Tying the Bluegill Belly Bean

With our local trout streams at their usual summer levels and warm temperatures, we turn our attention to warm water species - bass, bluegills and, sunnies.  Here's a great video with Tim Flagler tying our friend Paul Beel's Bluegill Belly Bean pattern.   We recently featured another of Paul's patterns here - his FrankenFrog. This is a fairly simple pattern to tie and by all accounts it's a fish getter.  Tie some up!
       

Sharpen your hooks!

The FrankenFrog

Our Friend from Indiana, Paul Beel aka FrankenFly, has come up with a great looking frog imitation that I want to share with you all.  Paul is a fellow fly tyer/fly fisherman who has developed a number of trout and warm water flies and shares our passion for improving fly designs to overcome tough fishing situations and hatches.

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.

Read the whole story on how Paul developed this pattern on his blog: FrankenFly

You can purchase this fly as well as his others here: FrankenFly Fly Shop

Nice job, Paul!