Frogs Fanny.
Stephen Welsh restores life to some delicate dry flies.
You may as well use Vegemite as use any of the usual paste floatants on a CDC dry fly. Neither will float your fly but with vegemite at least you’ll have tasty, interestingly coloured fingers. CDC calls for a floatant that does not cause matting. Frog’s Fanny is an excellent choice in that regard.
The structure of CDC feathers is the reason they float so well. Liquid and paste floatants (including CDC oil) mat the CDC feather barbules together, dramatically reducing their surface area and air trapping capabilities. Properly used with the supplied brush applicator, Frog’s Fanny restores the structure of the CDC and also makes it hydrophobic.
Imagine you are standing at the bottom of your favourite run in fading light with fish rising consistently ahead of you. Experience tells you they’re on small mayflies well matched by a CDC winged emerger you’ve developed over the years. Murphy’s law of fly fishing tells you that you will have only one bedraggled pattern of that type in your box and that it is unlikely to sit correctly on the water as is. To restore that fly’s buoyancy, simply work Frog’s Fanny into the CDC with the brush. When done, blow away the excess, and fish it.
Once the fly has been slimed by a cooperative fish, give the fly a quick swish about in the water (carefully remove it from the fish first please), dry the fly on your shirt or flick excess water off with a false cast or two, then reapply the Frog’s Fanny. It is far quicker to do this than to go through the rigmarole of finding the fly box, searching through the free range zoo inside, fumbling with lights, specs/magnifiers, knots etc. in the half light.
Frog’s Fanny is not only useful for drying off CDC feathers; obviously it can be used for any dry fly, emerger, or strike indicator if you’re that way inclined. When applied just to the hair or deer wing of the Klinkhamer or Shaving Brush style flies, it allows them to hang from the surface by the wing as the designer intended.
It can also be used to float nymphs tied on surprisingly heavy hooks. Frog’s Fanny enhances the trapping of air bubbles in body materials, increasing the buoyancy of the fly.
Weighted flies treated thus will sink dragging air bubbles into the depths: a useful trick for imitating corixa, improving the brightness of mayfly and caddis emergers, or for enhancing the appearance of flies like the Thong (nothing to do with Borat, see FlyLife #14).
Frog’s Fanny’s non-matting hydrophobic properties also allow its use on materials that would not normally be associated with dry flies. Marabou is a case in point. A decade or so back, some articles were published about using marabou for the wings of dry flies. Imagine a Royal Wulff with fluffy white marabou wings.
These very attractive flies tied up easily enough (although the marabou tie-in point is bulky), and they caught fish as well. However, the marabou wings were not terribly functional in that they tended to become matted and to hold water.
As with CDC, conventional paste floatants are ineffective on marabou. Frog’s Fanny recovers drowned marabou beautifully.
Frog’s Fanny is an excellent desiccant type floatant that works exceptionally well on CDC and other ‘fluffy’ materials. In so doing it is not only a very effective general floatant, but opens up some interesting material options for the angler-tier with a little imagination.
Available from Flyworld (price $8.95). www.flyworld.com.au