Tangled specks: tiny flies, big ambitions

I need to get my glasses checked

My fingers fumbling like heck

I have become a nervous wreck

Must be the season of the speck…

(With copious apologies to Donovan).

I’m still on the injured reserve list following replacement right hip surgery. Right now the plan is to come off the IR June 1, but I’m going to ask if we can’t shave something off that.

And yes, the rehab is going very well, thank you for asking.

What this means in practical terms is I am scheming and plotting like nobody’s business about all the fishly things I am going to do once Ye Doctor blows the all-clear.

I have glaring weaknesses in my angling game. I stink at roll casting. I’m hopeless with 12-foot leaders.

And I am really lousy at fishing with the kind of tiny little flies I refer to as “specks.”

I define a speck as anything smaller than size 20. Speck experts will disagree, as they think a size 20 is huge. Maybe I will think so too some day.

One of the perils of sitting around after surgery is scrolling through social media and buying things. For preference, things I don’t need.

I got some weird t-shirts. One sports the logo of the Shenandoah (Pa.) Hungarian Rioters, a 19th century minor league baseball team. Another reads “Surely Not Everyone Was Kung Fu Fighting.”

Among these idiotic acquisitions was an offer of 72 specks for about $50. This was a rock-bottom price, and it wasn’t coming from a fly-by-night outfit either, but from an online company, The Catch and the Hatch, who provided me with some very good perdigon nymphs a few years back.

So the specks arrived, and they are everything I feared.

Tiny. Hard to see. Did I say tiny? Infinitesimal. You know.

SPECKS!

Here’s why an angler needs to know how to use specks. In between the nice hatches of large, easily identifiable bugs, which is most of the time, trout eat little bugs.

If it’s a cloudy day, chances are there will be blue-wing olives on the water. Then there is a category called midges which contains multitudes.

I look at the river for five minutes, see nothing happening bug-wise, and I start trying to provoke a reaction somehow.

What I am missing is the trout happily eating specks beneath the surface.

So how am I going to do this?

What little speck success I’ve had has been with a dry-dropper rig. I use a big Stimulator or Chubby Chernobyl, a large, very visible, very buoyant dry fly, and tie a piece of fluorocarbon tippet to the bend of the dry fly’s hook with an improved clinch knot and attach the speck to that. A bass or panfish popper works as the dry fly too.

Here’s the problem. The speck hook eyes require a very fine tippet material — 6x, 7x, even 8x.

I dislike fine tippets even more than specks. The stuff is devilish. It curls up. It refuses to knot. It’s just awful to work with.

Some years back I discovered one brand of fluoro tippet with a 5x tippet that was somehow able to get through the eye of a size 22 hook. That made a difference.

But this moderately successful method is very one-dimensional. I need to be able to construct a leader with a dropper or two and get my specks down in the water column.

That’s going to mean 6x or worse, probably. I might have to add some weight, another thing I dislike and am not good at.

But that is the plan. I hope to report great things as I master the speck this season.

Or until my left hip goes out.