The famous nocturnal Hex hatch of the Midwest (and a few other lucky locations) stirs to the surface mythically large brown trout that only touch streamers for the rest of the year.
Orley Tuttle designed his bug to imitate the beetles he saw smallmouths eating on his local lake. He made it by laying a thick bunch of deerhair on top of the hook shank, lashing it down fore and aft, clipping the front into a stubby head, and leaving the rear tips of the hair to flare around the bend of the hook.
When Tuttle showed his odd creation to his wife, as the story goes, she declared: “Looks like the devil to me.” And thus it was named the Devil Bug.
If the Devil Bug wasn’t the first deerhair bass bug, it was certainly the first popular one. By 1922, Tuttle was selling 50,000 bugs a year in more than 800 combinations of color, size and design — moth bugs, beetle bugs, mouse bugs, and even a baby duck Devil Bug — and competing quite successfully with all the commercial cork-bodied bugs that had by that time hit the market. The Weber Life-Like Fly Company began mass producing Henshall Bugs sometime after that.
Life is sometimes more interesting with a little mystery in it.
As I said above I'm in Grayling and we are going to clean the Manistee tomorrow. Once I got up here I snuck off to a "secret" spot that I've fished since 1991. It rained a bit today and the humidity was high...Fogged up glasses etc. Mist thick above the river.
When I got to my spot there was a truck backed in there. I wasn't sure if they were fishing or hunting.
I got off the river at seven. There was a note under my windshield wiper. It was a small zip lock and inside it were 14 flies. Small streamers. The note simply said, "Thought you might want to try some Manitoba flies on these Au Sable browns. All the best!"
The flies look like the Fuzz Puppy on Marks site on Hans Weilenmann's site.