Okay so I'm trying to tie Charlie Bisharat's Pole Dancer. I was peeling back the original $17 fly and the fibers are wrapped around the glass bead and hook... What the heck is up with that? How dose one tie around a glass bead and hook? That is why the material/fibers are sitting so high up on the fly above the estaz on the hook below it. The first small section of Yak hair is laid on the actual hook. The rest of the fibers are wrapped on the glass bead and hook. Never seen anything tied this way, to me it would seem as the thread will just slide off the glass bead. Upon closer inspection it looks like the actual head is plastic and not foam. The back end is all hollowed out and the head is squishy like a Thingamabobber. I'm thinking it has a small air chamber. I want to take the whole thing apart but it was so expensive at $17.

Anyone know what this Pole dancer's head is made of? The one I have is not a foam popper in my not professional opinion. I could dremel out a bigger cavity on the rear of the head but I feel I will loose buoyancy 'cause of the added lead wraps on the hook.



Here are some of the items for tying this fly, it's not all the items just some of what I photographed, I picked this stuff up from BMFS.






On the longer head I'm going to cut it with an Xacto knife and then use a dremel tool to concave the popper head. The popper heads were fairly inexpensive so I could experiment a bit if I mess up.


Here is a close up of all the fibers in the fly body, White and pink bucktail. Also what looks like green synthetic yak hair, or EP fibers. I have both so I could test both out. Looks like Flashabou and Estaz as well. See what I come uot with.






Blurry image of eye shot, will try and dremel the eyes as well. Not sure what I can use to color the heads yet, maybe just leave them white with red mouth and gills. We'll see what I come up with.

Will post up some images with some of the final results at a latter date. If someone has a the recipe for this fly please post it up, that would be very helpful.

Update on angled cut and concave with dremel. It came out really well, I do like the way it came out. I might need to smooth out but so far so good.




I think the eyes might be a little more trickier to get done. Lot's of good uses for a Dremel tool, now includes popper reshaping.


This is the head on Dremel tool I used to shape the concave portion of the popper after the angled cut with the blade.

Don't quite have all the materials, still need the Worm Rattle, they had some at BMFS just the wrong size, they were to small/mini. I guess I could tie without the rattle. I noticed that just the larger flies had rattles and the smaller flies were rattle~less.

I was watching a video on how to add Rattle to the poppers and it quite easy. The tyer was talking about how on some occasions the rattle/glass beads made all the difference. Fish were keying in on the sound or maybe the vibration of the rattle?

Anyhow hope someone can help me out a bit. Trying to figure out what will work for tying this fly has been fun. I have something tied up but it looks nothing like the Pole Dancer.