Fly of the Week: the Spotted Popper

Yes! The camera has been found sneaking around in my pack and we are back in business. This week I'm doing a popper. Now before you start ragging, yes I know it's not the best popper. It's probably not even mediocre. but it's my first one, so bugger off (I'm still not counting that one I tried to make from the wine cork. Man did that get ugly....) It is most defintely not on the par with this guys, but I'm pretty sure he's half cyborg to begin with.


It's a simple little fly that required very little in the way of materials, not counting the paint.

For the body, I used a Hard Pencil Popper set that I got at Cabela's some time ago. This set included the #1 hooks needed. At the time I also purchased the "Perfect Popper" body by Wapsi, which is essentially the same but it didn't come with the hooks, and is a size 10 to boot.

If you've never made poppers, they aren't very hard to make as long as you can accept that they probably won't be great looking the first couple times around. You place the hook into the slot of the popper body and apply adhesive. I used globs of head cement. Then you paint.

Painting is probably the longest process, since you have to wait for it to dry before adding any more paint. It took my 5 minutes to tie this fly, but that was stretched over 3 days. I would have helped if I checked to see if it was dry more than once a day too.

Once your body is painted, you can add legs if you'd like, add your tail and your set. It was a little hard to do a whip finish with the length of the body, but I managed.

So here it is, the absolutely unique and originally named the Spotted Popper.

Body: Hard Pencil Popper Body #1 w/ Acrylic Paint


Tail: Fishhair Green and Brown Marabou