Streamer Time: Eric Hurst's Thrasher and Agent Scully

Words by Greg Thomas

PERSONALLY, I THOUGHT THE FLY WAS TOO LONG. ALSO, I HAVE AN AVERSION TO SEGMENTATION AND DOUBLE HOOK RIGS...

Especially in the size-2 to 4 variety because, well, those things don’t feel great when they’re stuck in the palm of a hand. Or in an ear. Or a finger.

But last fall, when an angling armada met at House of Fly’s Fish Camp in Craig, Montana, an annual three-day gathering of western fish-heads, guides, reps, and small batch fly tyers, I met Eric Hurst. Hurst is part of HOF’s small-batch program and a master at creating irresistible flies for big, predatory fish. He was talking up a couple of his signature patterns, the Thrasher and Agent Scully, and also handing them out. What was I going to say to free flies? No? I assumed the risk of getting a trailer hook stuck in my skin and said, “Can I have two of each?” I walked away promising Hurst I’d give those bad boys a thorough swim.

I closely examined those flies and had to admit, the Thrasher looked fishy and screamed of brown trout. I figured the Thrasher could be a match for juvenile whitefish, baby brown trout, and western sculpins, depending on which colors it was tied with. I figured that browns, rainbows, and cutthroats . . . bull trout, smallmouth bass, pike . . . almost anything that swims in the West and eats, would take that thing down.

I verified that last year while floating Montana’s Clark Fork River, after a friend decided to tie on a Sparkle Minnow as our trip commenced.

A mile down the river with no eats, I had to say, “They don’t like the Sparkle here.”

“Yes, they do,” he responded. “Eat it every time I’m on this river.”

“And when was the last time you were on this river,” I said.

“June,” he replied.

“Yea,” I said, “when the water was up and clouded and those fish were pushed to the banks, when they couldn’t see anything other than a black Bugger and that god-awful flashy thing you like.”

He paused.

I felt bad.

He said, “I’ll row.”

I said, “Great,” and quickly tied on a subtle olive Thrasher. I hooked a fish in the first hundred yards. Hooked another shortly after. Two to the net and I said, “Take this rod and throw this fly. I’m rowing.”

Just a hundred yards farther down the bank and he was into one, then another. By the end of the day, I’d brought five to hand. He’d landed that many or a few more. In addition, he’d had a dozen more eats and missed them via the dreaded side-set. Still, it was a great spring day for both of us, spent catching a bunch of browns on a fly that I’d had in my pocket for five months and I no longer had to wonder whether Hurst’s Thrasher would work in the West.

Full disclosure, that day on the Clark Fork wasn’t the first time I’d thrown the Thrasher. I hit Montana’s Bighorn River in February last year and unleashed the fly on some oversized brown trout. Three straight days of a streamer bite that never ended. Got them on yellow, white and olive Thrashers, also on nothing more complicated than a black Bugger with a tungsten head and some super-swimmy black shlapen. Those fish may have eaten anything, so I was curious to test the Thrasher in skinnier water, in clear water, when the fish would have an adequate chance to scope that thing out. Fortunately, the Thrasher proved its worth on the Clark Fork, too.

When I spoke with Hurst recently, I told him the news: “Thing Thrasher smoked them on the Clark Fork and the Bighorn.”

Hurst nodded and smiled but didn’t look surprised. He’s receiving great feedback on both of his flies, the Thrasher and Agent Scully, from around the country. The Thrasher works in Hurst’s home state, Alabama; it works here in Montana; friends have thrown it in Idaho and Washington with solid success . . . and I expect it would work wherever you fish, too.

Hurst, who now lives in Ennis, Montana, on the banks of the Madison River says, “People tend to like the Thrasher best because it’s a little bigger than the Scully and it looks better in the fly bin. But I would tell ya’ I do better on Agent Scully, especially with trout. I do find that the Thrasher does better for me on tailwaters and the Scully does best on freestones. When I’m fishing below the dams out here I do well with the white, shad-style or the natural olive. But the Thrasher is the one people are throwing most often.”

Hurst knows it’s not all about color. By design, the two flies swim differently, and they fish differently.

