The Polly Wog (Tad Pole)
It never ceases to amaze me the amount of fly anglers I know that have never heard of the Polly Wog fly. Come to think of it I’m also amazed that after decades of visiting fly shops though out the West I have never seen a Polly Wog fly for sale. I’m sure there is but I don’t even know if you can buy them on line. Here it is, I have caught hundreds of trout over the years on a Polly Wog in rivers, lakes and reservoirs. It is an incredible fly and is always the first fly that I tie on whenever I’m fly fishing a lake or reservoir.
The concept that up to 95% of what a trout eats are aquatic insects or creatures born in the water breathing world plays well when we talk about the Polly Wog. A Polly Wog or Tad Pole is nothing more than a frog in it’s infant stage of the life cycle. Many of the aquatic insects  trout will feed on in rivers and streams with abundance throughout the course of a season are not so abundant in lakes and it’s vice versa for trout living in lakes. But one thing for sure is we have frogs in both lakes and rivers in abundance. This is one aquatic creature that we either ignore or just don’t think about.
Over the course of my fly fishing career, in the hundreds of lakes that I have fished, I have never met a fly angler who fishes lakes, to have a Polly Wog or Tad Pole fly in his or her fly box. If that is true then I possess a secret trout catching fly that has worked for me throughout my fly fishing career on lakes, reservoirs and rivers. If you tie flies they are among the easiest flies to tie and if you don’t tie flies don’t worry I have them in my shop.
