the Tarpon Crab - In Stock

several years ago a west coast tarpon guide asked me to come up with a floating crab fly for his tarpon fishery. I looked through all my reference books and scoured the net but couldn’t find a suitable starting point so I started watching videos of blue crabs and pass crabs to get an idea of what I needed the fly to do. rather than trying to design a fly that looked like a crab I started by trying to imitate the way a portunidae crab swims in a current and worked from there.

the Tarpon Crab is the end result of years of testing and iterating and it does just what I hoped. the splayed hackle tail imitates the claws of a drifting crab and the combination of deer hair body and foam eyes keeps the fly in the right place in the water column. rubber legs, eyes and palmered hackle borrowed from Tim Borski’s Chernobyl round out this special fly. tied about 3” long on a Gamakatsu SL12s #2/0 with large foam eyes.