Cutbank

On Boogle Bugs and Mortal Life

Lost Souls

103 bugs ready to go when the water hits 50 degrees and the bass start cruising the surface again.
On a frozen weekend in December, I pulled out all of my damaged Boogles (as well as some of my own beaten-up poppers and sliders) and got to work mending eyes, wrapping new hackle and tying in strands of flash and rubber legs where needed. Now I have 103 bugs ready to go when the water hits 50 degrees and the bass start cruising the surface again.
Words, Photo and Caption: Christopher Schaberg

“Let’s see what we have in here,” Pierce Yates says over the phone, the sound of drawers opening and closing in the background.

Yates is the owner of Birmingham, AL-based BoogleBugs, in my opinion the best poppers on the market. I first encountered these flies more than 10 years ago in a no-longer-extant fly shop, Uptown Angler, on the corner of Julia Street in the Central Business District of New Orleans. The bugs glimmered in a fly box display, their extremely concave faces begging for water to be chugged through them, hungry bluegills homing in from beneath. I bought several of various sizes in black and green, and over the next few years I caught hundreds of fish on them—they were simply indestructible. 

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