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I asked an Artificial Intelligence-system to talk about a GFF article about the Muddler Minnow, and the result is truly mind-blowing!

Meeting up with a bunch of people and tying flies together doesn't just provide good company, but also education - and an easy shortcut to new fly names

This is an article about Don Gapen's original Muddler Minnow - a fly that is tied in countless versions and has inspired thousands of patterns, but only few that resemble the original

This is a muddler design type of fly that is more or less a derived idea based on something that has been copied many times, but never the less an efficient fly that has caught the author many fish.

This is the lazy man's muddler, the sloppy tier's muddler, the beginner's muddler.
It's actually quite close in style to some of the first Muddler Minnows tied by Don Gapen back in the 30's.

One evening when I was tying flies with a couple of friends, one of them, Nils, asked me to tie a muddler, just as a demo. I did. Luckily the other friend, Henning, was quick and caught these great pictures of the process.

Not one of Martin Joergensen's usual pike flies. For that it is way too complex and has too many tying steps and too many different materials. He doesn't like complex pike flies. "I spend dozens of minutes tying one, and a pike spends seconds shredding it!" he says.

It should be no secret that I'm a great fan of muddlers. These functional, characteristic and very beautiful flies that I connect directly with my favorite kind of fishing: night fishing for sea trout in the ocean. The technique used for tying them has always fascinated me, and although I do tie a lot of them, I still have a lot to learn in respect to spinning deer hair.

A few muddlers as inspiration

A large muddler for pike

A conehead muddler/zonker

A small muddler

A muddler pattern

The most important step in preparation is getting the right kind of hair. Buy your hair at a reliable source. Good spinning hair patches are dense and have little underfur. The single natural hair should be dull and light at the base, slightly waved at the root, and have a short tapered tan/black tip section.

Muddlers are mostly used for dusk or night fishing in the summer. Muddlers will work in the surface, streaming, making a wave wich can be seen by the fish against the light sky.
Muddlers move a lot of water and form a good profile. Almost any type of muddler can be used for this fishing although dark and black patterns seem best.

A great looking tube fly

A large surface muddler for all fish that eat in the darkness.

The muddler can double as a serviceable grasshopper, cricket or even damselfly nymph. One can fish it dry and doped up, damp, wet and sunk.

This muddler is tied on a small stainless Mustad hook using orange deer hair, orange dyed grizzly hackle and natural rabbit dubbing with a bit of orange flash mixed in. A small beauty indeed and sooo easy to see at night.

Choosing the right hair will make your deer hair flies - Comparaduns, EHC's, Muddlers, bass bugs - much easier to tie.

A large muddler pattern for big fish. This one has caught both pike and baby tarpon.

Muddlers are a type of flies that I love to tie and fish with. And they also catch fish. In my small story from the Danish summer night, you can read what this small modest muddler can do. A fly I had a fair success with

This fly is in a way my 'signature fly'. It's a beautiful fly (in my own humble opinion), and even though it's heavy - very heavy, actually - it's a good fishing fly, that dives deep and overcomes current and turbulence.