A fly tier sees the light!
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UNI Products Fly Tiers Corner
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COLD WATER
August 2025
By Steve Hudson
These days, everybody wants everything to arrive as fast as possible – especially if that “thing” is a holiday. It’s barely August, and I’m already seeing Thanksgiving and Christmas things in stores! Can’t we take our time and enjoy the approach of the seasons?
“No!!!” say the masses. “We want the holidays to get here now!!!”
But that’s nothing compared to Halloween.
Halloween stuff has been on the shelves for more than a month now. Usually, I just walk past it with barely a second look.
But not long ago, something in the Halloween displays caught my eye. It was “glow-in-the-dark webbing,” just the thing for making eerily spooky spider webs to brighten up October 31. The package said it glowed a “spooky green.”
Could it be used to tie flies too? It looked to be white and coarsely fuzzy, and that got me to thinking. Pretty soon I was thinking outside the box,and then way beyond the box. Could the glow-in-the-dark spiderweb stuff make dubbing that glowed? And the bigger question; why would I want glowing dubbing?
I had to think about that one. I’d always wondered why certain visual cues seem to make some nymphs more effective than others. Sometimes, for example, a spot of color is all it takes. But nymphs that glow? Would that be too much?
Maybe a glowing nymph would be easier for trout to see, perhaps because it might have just enough visual pizazz to stand out among all the rest of the stuff in the water especially in dimly-lit deep runs or pools or on cloudy, low-light days? Would a bit of a glow catch the trout’s attention and thus help catch the trout too?
There was just one way to find out. I bought a pack of the stuff and headed home to try it out. Glow-in-the dark (actually, glow-in-the-depths, or GITD) flies, here I come!
And was I ever on a roll! On the way home, it occurred to me that luminous dubbing by itself might not be enough. I remembered seeing GITD glass beads too at the local big-box craft store which was coming up on the right. So, I pulled in to have a look. Sure enough, there they were. The package said they glowed greenish blue, and I realized that would kind of match the glow of the dubbing. I grabbed a pack, choosing small ones perhaps a couple of millimeters in diameter.
I was in a hurry to try something, so I first made a bead-bodied caddis larve using only GITD beads. I simply slipped enough beads onto a hook to cover the shank; then I finished with a tiny drop of UV-cure resin at the rearmost bead. A brief blast of UV light from my UV flashlight cured the resin, and the fly glowed madly under the light.
Encouraged by my progress, I moved on to the next step – and out came the scissors. A few chops turned some of the spider web stuff into dubbing. Then I put a hook in the vise, after mashing down the barb so I could slip the beads onto the hook. Then I started thread behind the eye, formed a dubbing loop, added some of my home-made dubbing, and then wrapped a thorax. It actually turned out pretty well. Step one was done.
At that point, I tied off and trimmed the thread. Then I removed the hook from the vise and slipped several GITD beads onto the hook to form an abdomen. I added enough beads to reach the hook bend. Finally, as before, I secured the abdomen with a tiny drop of UV-cure resin at the back of the rearmost bead and zapped it with the UV light. Again, the fly glowed brilliantly – and just like that a second GITD fly, a generic but GITD emerger was done.
Now for the big question: Would they work?
My research was far from scientific, but I can say with certainty that both patterns did catch fish. But did the glowing flies catch more, bigger, or better fish My subjective impression is that they did in fact outperform non-glowing flies, especially on dim days or in dark water, and I’m guessing that’s simply because their glow made them more visible to the fish.
So, my GITD, Halloween-inspired flies did seem to work. Now I’m thinking about what other holiday-inspired tying methodologies might be waiting in the wings. A Thanksgiving Trico? A Christmas Chironomid? A New Year’s Nymph? A Valentines – well a Valentines something?
I’ll let you know!
