The Atlantic salmon don’t feed when the come up the river and if you want to catch one you need to know how to get a predatory reaction or you won’t be fighting anything but time and black flies. Okay there won’t be any black flies, yet.
Today I am ready to tie a few of my favorite early spring in New Brunswick streamers, the Mickey Finn.
The Mickey Finn was just about the first Atlantic salmon catching fly I ever tied. It’s simple to tie and only takes a few minutes so I can tie a bunch in an evening and I can even tie them right at the waters edge and be fishing it in under 10 minutes. If I am really excited it might take me 15 minutes because I get real shakey.
The Mickey Finn I use to catch the hunger black salmon in the early spring.
The Ingredients that make for an early spring Atlantic salmon’s dinner.
Hook: Mustad #3665A, #38941
Sizes: 2-10 and maybe even a 12
Body: Flat silver tinsel right off your Christmas tree, it’s still up right?
Ribbing: Oval Silver Tinsel
Wing: Yellow bucktail for the bottom of the wing, red for the middle and then yellow again for the top layer of the wing.
Thread: Black
As you can see there isn’t a lot that goes into the Mickey Finn but the salmon love and destroy them even though they are very durable flies, so I like to keep a few extras on hand. My fishing buddies never have enough. I like to give them a hard time so I pretend that I don’t have any left and then I start checking my many pockets and before you know it I come up with one or two more.
FACT: Something I didn’t know until recently was that the Mickey Finn was made famous by John Alden Knight in the 1930s.
August 1st, 2008 at 9:58 am
[…] fly I was introduced to by my brother-in-law Joe and is still my favorite early season fly is the Mickey Finn. A great artificial fly for those spring black salmon. It has also hooked me up with a few nice […]