Fly of the Month – The Shrimpadillo
Guest Blogger: Mike Cline, Bozeman, Montana
An inshore Gulf Coast flats trip to Florida in the Spring of 2021 was very successful save one frustrating morning. As I paddled the kayak in the early dawn across a shallow flat at low tide, I encountered several dozen tailing bull redfish. It was quite a sight as large pods of fish slowly meandered around the flat stirring up breakfast. I wasn’t really set up fly wise for redfish, but quickly changed flies and started chucking various stuff in front of fish. For whatever reason, they were not the least bit interested nor spooked and I never connected before the pod slowly moved away. So when I returned home, I started thinking about what flies I needed if I wanted to be successful in the tailing redfish scenario. One of the options was the traditional spoon fly, a redfish staple.
I had never really tried to tie spoon flies before primarily because I was never keen on all that slow drying epoxy and braided tubing hassle. But times had changed and with a little research it was easy to discover the advent of new methods of tying spoon flies with purpose constructed cutouts, hooks and UV resins. As I ventured down the spoon fly road, I came across a unique design—the Shrimpadillo. Half shrimp, half spoon, the Shrimpadillo was a hybrid design that captured the essence of a shrimp pattern as well as the wobbling nature of the spoon fly which might represent a baitfish or crab pattern. The Shrimpadillo is the original creation of brothers Steven and Alan Kulcak of Sightcastfishing.com, a south Texas outfit.
The inspiration for the Shrimpadillo came after a day on the water sight casting to redfish along Texas Gulf coast. Alan had the original idea but both brothers worked through many variations until they felt they had the pattern nailed down in terms of effectiveness and durability on the water. Steven told me the name came to them almost instantly as the fly looked like the head of a shrimp with the shell of an armadillo—an abundant resident of the South Texas countryside. Rumor even has it that one version called for the urine stained belly fur of a female armadillo, but I couldn’t verify that.