“Scully has rabbit strip so it offers more sinkability, but the deer hair still gives it some buoyancy,” he said. “The Scully is a bottom feeder sculpin type of thing, or a crayfish, while the Thrasher is more of a baitfish imitation.

“The Scully actually does a little more,” Hurst said. “It will float and hover, but once you strip it, it dives. I like a fly that waits on you and floats until you tell it to go to bottom. I do a lot of intermediate stuff, so it hovers over wood and other structure and then dives when I want it to. You got to get into those crevices and logs to find the biggest browns, and it’ll do that.

“It’s also versatile,” Hurst added. “You can go weighted, unweighted, with eyes or no eyes. You can hover over wood or make it dive deep depending on what you want.”

Regarding crayfish, Hurst thinks people should pay more attention to that food source. Hurst overlooked them at one time, too, but those days are over.

“People aren’t fishing them enough,” he said. “For a long time, I knew I should have been fishing them more often and figuring it out. Then lately, I started fishing them a lot and I was like, ‘Oh fuck.’ We have lots of ledges and whitewater and trees in the water where I fish, so I do unweighted patterns with a sink-tip or I go heavier with an intermediate. But there are certain holes where you got to get them to the bottom and jig it.

“You just have to watch and adapt,” Hurst added. “Read the water and put in the time. Be one with the river. Blood, sweat and tears. It’s like any relationship; sometimes the river will beat you down, other times it clicks. Slow down and appreciate more. Look more. Watch. Research. Nature will tell you what you need to know.”

I'm not the only big fan of the Thrasher. In fact, House of Fly's small-batch program director, Drew Evans, who runs HOF in Lewiston, Idaho, says he fell in love with the pattern from the start.

“From the second I saw the Thrasher, I had smallmouth on the brain," he said. "Due to it’s design, it will do so many different things that trigger eats in a number of different line and retrieve configurations. The stacked deer hair in each segment provides not only a good amount of hang time in the water column, but also adds a ton of push in the water. The push from the hair also drives tons of erratic movement that drives smallmouth nuts. The Thrasher fishes great on a full intermediate, like Airflo’s Four Season Sniper, on a sink-tip like Rio’s Outbound Short, or up high on a floating line, like Scientific Anglers' Bass Bug.

"Agent Scully is awesome too," Evans said. "That little sculpin fly is always out there searching for the truth, and most of the time it finds it. It has also become a go-to smallmouth pattern that I fish on the swing with a 4 weight trout spey on the Grande Ronde or on a single-hand with a sink-tip out here on the Snake.

“The magic of the Agent Scully is in all of the different ways you can animate it with your retrieve," Evans added."Straight strip it for a fleeing look, jig it for a “true” sculpin swim, or twitch and pause for that dying or wounded look.”

Although both of Hurst’s patterns are peeling fish, he’s still sitting at the inventor’s table. Coming soon, Hurst will offer smaller versions of each pattern, sizes 6 and 8 for the Scully and 4 and 6 for the Thrasher. Each pattern would, somewhat, resemble a Mini Dungeon. No matter which size or color you go with, you’ll find these flies to be truly versatile.

“The way I approach things is I don’t want a bunch of different flies,” Hurst said, “but I want confidence in the flies I have, and I want to feel confident fishing then anywhere. I mixed a lot of things into these flies so I can do that for a variety of species.”

Wondering how the Thrasher got its name? Think it harkens to the heyday of Thrasher magazine and the punk-ass skate crowd? Negatory. Instead, Hurst named the Thrasher after Georgia’s state bird, the brown thrasher.

“I tied this fly specifically for brown trout,” Hurst said. “Brown trout thrash so that had to be the name.”

Love the Thrasher? I do. That’s why I picked up one of House of Fly’s new graphic T’s, based on Hurst’s signature fly, the Thrasher. Black background and a flame-topped Thrasher racing across the chest, the shirt speaks to HOF’s unique small-batch tying program and the creativity of our tyers.

This unique batch of graphic Ts is limited to 300 shirts. Get them before they’re gone.

Strip flies and destroy.

A school of Small Batch Scully's tied by Hurst and ready to deploy.