Custom Deschutes Red Side trout flies – Eunan Hendron

Eunan Hendron had a request from a customer to design two custom fly patterns based on the Deschutes Red Side trout. Eunan explains it below. You can visit Eunan’s blog, Addicted to Vise, to read his ongoing tying adventures.

I was asked by a collector to design two flies, one streamer, one salmon fly, based on the Deschutes Red Side trout.

Designing the streamer was easy, as many Carrie Stevens patterns were designed to imitate smelt. So I looked at some images of the Deschutes Red Side and came up with the following pattern.

Tag – oval gold tinsel

Body – Tan floss

Rib – wide silver tinsel

Belly – White bucktail

Underwing – Custom dyed ‘fire engine red’ GP crest

Throat – Firey Brown Schlappen

Wing – Med. Pardo Coq de Leon, over tan, over red hackles (red on the inside)

Sides – Jungle cock

Head – Black.

Now for the salmon fly. In my limited experience, making a salmon fly look like a fish is no easy task. So rather than try and fail, I decided to go with an abstract approach, with some different elements in the fly representing certain aspects of the red side trout, with the intention to let the viewer formulate an image of a trout from the fly. The design spec I was given was the colors for the wing and the use of Jungle Cock for the sides.

Pattern is as follows.

Hook – 2/0 reworked Sunday Style Limerick

Tip – Oval gold tinsel

Tag – Highlander green floss

Tail – Custom Dyed GP crest (color as for the streamer)

Butt – Black Ostrich

Body – Rear third, Embossed silver tinsel, front two thirds, Olive-Brown Seals fur

Ribs – Med Pardo Coq de Leon Hackle, and medium silver tinsel, over the fur only.

Throat – yellow badger hackle

Wing – Married slips of Red, Yellow, green goose and kori bustard

Sides – Jungle cock

Head – Black, varnished.

That’s basically how these flies came about. I kicked ideas around in my head, but never wrote down specific patterns. I sat at my bench and worked from the mental images I had of what I wanted the flies to look like, lifting certain materials as I saw them on the bench and trying to incorporate them into the fly.

Both worked out pretty well I think.

Eunan