Here in New Brunswick the Atlantic salmon don’t always make it back to the ocean the same year they head up river to spawn. These are the salmon I am aiming for when fishing season opens.

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.

altantic-salmon-mickey-finnThe 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.

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Filed under: fly fishing new brunswick

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