Shultry Sculpin

  I started working on my fly order on friday and going through my list I wanted to do the most time consuming ones done first. The shop really liked my shiners and asked if I could do a sculpin version of it. I thought and thought cause I needed to pick the right colors of super hair and beads. I studied pictures of the fish and came up with a good pattern. I tied these a little longer than my shiner and used bigger eyes cause the natural fish has big eyes. The biggest feature of the sculpin is the the large front fins.  Here is my creation I came up with.

Shultry Sculpin

Hook:  Mustad 3366 size 6

Thread: Clear mono thread

Body: Green and Brown 6/0 Glass Beads

Inner Tail: Lite Bright holographic silver

Tail:  Top black, sides green, bottom blue super hair

Head:  2 green and 1 brown 6/0 glass beads

Eyes:  extra small doll eyes
Fins:  Pheasant 

Glue: 6 coats of hard as nails

This is not the best step by step but this shows the steps. I could not tie the tail off and hold the camera at the same time so I couldn't take a picture of it. To get the curve of the body is quite simple. Just leave yourself a little slack and it naturally will curve like above.


As you can see from the below pictures that multiple layers of hard as nails fills the grooves of the beads and it keeps the eyes on while fishing.

 Pre-bead all your hooks for ease of tying

 Separate the beads in the middle leaving three in the front and four in the back, Make sure to leave a space to tie the tail in. Move the thread to the rear and tie in the Lite Bright

 Bring the thread to the middle again and tie in the black super hair on the top and then the blue super hair on the bottom.

 Tie in the green super hair on both sides.

 Trim the tail 3 times the length of the body.  This is over kill but I like to have a lot of space to work with to tie the tail.

 Now tie the pheasant on both sides. After this you need to leave a very large thread base to glue the eyes on without too much overhang of the eye

 Now glue the eyes on both sides. Sorry again I couldn't get the pic of tying the tail. This picture does not have the fins cause this was a prototype before I did the fins.

Here is all the ones I got finished so far. These have been very time consuming. I use this foam so I can put the hard as nails on without them moving and I can do them all at once.