Athlone, situated pretty much slap-bang in the middle of Ireland has pretentions to be a ‘city’. I am sure this has a lot to do with how they could access government funding but I have doubts that a town with about 25,000 residents can be classed as a city. I have visited Athlone frequently, especially when I was working in the midlands as it was the closest town of any size. Herself and myself go there sometimes for a night away as I am assured there are some good clothes shops there too. Despite its unglamorous reputation we like the town. The fact Athlone has a good tackle shop is of course pure coincidence.
I was in said tackle shop over a year ago, maybe nearer two in fact, and came across a ‘bargain bucket’, a wire mesh receptacle brim full of small items. Always on the hunt for something cheap, I poked about in the melee of swim baits and out of date nylon line. Elbow deep in it by now, a small packet caught my eye and closer inspection revealed the contents were some size 8 hooks with lead moulded on to shank. Marketed by Lureflash, they appeared to be of reasonable quality, the hook gape was wide enough to allow for good hooking despite the blob of neatly formed lead near to the eye. For the life of me I could not figure out what they could be used for, but further rummaging revealed a second packet, but this time with size 10 hooks. At one Euro for each packet I felt I had little to lose, even if I did not have an immediate use for these oddities. I took them home, tried to decide what I would do with them, came up with no good ideas and tossed both packets into a box along with so many different hooks which I have yet to get around to using.
Cut to early January and we needed a couple of odds and ends for the house so I went online and that popular purveyor of all things plastic, Temu. Have you ever used them? It is a veritable cornucopia of crap! Well, most of it is, but there are some useful things on the website. I found the bits we were looking for and just for laughs I started to search for fishing tackle (as you do). Swivels for non-critical use such as feeder links were only a few cent, disgorgers were for next to nothing and a wee bucket sort of thing to fit on the boat was a bargain. AI is of course monitoring you as you shop and it throws in all sorts of suggestions for you to buy based on what you are searching for and purchasing. This led to fly tying materials popping up as I scrolled, most of it useless but then I saw some plastic masks. I’d thought about these things before to use on my bigger lures but they are dear enough for something which would be a trial. Here they were very cheap so I bought a packet.
We were out when Wally, our postman, delivered the grey plastic package from the Peoples Republic of China, but he left it for us on the doorstep. My swivels and plastic masks were there among the other neatly wrapped packages inside which I opened like a child on Christmas morning. The swivels were grand for what I wanted them for and I have them safely tucked away in the coarse tackle box ready for the next time I am feeder fishing. When it came to the masks I found they were just like the expensive ones I had seen elsewhere, so I set about trying to use the damn things. I had bought the smallest size, rated to fit a size 4 hook and sure enough they slipped over the eye and would do the job on a big streamer hook. Something was niggling at me though, I kinda knew I had another use for the masks but could not for the life of me remember what it was. Leaving the small packet on my fly tying bench so I would not forget them, I instead tied some traditional wets for my rapidly filling box.
Yesterday I was making some more flies and reaching into an old container of odd hooks as I needed a slightly longer shank hook than I normally use for the muddlers I was making. There I found not just the 2X hooks I wanted but also both packets of those odd hooks with the lead moulded on to them from Athlone. It would make for much better copy if had made this discovery while soaking in a bath and had leapt in the air crying ‘Eureka’, but alas, no, there was just the slow whirring of my sixty odd year old brain as I finally put two and two together. Would the lead adorned hooks mate up with the plastic masks from Guangdong? Sure enough, they fitted perfectly on the size 8’s and were a bit loose, but usable, on the size 10’s.
My idea was to make very basic jig flies which would roughly imitate fry. Nothing fancy here, just a flexible tail of marabou or fine hair and a body of synthetic flashy dubbing. The mask is then superglued on and the wee red eyes glued on each side. It was the work of a couple of minutes to create such jigs and they look pretty good to me. How to fish them is an interesting question. Obviously, they can be cast on a fly rod but I am also going to experiment jigging them on an ultra light rod for perch too.
As for the dressings, I made some up in white (an obvious bait fish imitation), olives (damsel???), black and even a sort of hare’s ear concoction. When it came to the size 10 hooks I added a layer of old floss silk to the lead to bulk it up a bit so the plastic mask was a snug fit before I superglued it in place.
I guess the dry fly fanatics out there will be throwing their hands in the air and bemoaning the drop in angling standards with this sort of shenanigans, but I have always been attracted to different ways of fishing, using different methods and trying out different ideas. These little jigs might catch me a few trout or perch, then again they might be useless, but I will have fun messing about with them over the coming months.
Claretbumbler 