For fly fishermen there are lots of buzzers buzzers, uninteresting buzzers! Buzzers, there are many, ranging from anorexic buzzer and epoxy buzzer hybrids not counting lots of variants like Chew Buzzers and Shipman’s Buzzers. Could they possibly be improved upon? During 1920's Dr Howard Alexander Bell developed some extremely good slim buzzers imitating the midge pupa for fishing on Blagdon water. Buzzers have been around since early days of trout fishing. Any visitor to Scotland or for those who visit in Scotland will know those horrid times when huge numbers of buzzers swarm so heavily you can't breathe without having them taken into your throat. The buzzer isafter all the staple diet of the still water trout , so, the buzzer is an important fly ……. could Sandy improve the fly which may be in almost every fly fisherman’s box - the monotonous buzzer? Sandy thought so. This buzzer, Sandy’s Blank Buster Buzzer, required a scientific approach which taxed their inventor Sandy over over a long time until their perfection.
The creation of new fishing flies generally is a highly demanding exercise, requiring a scientific approach and sometimes even the creation of leading edge materials. Sandy Dickson is one of the most demanding fly tyers around, making huge demands of himself to constantly improve and innovate. Charles Jardine has said that Sandy is “One of the greatest innovators I have ever come across”, a comment that Sandy is highly proud of. Charles went on stating that Sandy’s patterns are “completely divine”. What more can anyone say? Could improvements on the humble buzzer be achieved?
Fisherman and fly Tyers everywhere argue about what creates the best fly, many experts will argue size, others will argue shape or colour or movement. Sandy decided upon the basic recipe for his buzzers:
1. Trigger point thoraxes specifically designed for various light conditions at different depths and at different times of day
2. Size- the buzzers had to appear ‘real’ to trout, they needed to make anorexic buzzers look fat but they needed to be lifelike, ribbed but not like lots of the horrific ribs found onso many buzzers today.
It took Sandy lots of experimenting with thread and materials to develop a new tying method for tying thread and materials making it much thinner than normal. The buzzers are tied utilizing a special technique that Sandy developed. Many tyers seeing these buzzers are unsure of how they really are tied.
Sunlight Colors & Ultraviolet Light
Reading books in the 1960’s just like Clegg and Keen on fluorescence and the way colors change with different light conditions the initial consideration was colour within the buzzers trigger points. One colour won't work all day, so a range of buzzers needed creating. Science does give us indicators of the most effective colors to use in different conditions. Put simply, light is formed up simply of different colors, red, green and blue plus ultraviolet (which burns us!). For any lure to show up as red then red light lure sun has to be hitting it, for a yellow lure yellow light has to be hitting it. It is a popular undeniable fact that colors change at depth with reds typically disappearing at 15’ oranges and 30’ yellows at 50’. On a cloudy day the red may only penetrate 10 feet! So below 10 feet with a cloudy day the red colors for a fly are black as the red rays belonging to the sun will not be reaching the fly! Which may be why we never bother getting a brightly colored lures at depths in lakes like {Grafham Water|Rutland|, there is simply no point, the colors will not be visible for the trout.
However determining what colors are visible at various depths of water is mostly a science, an analysis with the physics of how light interacts with water particles and other light absorbing particles that could be present in water we are fishing. It's by no means possible for the fisherman to look at a calculator to a lake, figure out what light absorbing particles are present from the water so see what colors are visible at depths. Sediment can absorb colors that will be visible at different depths, so peaty water and clean lake water may not allow the exact fly to work at similar depth during the same time of day!
Have you ever wondered why people say to use bright lures on bright days, and dark lures on dark days? Does it make sense now that you know something about light penetration? NO? O.K., let’s make sure to explain. Firstly, bright colored lures are typically considered those of the orange, red, green, and yellow variety; which are top choice on those beautiful bright days. So if it’s dark or cloudy, running bright colors has little effect because unless they're being run totally on the surface those colors should not be visible. Why run dark lures on dark day then? Because the colors will not be going to show, it becomes a matter of contrast, lure action, and lure size, and dark lures contrast more effectively on dark days because these are darker to begin with with. In particular an orange lure down deep might work, nonetheless it is really showing a soft brown where as a black lure is showing solid black and a hard edge.
Obviously there does exist the hidden colour in the sun’s rays, the colors we cannot see, Infra Red and Ultra Violet lights. UV penetrates deeply into water, this provided a trick to creating the Blank Buster Buzzers ‘firing-up’ its fluorescence when used at different times of the day. Ultraviolet penetrates the water all day so using fluorescent threads Sandy could maximize hitting power of the buzzers. Using highly fluorescent threads would help with making the flies attractive to trout.
The true science behind the Blank Buster Buzzers only comes to light when viewing them in a box under Ultraviolet light when the trigger spot glows. The range of colors for fluorescent materials of the flies developed during scientific analysis - Scarlet, Hot Orange, fluorescent Green, luminous or Phosphor Yellow. However, the challenges still would not stop however, first attempts at tying the thorax over the black silk body were fine but the colours simply didn't ‘fire-up’ their fluorescence as much as they should. The answer came watching pike fishermen. They were painting their floats white before painting Luminescent paint on them, Sandy investigated materials from China before he found his magical answer, a material now called Sandy’s Thorax Magic, a white thorax backing material which when used behind the thorax tying really light up the colours giving the right trigger that Sandy had been trying to find on the Buzzers. Finally using a black box he had made to research luminosity, a box with ultra-violet lights were useful to test the luminosity of various materials for the luminous buzzer and for breathers showed the Essential Fly Sparklemet, their Flashabou equivalent, this gave the high levels of luminosity that Sandy required. Two coats of varnish over the thorax only and the new buzzers were born from many different trials and failures.
First outing while using Blank Buster Buzzers Sandy and his testers in the Scottish Working Men’s Anglers Club landed over 50 fish, experiments showed them to be deadly. Even loads of wary of trout could be tempted by Sandy’s Blank Busters with the use of a long leader, often up to 20’ in length with nothing upwards of just one Blank Buster Buzzer the end. Essentially the most wary trout were regularly fooled by these superb buzzers in trials in Scottish and English using this long leader technique with a single buzzer. Most amusing in the tests was when a fisherman trying Sandy’s buzzers off of a boat tied one to the point and then dropped it over the side, he continued to tie in two droppers on an exceedingly long leader as instructed by Sandy. Unfortunately the point fly was hit almost immediately by a sizable trout, dragging the droppers straight into the fisherman’s hand. Expletives were shouted until the poor fisherman realized that he would never win!
The final variants were developed using Kamasan B100 grub hooks to give the ultimate skinny buzzer and thicker Kamasan B110 for specimen fish with the heavier guage hooks These trout flies proved being deadly hence the name Blank Buster Buzzers. These trout flies are truly irresistible along with tests prove very successful indeed. Surely they have to be an essential part of every Fisherman’s fly Box?!
Blank Buster Buzzers are a trademark of The Essential Trout & Salmon Fly Company
Author Resource:
Andy Kitchener is ceo of www.theessentialfly.com which designs, manufacturers and sells flies including salmon, trout, saltwater, pike, muskie and specialist fly fishing flies plus gear and tackle for fly fishing . Andy is a fanatical fly fisherman having fished for over 40 years. Andy has been lucky enough to have fished for 'normal' fish like trout & salmon as well as fish like the mighty Golden Mahseer in India, Sailfish and Marlin on the Great Barrier Reef and Cobb in South Africa.
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