My FrankenFrog is now available in the FrankenFly online fly shop. Just click the FrankenTrout on the upper right column of the website.
I wanted to post some of my thought process that happened when I was designing this frog. It actually came out much better than expected and I wasn’t even thinking about a frog at the time. I have been using the FrankenFrog ever since the fishing season began this year and it has been tearing it up! As you can see by the recent largemouth I caught.
One of the primary reasons you might design a fly is to solve a particular problem. Many times, as a fly designer, there are various products that may give you an idea for a fly that you may not have thought of otherwise.
Through the years I have tried many times to design a frog fly. I was really trying to solve a problem which is to have a top water fly that resembled a frog, so bass would go crazy over it. I never was happy with what I designed for this type of fly or it didn’t swim or pop to my liking. Eventually I abandoned the thought of designing a frog and any time I wanted to fish this type of fly, I would just throw a larger popper.
That was until I was staring at a pile of various Rainy’s poppers I had lying on the kitchen table. There were many shapes and colors and I thought it would be fun to throw together some kind of funky popper. I wasn’t even thinking about a frog at this point. I began placing them next to each other, cutting the fronts or backs off, and generally thinking about different ways I could tie things together.
Then as I place some pieces together, a frog started to take shape, but I was still fighting the thought, because I had never been happy with this type of fly in the past. But it really started to fall in place and as I kept thinking about how to tie the fly together, I clarified in my mind how each section might work. Then I went to the vise and got to work. Piece by piece this frog came alive!
The FrankenFrog rides on a Partridge of Redditch Universal Predator X hook and also has some FrankenFly Monster Dub thrown in to hide some connections. The Rainy’s foam makes this thing float all day long and the kick of the back legs are just crazy good.
Of course this fly takes some time to tie, but it is an extremely effective fly and does its job well. I am super excited about how it came out and I wanted to make sure it kept fishing well after catching many fish and it has. So I thought this would be a good time to post some information about it. Once again, thank you for reading FrankenFly!
-Paul J. Beel
