“BASS-BUGGING,” wrote Ray Bergman, “is a type of fly-rod fishing that was born and raised right here in America. Considering that most fly fishing dates well back into English history, it’s a young sport, young enough that as a boy [Bergman was born in 1891] I was among the first to fish these big bugs in this way.”

Actually, bass-bug fishing is the oldest method of catching fish on hook and line in North America. In 1741, when William Bartram described how Florida’s Seminole Indians fooled largemouth bass (which he called “trout”) with a “bob”, it’s likely he was reporting on an angling method that had been practiced for generations before the Europeans invaded the continent.

“Two people are in a little canoe,” wrote Bartram, “one sitting in the stern to steer, and the other near the bow, having a rod ten or twelve feet in length, to one end of which is tied a string line, about twenty inches in length, to which is fastened three large hooks, back to back. These are fixed very securely, and tied with the white hair of a deer’s tail, shreds of a red garter, and some parti-colored feathers, all which form a tuft or tassel nearly as large as one’s fist, and entirely cover and conceal the hooks; that are called a “bob.” The steersman paddles softly, and proceeds slowly along shore; he now ingeniously swings the bob backwards and forwards, just above the surface and sometimes tips the water with it, when the unfortunate cheated trout [sic] instantly springs from under the reeds and seizes the exposed prey.”

Today when we cast our sleek spun-and-clipped deerhair bugs onto the water for bass, we are practicing an ancient and uniquely American technique that takes advantage of the bass’s aggressive surface-feeding habits . . . and one that predates the use of cork and wood to float the lures. Modern fly-rod bass bugs — and the methods by which they are fished — are mere refinements of angling with the primitive bob.

Bass bugs have always been bass killers. It’s doubtful if the Seminoles were much interested in sport or artfulness. They needed fish to eat, and Everglades largemouths were their most available species. So if bob fishing hadn’t been an efficient way of capturing them, however much fun they had doing it, the Seminoles undoubtedly would’ve developed a deadlier method.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, bob fishing had expanded northwards into North Carolina, whose natives refined the lure into something that resembled a modern deerhair bug. Dr. James A. Henshall — whose Book Of The Black Bass, published in 1881, was the very first devoted to the subject of bass fishing — described his own experience with bobs:

“Happening to have a fish-hook in my pocket, I cut off a piece of the deer’s tail, and made a ‘bob.’ Then, cutting a long, slender pole, and tying the bob to the end with a piece of strong twine some three feet long, we got into the boat, my comrade paddling and I manipulating the bob. . . .

“As my companion noiselessly paddled the boat along the fringe of rank grasses and luxuriant aquatic vegetation, I danced the bob along and over the water, now low, now high, and now dipping in the water — skimming, leaping and flying — till it seemed an uncanny thing. . . .

“Several bass rose to it, and swirled at it, until one more active than the rest grabbed it by a vicious lunge, and the hook was firmly in his jaw.”

In Flies (1950), J. Edson Leonard explained how the North Carolina bob had evolved into something resembling a bass bug. Bobs were made, he reported, from squares of deerskin (“preferably from the skin from the shin bones”), which were cured, cut into strips “about the width of a shoe string,” and soaked to make them pliable. “With the tail fastened on,” wrote Leonard, “there remains only to tie the body in place and fasten on the wings. Taper one edge of the strip and tie it to the shank. Wind the strip around the shank, fasten it with the working silk, tie on the wings and the bug will be complete. The hair will project nearly at right angles to the body and will weave back and forth when the bug is retrieved.”

Whether Dr. Henshall actually invented the first bass bug made from spun and clipped deerhair, or whether the Henshall Bug was invented by somebody else and named after the father of American bass fishing, is uncertain. Leonard, for one, gives the doctor full credit. “Dr. James A. Henshall did more, perhaps, to exploit the first bass hair bugs than any other angler,” Leonard wrote. “He is credited with having made the original hair bug, one which bears his name to this day.” Others give the nod to Orley Tuttle, who concocted his Devil Bug in 1919.

I do not propose to resolve this mystery. Ray Bergman, who fished with bass bugs before 1919, is no help. He describes his childhood bugs as “big, beautiful artificials made of cork, feathers, and deer hair,” but it’s unclear whether any of them was the Henshall deerhair type, with no cork ingredients. The fact that Henshall never described anything that resembles what we now know as the Henshall Bug in his 1881 book suggests that if he did invent it, it happened sometime later. But we do know that the good doctor fished with bobs. At least in retrospect, spinning deerhair seems to be such a logical next step and obvious improvement over winding a strip of hairy deerskin around a hook shank that it’s easy to imagine Henshall, the consummate bass expert of his time, doing it. The Henshall Bug resembles a bob. It doesn’t look anything like a Devil Bug.

The Henshall Bug features a tail of bucktail — white in the middle and a contrasting color on either side — flanked by splayed grizzly feathers. The body is built from flared and clipped natural deerhair, typically with a colorful stripe around its middle. The wings are fashioned from a bunch of bucktail tied in a downwing style over the clipped deerhair body and then divided and figure-eighted into position so that they stick out at right angles at the front of the hook. Most of our contemporary spun-and-clipped deerhair bugs are direct descendants of this design.

Orley Tuttle designed his bug to imitate the beetles he saw smallmouths eating on his local lake. He made it by laying a thick bunch of deerhair on top of the hook shank, lashing it down fore and aft, clipping the front into a stubby head, and leaving the rear tips of the hair to flare around the bend of the hook.

When Tuttle showed his odd creation to his wife, as the story goes, she declared: “Looks like the devil to me.” And thus it was named the Devil Bug.

If the Devil Bug wasn’t the first deerhair bass bug, it was certainly the first popular one. By 1922, Tuttle was selling 50,000 bugs a year in more than 800 combinations of color, size and design — moth bugs, beetle bugs, mouse bugs, and even a baby duck Devil Bug — and competing quite successfully with all the commercial cork-bodied bugs that had by that time hit the market. The Weber Life-Like Fly Company began mass producing Henshall Bugs sometime after that.

Both the Henshall Bug and the Devil Bug are easy enough to tie, and they’ll still catch bass, although I don’t know anyone who uses them anymore. This, I think, is too bad. You don’t need to be a curmudgeonly old traditionalist to appreciate the uniquely American roots of bass-bug fishing and have the urge to revisit them now and then.

For that matter, given the pugnacious nature and unselective appetites of largemouth bass, I bet you could convince one to attack a bob.

Continue Reading "From Bobs to Bugs"   1  2  3