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UNI Products Fly Tiers Corner
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Coldwater Edition
April 2024
Article and photos by Steve Hudson
The small stream was fishing well, and it had been a great day. Close to a dozen wild rainbows had ended up in my net.
What were they hitting? Ants!
Ants are everywhere this time of year, and that’s one reason ant imitations are such great flies. They come in myriad forms too – and they work. In fact, ants just may be the best-kept secret in fly fishing!
Because ant imitations are so effective, fly tiers are always trying new ant-making materials, and one the of the most unusual to come along in recent years is shelf liner material!
Foam shelf liner consists of puffy plastic foam on a gridlike framework of interwoven threads. When used for their intended purpose, these liners provide a cushioned, non-slip surface that keeps plates and saucers from sliding around.
But shelf liner materials have great fly tying potential too. Those little blobs of foam look an awful lot like the body segments of insects, and tiers have found a number of creative ways to put shelf liner to work.
One of the most innovative uses of shelf liner as a tying material was developed by master fly tyer Ken Walrath of Rochdale, Massachuetts. Ken developed “Ken’s Crazy Ant,” a fantastic pattern that is effective anywhere that ants are found – and that’s just about everywhere.
Ken, who operates Ken’s Custom Flies, got the idea for this shelf liner application one day as he and his wife were getting their RV ready for a trip. His wife was using a nonslip shelf liner material called Easy Liner to prepare the RV’s shelves, when Ken noticed how strongly the little bumps of plastic making up the shelf liner resembled the segments of an insect. He began to experiment and soon figured out how to prepare and tie the material to create remarkably buggy ants. He called his creations Crazy Ants.
How realistic are these flies? Well, I once tied up a few Crazy Ants and had set them on the kitchen table while I headed downstairs to get a fly box. But about halfway down the stairs I was stopped in my tracks by a squeal from my daughter. She had seen the ants on the table and mistaken them for the real thing!
And how about fish? How do trout respond? Apparently, they are crazy about Crazy Ants.
“It catches just about anything that swims,” Ken says, adding that some guides in Montana tell him they have used the Crazy Ant to catch some of their largest trout.
Crazy Ants can be fished as surface flies or as subsurface “drowned ant” imitations, and either approach works well. I’ve personally landed everything from small panfish to big trout on Ken’s Crazy Ant. One afternoon, I even hooked (and somehow landed) a multi-pound bass on one of these little flies. I don’t know how that fish stayed on the tiny hook, but it did!
The raw material for making Ken’s Crazy Ants is Easy Liner shelf liner, readily available in the kitchen furnishings department of many big-box retailers, hardware stores, and elsewhere. It comes in rolls of various sizes, and even a small roll will set you up to tie thousands of Crazy Ants.
One thing you’ll notice about these ants is that they float low in the water. That enhances their natural look. However, a low-floating fly can be difficult to see. For that reason, many Crazy Ant tiers add a wing of bright Antron. You can leave it off if you choose, and the fly will still work fine. But it will be harder to see on the water.
Easy Liner is available in a variety of colors. Ken’s favorites are black or red. White is good, too, as it is easily colored using permanent markers.
