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.