Tom Thumb
– 2 min read
The Tom Thumb might be the most forgiving dry fly in your box. It's almost all deer hair, which means you can't really sink it, and there's very little to get wrong.
Two or three minutes at the vise once you've got the hang of the fold, and you've got a fly that rides high all day.
Nobody's sure where it came from. There are stories from the UK and the same ones from Canada, and the original is hard to pin down, but it seems to be the fly that inspired the Humpy.
Hardly anyone ties it now, which is a shame, because as a skater it's hard to beat.
The whole thing floats on hollow deer hair, so there's no hackle to mat down and drown. That's the bit I like.
Most dries die when the hackle soaks up and mats. This one has nothing to mat, so a couple of false casts and it's back on top. You genuinely have to work to sink it.
The body is where you can do what you like. I run a peacock herl back end into a little SLF thorax up front.
But the Tom Thumb was a thread body long before it was herl, and these days almost anything goes. Dub it, thread it, change the colour, it still fishes. The deer hair is the fly, the body is up to you.
Colours are your call. I keep mine natural deer hair over peacock because that catches trout and grayling as well as anything I own.
Go darker for low light if you want, lighter for bright days, but there's no wrong answer here.
Materials:
- Hook: Partridge of Redditch standard dry, size 14
- Thread: Uni Camel 6/0
- Tail: standard deer hair
- Body: peacock herl
- Thorax: SLF Bug Dubbing
- Shellback and wing: standard deer hair
Fish it as a skater. Cast across and down, let it swing, and let it drag a V across the surface.
It's at its best in broken or riffled water where that wake stands out. The takes are savage, fish come up hard for something waking over their heads, so give them a beat before you lift or you'll pull it away from them.
If they keep boiling behind it and missing, slow the swing down and let it sit a bit longer between pulls.
