Weedless Wiggler

[Northern]

I have tried various versions of wiggle bugs in lily pads or other cover, and had very limited success. As people have said, the lip catches on everything. I have done OK with “gutless frog” type of flies, which can be tied with a smooth non-snaggy head, ride hook point up, and can be worked with a walk the dog type of action once they are out of the crap. I still only hook a fraction of the fish that hit the thing, but that is probably mostly me rather than the fly.

I have had a couple of decent days gear fishing with these:

View attachment 180043
It’s called a “horny toad”. Fishes hook point up and slides over lily pads with its little feet kicking away. A fly version of that would be worth playing with.

Like this?


This one slides/tumbles over thick pads really well and has had spectacular blowups on it, but I've yet to land a fish on it that way. It feels like they tend to get a mouthfull of weeds along with the fly, so no good hookset. Or I just blew it
You could add kicky feet if you like, but I'm pretty sure those big fish didn't even see it - just heard it on top of the pads.

 

[Northern]

I've tried a lot of weedless patterns but it is usually the leader or fly line that hangs up on the vegetation just as much as the fly.

It could be that because I'm using a SuperCat pontoon boat my angle is too shallow and if I was casting from a boat, I might not hang up as much.

Great look'n patterns anyway.

Thanks - and agreed, but not much to be done about line snags!
A lot of the time I'm aiming to land 1-2 feet into the weed bed, bounce it on top of a couple pads, then jump it off to swim it back through the more sparse submerged pads along the edges.
With a heavy leader I can usually yank it free when the whole fly catches on a pad (the soft-resin coat on the foam makes these things dang near indestructible); it's when the hook point buries in a stem that it's game over and it becomes a retrieval mission!