“I have to admit that I was pretty flattered back in 1998 when John Barr asked me to help him work on a new pattern he had been having trouble with.
This was early on the Hopper Copper Dropper days and John was trying to develop an ultra-buoyant and visible indicator fly. He had some pretty rough prototypes that had a wrapped yarn body that just wasn’t cutting it. He asked if I could play around with it a bit and see if I could incorporate foam body like I had used on my Charlie Boy Hopper.
I went home and confidently went to work on the fly...for about fifty hours.
What seemed like would be an easy add-on became a complete redesign of the fly, incorporating the foam body, a robust bullet head, elk hair and flash wing, knotted legs and an indicator on top.
I fought with one aspect or another of this damn thing for what seemed like forever until it came to me one night lying in bed. The next day I got up and twisted up the final version in a fury.
John and I then proceeded to test the fly all over the state and found that it really did exactly what we wanted it to do.
As a funny aside, I had tied one of the early versions with a polypro macramé yarn wing, way back before the Chubby et al, but we both decided that it was just a little too dirty to put our names on...my how times have changed!”
- Signature Tyer Charlie Craven
