Crab Cocktails
By Steve Starling Flylife/autumn 2005
Starlo lifts the lid on some surprising techniques that are re-writing the rule book for that holy grail of flats’ fishing; the permit.
It’s generally accepted that sight casting is the pinnacle of the fly fishing mountain. Spotting a fish, stalking within range, making a presentation, observing your quarry’s reaction and, hopefully, watching as that fish swims over and eats your fly is arguably the most fun you can have with your waders on. If the fly you’ve presented happens to be a floating pattern — a ‘dry’ in trouting parlance — then the entire process takes on an added dimension. Duping an instinctively wary fish into coming right up to that interface between its alien world and ours, then actually seeing it stick its nose into the air as it eats your bunch of fur and feathers, is an incomparable blast. It just doesn’t get any better than that — not in my book, anyway. In the end, I don’t really care whether that fish is a 20 centimetre mullet, a two kilo brown trout, a half metre saratoga or a bloody big carp. The thrill is much the same.
Fishing ‘blind’ with surface flies is a slightly less refined process, but one with its own kick — the adrenalin rush of the unexpected. A strike from the blue on a floating fly is related to that thrill we experienced as kids in the circus ghost house, where screams of fear and peals of laughter were separated by less than a heartbeat. As oldies, we still enjoy a good fright; the kind you get when a dirty big trevally crashes your chugging foam popper, or a flashy rainbow trout bushwhacks a bouncing cicada in the rapids.
These thoughts flicked through my head at random as I watched my floating crab fly drifting on the slick, green ebb of a Cape York river mouth. My nerves were taut, but not stretched, mostly because one small, cynical corner of my brain still refused to believe this lark would actually work.
The run-out tide was brisk, forcing constant mends of my floating line and long leader to avoid unnatural drag. Each drift was short. As the line straightened below the anchored boat, I’d lift off, false cast a couple of times to throw water from the fly, then lay it up and across the current at about 45 degrees, quickly throwing a big upstream mend to re-start the drift.
I’d repeated this process maybe two dozen times and was finally slotting into the groove, mind sliding into auto, when a flash of movement two or three metres upstream of the bobbing fly caught my eye, making me swing my attention away from the fake crab. It was an arm-length long tom, zigzagging through the swirling litter line of yellow and green mangrove leaves, hunting an easy meal.
"Don’t you eat my crab, you toothy little bastard,” I muttered, snapping my gaze back onto the fly to check its position in relation to the fanged marauder. As I did, an amazing thing happened. A great, polished disc of pewter materialised from the deep, coalescing into a heavy set of shoulders behind a bulbous forehead and dark eye. In a wink, it was on my fly, bulging over it in a rushing surge, going away and down again. The line jerked tight in my hand and I lifted — instinctively, but unnecessarily. Got him on!
Loose loops at my feet were gone in a second and the reel humming, pale floating line cutting and vibrating down-current, then vanishing to be replaced by bright backing. A strong, seemingly unstoppable rush that continued as Felty hauled the anchor and I pulled the outboard starter with my left hand. Once on the sandy shore, I jumped out and followed the deeply slugging fish, gradually winning line.
Fights with Indo-Pacific permit or snub-nosed dart are dour affairs after the initial thrill. Your heart stays in your throat as you run through the thousand ways you already know of to lose a good fish, then start making up new ones. You try to convince yourself to pull as hard as you would on a golden trevally or a big queenfish, but unless you’ve caught as many of these rare prizes as my mate Greg Bethune, it’s impossible to do it. Caution born of a desire not to lose this precious thing at the end of your string softens your arms and hands and makes your back bend and your knees weak.
I’ve had perhaps six or seven permit solidly on my line in a decade of fishing for them. This dry fly eater — which I finally tailed and released after 25 tense minutes — was only the third I’ve landed. Yet I’ve seen literally thousands of these frustrating dart, and covered hundreds with my fly. The vast majority have simply ignored my best efforts, or actually shied away from them. Permit didn’t earn their reputation lightly. They are tough customers on a fly, regardless of whether they swim in the Atlantic, the Pacific or the Indian Oceans.
SILVER BULLETS
Before the late, great American angler, Del Brown, developed his legendary Merkin crab pattern, permit were even tougher to catch. Del’s Merkin was a magical ‘silver bullet’ of sorts for this family of fish, turning the impossible into the improbable. It’s creator went on to amass a career total of 500 improbabilities on fly — a tally that once seemed as unbeatable as Don Bradman’s batting average. Nowadays, I’m not so sure.
In the last few years of his long life, Del visited Australia and fished for our local permit or snub-nosed dart (Trachinotus blochii). He saw many, cast to lots, hooked one and lost it, declaring them at least the equal of their Atlantic and Caribbean cousins in every department. Along the way, Brown helped finally put an end to the strange cultural cringe that had seen some local pundits deny the bona fides of these wonderful fish and sell them short with disparaging names like ‘pumpkinhead’. The fact is, they are permit, and worthy of that title.
Back on Del Brown’s home waters in the northern hemisphere, other innovative fly fishers were working on newer, even better silver bullets. One of them — Orvis guide, Simon Becker — came up with what he called the Hover Crab. Rather than being weighted like Del’s Merkin, this fly incorporated closed cell foam and floated. Becker and a growing band of disciples rigged these flies with small bullet weights pegged on their leaders anywhere from a few centimetres to half a metre ahead of the fly, so that it rose up from the sea bed and hung or suspended in mid-water. Fish ate it. In fact, lots of fish ate it, and many of those fish were permit.
