How to Tie the Charlie Boy Hopper Pattern

Learn how to tie the Charlie Boy Hopper pattern, including step-by-step instructions, a video tutorial, pictures, and much more. Improve your fly-tying skills here.

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An easy to tie hopper pattern designed by Charlie Craven and named after his son. Charlie came up with this fly about 20 years ago and it is one of my favorite hopper patterns. Floats extremely well and a great fly to run a dropper fly. With all the colors of foam available you can let your imagination run wild. Today I have chosen black to imitate the many crickets seen in the summer.

Material List

• Hook: TMC 100BL size 10
• Thread: Veevus GSP 100 in Black
• Body: Harline 2mm Fly Foam in Black
• Legs: Hareline Medium Rubber Legs in Black
• Wing: Hareline Deer Hair in Black
• Sight Indicator: McFlylon Polypro in Pink

Video Transcript

Hello, I'm Carl at Trident Fly Fishing. Today we're going to tie the Charlie Boy Hopper. It's an easy hopper pattern to tie, and it was designed by Charlie Craven and named after his son. Charlie came up with this fly about 20 years ago, and it's one of my favorite hopper patterns. It floats extremely well, and it's a great fly to run a dropper fly from. With all the colors of foam that are available out there, you can just let your imagination run wild. Today I've chosen black to imitate the many crickets that we see around in the summer.

Here's the fly in the vise. The hook we're using today is a TMC 100 - that's their standard dry fly hook in a size 10. Our thread today is going to be some Veevus GSP 100 in black. We'll get this thread started right behind the hook eye and run back to our bend.

The body of the fly is some Hareline foam in 2mm black. I have cut some widths of foam that are about a hook depth in width. And to help anchor the body of the fly to the hook, I've cut some pieces that are about 2x2mm. We're going to tie those in first on top of the hook. We'll run our thread back up to the eye, get rid of our excess there, and now we can cinch that all down.

The foam body for the fly is about a 3-inch strip. About 1 inch back from the end and the center, I'm going to poke a hole where the point of the hook is going to go through. That's going to go over the hook point and around the hook up to the apex of the bend. Run my thread all the way back down to the start of the bend of the hook. We're going to pierce the material with the eye of the hook, so we're going to measure that out and use our bodkin once again. I'm going to do this from both sides to help prevent it from tearing when I push it through.

We're going to glue everything together now, and for that we're going to use some Zap-A-Gap. Don't need too much - in fact, you don't want too much or it will all squish out. The most important part to get is back here where the back body of the fly is going to be. Now we're just going to fold it back on itself as evenly as you can. Try to keep the back body up at about a 45 degree angle - that when it's finished is going to give you a good hook gap underneath. Doesn't take long for the glue to set.

Now we're going to make our first segment. Take three wraps. We're going to divide this fly into four sections, so we're going to run our thread across the top at a diagonal like so. There's one segment. Same thing for the next - two. And the last one - three.

Now to form the back section we're going to lay our razor blade straight across the back of the fly. We're going to hold this tail up and push straight through. We're going to trim the head just a little bit flat here - it's a little bit on the big side. Make one straight cut back, same thing on the other side, and for the very back of the fly we're going to taper that some. Put that back in the vise.

We're going to tie in some Hareline medium round rubber legs in black. Peel off one of those and cut off two 2-inch long pieces. We're going to tie that in right behind the head of the fly - no more than two wraps. We're going to come across the back like so, and that's going to tie in the back leg. Then we'll take our second leg, lay that along the side of the fly, take a wrap, come across the top of the fly, take another wrap, and capture the front leg. That looks pretty good. We'll cut these to length - the back legs just a little longer than the body of the fly, and the front legs about two thirds of that.

The wing is next. That's just going to be some black deer hair. We'll cut about a half a pencil width's clump from the hide, clean out all the junk, and get it in a stacker. We want this wing to be about a hook shank in length. We're going to cut off all of the unneeded material up front, let that hang about halfway over the head of the fly, and capture it. Pull it tight, and if you haven't let go of your hair, it's going to sit right on top just like that.

This fly can be kind of hard to see in the water, so I've got some McFlylon polypro hair in pink. I'm going to tie that in on top of the wing just as a sighter. We're just going to tie that in right up on top - a couple of turns. Take out our whip finish tool, do a whip finish, cut our thread. The front of that McFlylon I'm just going to trim to the front of the head of the fly, and the back about halfway up the wing - kind of your choice.

Just to the bottom of the fly to keep anything from coming apart, I add just a little bit of Zap-A-Gap, and our fly is complete. Please feel free to leave comments at the bottom of the page, and don't forget to hit that subscribe button to see all the new content here at Trident Fly Fishing. Thanks for watching, and I hope to see you again next time.