Girdle Bug – classic trout fly tying

Tying SBS and underwater action on the Girdle Bug. In the box it looks like shit, but when you’ve seen it solid embedded in the jaw of large trout often enough… well you come to like the bastard. It still isn’t beautiful but it looks efficient and killing in the way an AK-47 does.

Well I know Mister Mikhail Kalashnikov wasn’t much into fly tying, but if he had been that, he probably would have come up with something remarkably like the Girdle Bug.

Since this dude concentrated his effort on deadly hardware for the military it was up to Frank McGinnis of Anaconda, Montana to combine rubber legs and chenille in an equally killing way. Back then, in the 1930’s and ’40s, the fly was known as the McGinnis Rubber Legs. McGinnis tied the fly as an imitation of the large stoneflies nymphs, or hellgrammites, in the Big Hole. If you want this fly to go deeper, give it some wraps of lead- og leadfree wire on the hook shank befor tying the rest of the fly :0)

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