Tip of the Week--Go Beadless

I work and play on the Missouri so naturally, 99% of my nymphs have bead heads and they usually work better than non-beaded bugs. However, there are those days, whether due to pressure or just because, fish figure out that shiny beads are bad.

A few years ago I did start experimenting with some bugs without beads and they worked but in the past couple years, it really didn't seem to matter. However, I can think of a couple examples where the beadles, beat out the beaded.

A couple weeks ago, floating with Jim Murray and Nick Coffman, Jim pulled out the non-beaded sow bug and absolutely crushed them. I probably would have done the same but the streamers started calling and we commenced the targeting of the two-footer. A few years ago, however, I did run into a stretch of days where fish up at the dam actually started getting picky and it absolutely mattered.

It was purely luck that I even had these bugs in my box but at some point, while rifling through all the glare from zebra midges, love bugs, and beaded PT's, I came across a few size 22, chocolate WD-40's without beads. "What the hell," I figured, "They're not eating anything else."

I tied one of the little critters on and immediately, my guys started pounding fish. I looked around at all the other boats and noticed one other boat getting them but nobody else. At the end of the day I saw this guy at the shop and asked him what he was using.

"WD-40, size 22, chocolate."

"No shit," I said. "That's what I was using."

That little bug worked for a while that summer before fish eventually went back to just being stupid and eating anything but it was pretty crazy that they became that picky. It had to be a size 22 and it had to be chocolate and NO BEAD. I haven't seen fish get like that since but then I do know the fish at the dam seem to shut down every summer because although I'm not up there, I hear about it. I wonder if you went beadles, maybe they'd stop ducking out of the way of a nymph rig and actually eat something.

Keep 'em where they live...