Becker brought his developing Hover Crabs to the land Down Under in 2002 and joined Greg Bethune’s Carpentaria Seafaris for a trip along the remote north western coast of Cape York Peninsula. Here, the Hover Crab quickly proved its effectiveness on our Indo-Pacific permit, too. Bethune was already this country’s leading permit taker on fly, and the addition of Becker’s Hover Crab to his arsenal saw Greg’s personal tally and that of his clients rocket dramatically.
PARALLEL PATHS
One of those clients and a regular on the Cape is Sydney-based fly designer, Mike ‘Felty’ Felton. Felty took Becker’s original design and streamlined it for mass production as the Suspender Crab, distributed through his wife Cutty’s tackle wholesale company; Felty Flies.
Back in the States, Orvis were also marketing a Becker-designed Hover Crab, but some other interesting things had now begun to happen. A few switched-on anglers were occasionally leaving the lead weights off their leaders and fishing the floating crab as a true floater — right on the surface. On its day, this ‘dry fly’ approach was deadly.
As is so often the case in fly fishing, parallel lines of evolution — sometimes separated by half a world — were ultimately leading to the same conclusions. Back on Cape York, Greg Bethune’s head guide, Phil Edwards, had begun to observe tiny crabs clinging to floating mangrove leaves on the run-out tide pouring from some rivers at certain times of the year. On specific days within the tide cycle, every tenth leaf or so was serving as a crab surfboard, and these thumbnail-sized crustaceans often fell off their little rafts and were forced to swim for another. As it turned out, those surprisingly subtle swirls and boils along the leaf litter lines and wind lanes we’d passed off for years as mullet or small queenies were something much larger and much more exciting. They were permit!
The whole equation finally fell into place during the second half of 2004, resulting in the sort of permit fishing most fly fishers could only ever have dreamt about previously. Phil Edwards’ and his guided clients began by ‘nymphing’ for the leaf-line feeders using small, weighted Merkins fished deep under the drifting smorgasbord, but eventually, a few more adventurous souls tied on Suspender or Hover Crabs, discarded the weights and began fishing them as true ‘dries’. The rest, as they say, is history.
I was fortunate enough to be aboard Greg Bethune’s mother-ship "Tropic Paradise” for the third consecutive week of this action in September, 2004. In three days of fishing that will burn bright in my memory banks forever, those of us aboard hooked a phenomenal 39 permit on fly and landed 19 of them, their weights running from six to at least 10 kilos. Incredibly, more than a third of those hook-ups fell to unweighted crab patterns fished right on the surface. Dry flies. The rest were split fairly evenly between standard Merkins and Suspender Crabs fished on weighted leaders.
Most of these fish were taken while blind casting in the leaf litter lines inside the river mouths on run-out tides, but there were also permit cruising the shallow flats and beaches outside the rivers, as there always are at that time of year. On our last morning at the most productive estuary, Felty and I left the deep channel and its leaf-riding crabs behind to head out after some sighted fish with fast-rising junior guide, Emily Eivers. Mike tied on one of his Merkins for the task but, on a hunch, I left my floating line and four metre-plus leader intact, with an un-weighted Suspender Crab attached to the end. What followed rates amongst the most exciting events of my fishing life.
We drifted across the flats with the falling tide and south east breeze, standing high to peer into the clear, shallow water ahead. Suddenly, there it was. A single fish. Obviously a permit. Zigzagging its way across the flat from the left on a path at right angles to ours and closest to my end of the boat. My shot.
Singles are always the hardest. I’ve cast to literally hundreds over the years and hooked two or three. It’s a low percentage game… or so I’d always thought. All that was about to change.
Leading the fish by a good four metres, I cast the dry crab pattern, watching my long leader unfurl as the following breeze helps turn the fly over and drop it onto the chop with an almost imperceptible plop. Fortuitously, it lands in exactly the right spot and all three of us aboard the skiff, including Emily, instantly know — as surely as we know the sun will rise tomorrow — that this fish will eat. It angles up, fins erect, and sucks in the bobbing crab pattern like a giant brown trout sipping down a tiny midge. I strike, we’re on, and my fly fishing world has tilted on its axis. The old book on permit fishing is obsolete. This is the first page of the brand new book.
TYING THE SUSPENDER CRAB
Materials
#1/0 Gamakatsu SL12 hook
Tan tying thread
6 strands pearl crystal flash (antennae/whiskers)
Tiewell tan suede chenille (legs)
2mm tan foam (back)
Synthetic suede or similar (underbelly)
4 to 6 brown hackles (claws)
Fast-drying, water resistant glue
Tying Instructions
Wrap the hook with tan thread, tie in 4 to 6 tan and brown hackles to imitate claws.Tie in 6 to 8 strands of pearl crystal flash half the length of the hackles.Cut heart- or pear-shaped piece of foam, tie thicker end in at bend.Glue six lengths of chenille in place as legs.Cur underbelly material to shape and glue on.
Trim legs to the required length and burn ends with a match to complete.
NB: For a more detailed description of how to tie, rig and fish this pattern, visit www.felty.com.au
