Several years ago, in the early '70's, I moved to the Mountain Home which is in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. I was a math teacher and then as still now, Arkansas teachers weren't paid very much. I made $9,100 that year. I had four children, a wife that worked, a college degree, and we qualified for food stamps. I was too proud to take the food stamps so I supplemented our groceries by hunting and flyfishing. I spent every day I wasn't teaching with a gun or a fly rod in my hand. In those days, I practiced "catch and feed the kids", not C&R. This was true of most everyone on the river back then, most of whom were bait guides. In fact, when I started to guide the rivers, John Gulley was the only real full time flyfishing guide I knew of. Some said they were, but I never saw any of them with a fly rod in their hand.
John and most everyone else that came to the rivers were woolly bugger fisherman and I hated woolly buggers. To me, woolly buggers were, and still are, a poor imitation of a lot of things and a good imitation of nothing. I had already developed the Arkansas Dead-Drift and sowbugs were about all the flies I carried except for a couple scuds. You see, the sowbugs were so thick back then, that if you stood still for two minutes you couldn't find the toes of your boots. And that's not an exaggeration.
One day, I decided to dig up one square yard of gravel near Bull Shoals Dam and collect every aquatic insect in it. Being a math teacher, numbers were and still are pure logic in the raw to me. I found that there were about 7,000 sowbugs, 500 scuds, 100 planarian, 3 mayflies, and 1 caddis per square yard of gravel. Well to me this represented the ratio of bites that I could expect using any of these bugs. While the ratio of bites of sowbugs to planaria, to mayflies, to caddis was true. The ratio of sowbugs to scuds wasn't. You see there were 14 sowbugs to every scud, but in the fish's stomach the ratio was 5 sowbugs to 1 scud, or 4 to 1, and sometimes 3 to 1. I wanted to find the reason why this was happening. I thought I new the answer but I wanted proof from a reliable source before I started spouting off. I searched for the answer to my paradox for almost a year.
Near the end of the school year, the junior high science teachers organized a field trip to Blanchard Springs Caverns. I drove a bus so I had to go. Before each group of students went down into the caverns, they had to attend a short 30 minute movie and lecture. As my group was leaving, I noticed two large sketchings on the wall, one of a sowbug and the other of a scud. They caught my attention because both drawings were about a foot long with infinite detail. As I was admiring someone's else artistic abilities, which I lacked, the young Speleologist that gave the lecture ask me if I knew what I was looking at. I told her I sure did and probably played with them more than anyone she had ever met. She proceeded to tell me a whole lot about them anyway. A lot I already knew but some I didn't. Then I told her about my ratio problem. She smiled at me and said that was simple. She said that the first thing you do when exploring a cave is to figure the bio-mass, then you would kind of have an idea of what to expect. Then she threw me the bomb. She said that scuds have five times more protein than sowbugs, and the fish's instincts tell them to eat the best food available at all times. To me that meant that a trout would pass up 9 sowbugs to eat one scud.
The answer was what I had expected, and, from the day I had dug up that one square yard of gravel, I had been fishing scuds with great success. But thanks to 5 foot blonde genius, I knew for sure why I was succeeding. She don't know how close I came to giving her a big old hug and kiss that day. But...I decided to not show her how jubilant I felt... because I wanted to see the caverns and not the insides of a jail.
How To Tie Fox's Arkansas Scud
A scud can come in several colors, even within the same river, because of the life-cycle stage it is in and what it eats. A scud may molt from one to several times a year depending upon the water temperature and how fast it is growing. A young-of-the-year scud may molt several times in the summer while an adult may molt only once. Just before a scud molts, it turns very dark in color and moves to fine gravel to bury itself. This may be a dark chocolate, dark olive, or dark gray (almost black). During the molt, it looses its outside skeleton or shell and grows another. The coloring of its new shell is pale yellow to a pale yellow-green. About the time it leaves its hiding spot, it may be a copper, light olive, or pale gray. As the new shell ages and hardens, its coloring will darken to almost the colors of the river bottom. It is suggested by Fox to use a shade darker than a molting scud or a molting scud color. Rarely does he use the dark phase. Why, because Fox thinks the fish prefer the more easily digestible lighter phase over the darker phase. So even though these are very good colors to start with, he suggests that you "tune" your scud pattern to the water you are fishing.
The Hook
Your choice of hook can make a lot of difference in the amount of success you experience when fishing a scud. A straight-eyed, fine wire, quality dry fly hook has proven to be the best. Circle hooks and rounded shank hooks imitate resting scuds, while straight shank hooks imitate swimming scuds. A straight-eyed, straight shank hook offers the largest hook gape for that size of hook and will have the best hook set. A fine wire hook will penetrate the flesh and bone of a fish's mouth with less effort than a heavy nymph wire hook. This is especially helpful when using tippets of 6x and smaller.
The Lead
The size of lead used in this scud pattern is related to the size of hook to be used. On a #12 hook use .025" lead wire, #14 hook use .020", #16 hook use .015", and on a #18 hook use .010". For scuds smaller than #18, try the Worm Scud Pattern, another article on this site. Always wrap enough lead wire to fill half of the hook-shank, usually this is about 8 to 10 wraps depending upon your choice of hook.
