly ought to skate like crazy, just like Pinch's RIFFLE DANCER which is made up entirely of moose and elk or deer body hair. Both your fly and the RIFFLE DANCER have a longish tail, horizontal, side-mounted wings, spin hair head, and a carapace with skating "lip" on top. Your fly will be much easier to see and track when fished. I know how effective the RIFFLE DANCER is and I'm sure yours is equally good at bringing them up. Great use of foam.
Flytyer:
Thanks for your comments. You know, my pattern was a merging of multiple patterns and I think subconsciously, the riffle dancer was one of the patters that must have been in the back of my head.
The pattern started off as my attempt to make a skating version of the yellow stimulator. In 2010, my son in law Shaun was just getting into fly fishing for steelhead and not knowing any different, he had been looking in my trout box and a #6 Yellow stimulator appealed to his eye so he grabbed a couple and asked "think these will work for steelhead" and I replied "they could be worth a shot". Shortly thereafter, Shaun began hooking Willamette hatchery steelhead on the pattern (no hitch) either during a short dead drift, skating on the the swing, damp on the dangle, or even subsurface on a tip (he didn't want to give up on the pattern, even when the water was getting cold)!
Shaun's "beginner's luck" with surface steelhead continued with consistent results using the yellow stimulator so the gears in my head started turning. Initially I tried just putting putting a foam lip on the pattern and it actually skated well and got me several steelhead. It got the name "stimuwaker".
While the Stimuwaker worked well enough, I still pondered how to make the fly more aesthetically pleasing to my eye while still maintaining properties of good visibility and staying on top as consistently as possible.
I thought of how to make a splayed wing version, using a piece of foam as a shellback, somewhat like the Finnerty skater and Tony Wratney's foam dome and the initial version of my current skater was born.
For fun, after watching one of Tony Torrence's flytying vides where he tied his foam skater with a green butt, I decided "why not" and adapted the green butt color scheme to my skater along with contrasting colored foam visibility posts as well.
Over time some folks have found that they like my pattern and variations on color combos, flash, etc have come about. Multiple samples have been given to friends and the pattern has proven itself as a fly that skates well, has good visibility and draws the occasional steelhead to the top.
Your reference to the riffle dancer pattern has got me thinking again, since Adrian Cortes had asked me to tie a version of my skater with "no foam". I've began tying some prototypes and we named the pattern the Freebird, but I am now thinking of taking some ideas from the riffle dancer and merging them into the Freebird.
This tinkering with surface flies just never ends!
Todd
