“I used the (bead head nymph) fly first on my home river the Austrian Traun. The success was tremendous and astonishing. In the clear water I could see how the grayling turned around and followed the nymph over many metres downstream to take it without any hesitation. I caught endless numbers of fish at any time of the day as well as any water depth.” Roman Moser writing about his first use of bead head nymphs in 1978.

http://globalflyfisher.com/staff/moser/goldheads.html

(Roman Moser)

The most significant innovation in fly tying in the past 30 years was the beadhead nymph – CDC proved almost as significant for dry flies.

Roman Moser was the man who started the beadhead   trend on his home river, the Traun in Austria. Spin fisherman had for years been using little lures which used glass beads in the rivers of the Tyrol mountains and Moser decided that lead wire behind the bead would help to sink the fly. The results were astonishing, so much so that he was accused of bait fishing.

It would have remained a local method but in 1988 Moser produced a video Neue Wege mit der KocherFliege – subsequently produced with English commentary as New Ways of Fishing the Caddis. One of the patterns featured a caddis pupa imitation with a brass bead at the hook eye and with leading writers such as Hans van Klinken in Europe and Malcolm Greenhalgh in the UK becoming enthusiastic converts, the die was quite literally cast. By 1990 a Birmingham fly tyer, Ian Warrilow was manufacturing the metal beads in 2mm and 4mm diameters.

Then, in 1992, Orvis, with its significant marketing clout, started selling – and promoting – beadhead nymphs.

“How would you like to discover a fly that will catch trout when nothing is rising – in deep water and shallow, cold and warm, in those periods when a trout stream seems as lifeless as Death Valley?” the Orvis marketing director Tom Rosenbauer, wrote in the company’s monthly newsletter, Orvis News, in February 1992.

Silver bullet

We are all looking for the ‘silver bullet’, the fly with magical fish-attracting traits and we seemed to have found it in the beadhead nymph.

In Britain, Greenhalgh added the bead to traditional favourites such as the Hare’s Ear and Pheasant Tail nymphs and reported unprecedented success – including 42 grayling in a day using a bead head PTN on that most testing of chalkstreams, the Wiltshire Avon.

Click in images to enlarge

The author's size 16 Sunken Beetle using the 7 mm  Bidoz tungsten scud back in green

I added a gold bead to my Sunken Beetle and it definitely seemed to increase the efficacy of the fly.

The author on the Molenaars River near Worcester with a rainbow trout taken on a  bead head sunken beetle

Fly fishers taking part in the FIPs-Mouche World Fly Fishing Championships are constantly looking for innovations which will give them an advantage of other competitors and tungsten quickly replaced the lighter brass beads which Ian Warrilow had started manufacturing in 1992.

The French company, Bidoz, started using tungsten in a variety of innovative ways and the moment I first saw their 7 mm green tungsten scud backs I realised that it could be the basis of a small, streamlined sunken beetle imitation that would sink quickly and drift with the hook point facing upwards. A smaller, more buoyant pattern, say a sunk spent mayfly imitation (spinner) could then be tied to the bend of the hook, a New Zealand rig, which bobs enticingly above the beetle imitation.

http://bidoz.com/shop/en/body/4-bidoz-body.html

Bidoz neck rings

Now Bidoz have done it again with the introduction of their “hotspot collars” or, as they call them, “neck rings”. These are 2.2 mm brass rings in 14 different colours which allow one to add a weighted “hot spot” behind the bead.

Adding a touch of colour to a nymph undoubtedly adds to the efficacy of the fly especially when rainbow trout are the target. Ian Cox, chairman of the Durban Fly Tyers and editor of its monthly magazine, the Bobbin, says that the most deadly way to fish for trout in the small streams of Barkly East and Rhodes in the North Eastern Cape is probing the undercuts with a beadhead nymph incorporating an orange hotspot.

http://frontrangeanglers.com/blogs/hot-spots

(touch of colour)

http://info.bluequillangler.com/blog/bid/82254/Make-your-Flies-Pop-with-Fluorescent-Materials

(orange hotspot)

http://www.durbanflytyers.co.za/

Red hotspots

The other colour that has intrigued me as a “trigger” in trout flies is red – particularly after I read New Zealand’s Best Trout Flies by Peter Scott and Peter Chan (Pheasant Tail Publishing, 2006). It contains chapters by 30 leading New Zealand fly fishers most of whom are guides, in the tackle trade or have represented their country in international competitions. Some concentrate solely on the big lakes but, of the 30, 22 had a bead head nymph in their list of six flies and several had a red hot spot on those nymphs. Stratos Cotsilinis said: “Personally I am convinced that at least in the tying of nymphs and dry flies, red adds a significant positive aspect to our success rate.” He experimented with a bead head nymph made of dubbed rabbit fur dyed black and adds: “… the true breakthrough came when a small red tag (two to three mm) was added to the tail of the fly. The success rate increased immediately.”

Kiyoshi Nakagawa chose six nymphs and four of them had a red tag and one a red holographic tinsel rib.

Des Armstrong favours a bead head nymph with a red thread hotspot behind the bead. “The hot spot behind the gold bead acts as a trigger for the trout. Rainbow trout seem to be attracted to this colour combination. This is a ‘must’ fly or fishing for rainbow trout.”

Super normal releasers

The concept of “triggers” which cause an instinctive reaction in various animal species has been well documented by Nikolaas Tinbergen and other scientists in the field of ethology, the study of animal behaviour.

Shortly before the start of World War II, Tinbergen, a young Dutch zoologist, noticed something strange happening in a fish tank containing sticklebacks, a small local minnow. The fish tank was on a window ledge and Tinbergen noticed that at the same time each day the male sticklebacks would adopt aggressive postures. He realised that they were responding to the passing of the bright red van belonging to the Dutch postal service. Male sticklebacks have a bright red stripe and the females have swollen bellies. He built models which hugely exaggerated these features and found that the males would attack the model which had the largest element of red and that when a model of a female with an exaggeratedly swollen belly was introduced into the fish tank they would become amorous. In each case the male sticklebacks concentrated on the models with exaggerated features and ignored the real fish.

Tinbergen called these exaggerated features, “super-normal releasers” – in other words they triggered extremes of behaviour.

Beadhead nymphs seem to have that trait and now Bidoz has made it possible to add to their attraction by a product which adds weight to the hotspot.

But what is the best colour for the bead?

MC Coetzer, the chairman of the Cape Piscatorial Society has attended several World fly Fishing Championships either as a competitor representing South Africa in the senior championship or as a coach to the national junior team in the youth division. On every trip he has asked for flies from leading competitors and, by some majority, gold has been their colour of choice for beadhead nymphs.