Wombat Fly

As tied by innovative Northwest fly tier, Brian Kite, the Wombat is a traditional marabou pattern with a couple modern twists added to it. The fly was created primarily as a guide pattern since marabou is inexpensive and easy to tie with. Traditional marabous are typically tied on long-shank or heavy wire salmon hooks. We have found that the longer shank hooks tend to work them selves out of a fish’s mouth due to the amount of leverage applied when playing a fish. This fly replaces the long shank with a stinger hook to eliminate the “leverage factor” and also provide for some flexibility on the style of stinger hook you can use. Just remember to tie the stinger loop long enough to allow simple change out of stinger hooks. I also added lead eyes to the fly to get it down quicker and then wrapped them up with some “ice-dub” to add a hint of flash. The butt of the fly also has some built up ice-dub to set a larger profile when the marabou is wrapped. This fly was designed to be very versatile in nature. It can be tied large and small, can use any color combination in the visible spectrum, can be tied in white colors for dollies, flesh colors for Alaska trout, can be dead drifted of a nymph rig, center-pinned on a float rig, swung or stripped.
This is kind of a mid-size fly which fits between Agitators and Intruders for size.